Peter Thonning and Denmark's Guinea Commission

Home , Charlotte Schimmelmann, Georg Christian Oeder, Hyaenanche, Jens Wilken Hornemann, Martin Vahl

Peter Thonning and Denmark’s Guinea Commission Atlantic World

Europe, Africa and the Americas, 1500–1830

Edited by Benjamin Schmidt University of Washington and Wim Klooster Clark University

VOLUME 24

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/aw Peter Thonning and Denmark’s Guinea Commission

A Study in Nineteenth-Century African Colonial Geography

By Daniel Hopkins

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013 Cover illustration: View of the plantation Frederiksberg, near Fort Christiansborg, early 1800s. RAKTS, Rtk. 337,716 (Courtesy the Danish National Archives [Rigsarkivet]).

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012952821

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ��vii Acknowledgements ��ix List of Abbreviations ��xi

Introduction: On the Geography of Colonialism ��1

PART I EARLY COLONIAL EXPERIMENTS

1. The Guinea Commission Commences Its Investigation: Isert’s Colonial Expedition of 1788 �� 19 2. Denmark’s Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1792: The African Colonial Alternative �� 49 3. Africa in the Atlantic World: Guinea Plantations on the West Indian Model �� 69

PART II SCIENCE AND COLONIALISM: PETER THONNING’S EXPEDITION

4. Peter Thonning’s African Sojourn and the Formation of His Colonial Views �� 95 5. Reports and Reverberations: Thonning’s Early African Writing ��149 6. The Atlantic Triangle Stood on Its Head: African Undertakings after the Cessation of the Danish Slave Trade in 1803 ��215

PART III COLONIAL DEVELOPMENTS DURING THE NAPOLEONIC WARS AND THE ENSUING DEPRESSION

7. “For Colonization, A More Desirable Country Cannot Be Found”: Plantation Experiments during the War Years ��251 vi contents

8. An Eye to the Future: Colonial Ambitions in a Time of Retrenchment ��271

PART IV RENEWED INTEREST IN AFRICAN COLONIALISM IN COPENHAGEN

9. Fresh Colonial Momentum in the Early 1820s ��301 10. Conflicting Colonial Schemes in the Late 1820s ��343 11. The Literary Impulse: A Young Colonial Officer’s Essays on Denmark’s African Future ��377

PART V CONFLICTING VIEWS OF THE COLONIAL WORLD: THE GUINEA COMMISSION AND THE CLOSING OF AN ERA

12. Plumbing the Archives: The Commission Frames Its Debate ��435 13. The Guinea Commission in a Changed Colonial Climate ��545 14. The Tide Again Turns: New African Colonial Impetus ��629 15. The Colonial Dénouement, Denmark’s Withdrawal from Africa, and the Colonial Upshot ��673

Bibliography ��695 Index ��711 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Peter Thonning’s map of the territory around the Danish establishments on the Guinea Coast ��xiv 2. Peter Thonning’s map, detail, showing the area around Tubrekue [Togbloku], not far from Fort Kongenssteen on the Volta River. �� 44 3. Peter Thonning’s map, detail, showing the area favored by Jens Flindt for cultivation, around the plantation Friderichstæd, on the upper reaches of the Laloe, the stream reaching the sea near Ponny...... 47 4. Exceedingly schematic eighteenth-century pen-and-ink representation of the Guinea Coast from diplomatic archives, detail �� 83 5. Watercolor view of Fort Prindsenssteen, 1799...... 108 6. Early version of Thonning’s map, detail, showing his journeys to the eastern forts ��136 7. Early version of Thonning’s map, detail, showing his routes with Christian Schiønning and Jens Flindt ��137 8. Peter Thonning’s map, detail, showing the mouth of the Volta. ��282 9. Thonning’s rough sketch of the layout of plantations. ��318 10. P.L. Oxholm, Charte over den danske Øe St. Croix i America, detail, showing the rectangular layout of plantations on St. Croix ��319 11. Peter Thonning’s map, detail, showing the area Thonning favored for plantation cultivation, north of Fort Christiansborg, “between Jadosa and the River Sakumo Fyo” ��323 12. Lithographed school map, 1820s, of the area around the Danish forts on the Guinea Coast, drawn from Thonning’s map. ��328 13. School map of the area around the Danish forts on the Guinea Coast, with the place-names removed, for examinations ��329 14. Views of Forts Kongenssteen and Prindsenssteen, 1817, with, on same sheet, a map of the lower Volta, 1825, by Philip W. Wrisberg ��350 15. Lieutenant Lind’s map of the Volta, 1828, detail, showing the mouth of the river ��363 16. A rather heavily annotated version of Peter Thonning’s map, detail, with newly inserted features along the Volta. ��457 viii list of illustrations

17. A later draft of Thonning’s map, detail, with the lower course of the Volta missing, to allow for the incorporation of Lind’s 1828 map of the Volta River ��458 18. Another later version of Thonning’s map, detail, with Lind’s rendering of the Volta drawn in. ��459 19. Lt. Gandil’s map of the area north of Fort Christiansborg, 1833, detail ��482 20. A sample of fibers sent in from the coast preserved among the archived colonial correspondence ��505 21. A lithographed portrait of Peter Thonning at about the time of his retirement from the Chamber of Customs, 1840. ��543 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is gratifying to acknowledge the support of the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Carlsberg Foundation, the University of Missouri Research Board, and the Office of Research Services at the University of Missouri—Kansas City, as well as of the College of Arts and Sciences there and of my own Department of Geosciences. It has been a pleasure over the years to work with the collections and to be able to rely on the expert assistance of the staffs of the Danish National Archives and the Royal Library in Copenhagen. I am exceedingly grateful also to Erik Gøbel, Ole Justesen, Per Hernæs, Ray Kea, Svend Holsoe, Peter Wagner, Poul Olsen, Philip Morgan, the late Brian Harley, David Buisseret, Palle Sigaard, and Marty Ross. Some of this material was originally published in Nordisk Museologi,1 Cartographica,2 Archives of Natural History,3 Itinerario,4 the William and Mary Quarterly,5 and Geographies of the book,6 and is incorporated here with the kind permission of the editors of those publications.

1 Daniel Hopkins, “Peter Thonning and the natural historical collections of Denmark’s Prince Christian (VIII), 1806–07”, Nordisk Museologi, 1996, No. 2, pp. 149–64. 2 Daniel Hopkins, “Peter Thonning’s map of Danish Guinea and its use in colonial administration and Atlantic diplomacy, 1801–1890”, Cartographica, Vol. 35, Nos. 3–4, 1998, pp. 99–122. 3 Daniel Hopkins, “Danish natural history and African colonialism at the close of the eighteenth century: Peter Thonning’s ‘scientific journey’ to the Guinea Coast, 1799–1803”, Archives of Natural History, Vol. 26, No. 3, 1999, pp. 369–418, and Daniel Hopkins, “A poisonous plant of the genus Datura (Solanaceae) in an eighteenth-century Danish garden in West Africa”, Archives of Natural History, Vol. 30, No. 1, 2003, pp. 157–159. 4 Daniel P. Hopkins, “The Danish ban on the Atlantic slave trade and Denmark’s African colonial ambitions, 1787–1807”, Itinerario, Vol. 25, Nos. 3/4, 2001, pp. 154–184. 5 Daniel P. Hopkins, “Peter Thonning, the Guinea Commission, and Denmark’s postab- olition African colonial policy, 1803–1850”, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, Vol. 64, No. 4, 2009, pp. 781–808. 6 Daniel Hopkins, “Books, geography and Denmark’s colonial undertaking in West Africa, 1790–1850”, in Geographies of the Book, Miles Ogborn and Charles W. J. Withers, eds. (Farnham, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010), pp. 221–246.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

This list only includes abbreviations employed for the major archival groups cited. Less frequently used abbreviations will be pointed out where they first occur; archival groups not cited so frequently as to require abbreviation are also omitted here.

RA Rigsarkivet, the Danish National Archives in Copenhagen1 GTK The Generaltoldkammer, or Chamber of Customs2 GK The Guinea Commission papers, Boxes I-V, and several bound manuscript volumes3 Betænkningen The Guinea Commission’s final opinion GJ Guineisk Journal, the Chamber of Customs’s Guinea correspondence journal4 GJS Guineisk Journalsager (the actual files of incoming Guinea correspondence)5

1 The abbreviation RA will be used in the notes in a few cases where it seems necessary to avoid confusion but will otherwise be dispensed with: almost every archival source cited here is held at the Danish National Archives. 2 Unless otherwise indicated, reference is to the Chamber of Customs’s archives of West Indian and Guinea Affairs (Vestindiske og Guineiske Sager). 3 There are files within files within files in the Guinea Commission’s archives. The names of these files and sub-files are separated by commas in references to them, with the outermost file named first. 4 Citations refer to the dated and numbered entries in the journals and copy-books, not to the individual volumes; similarly, the documents themselves are cited by journal number and year, as well as by date, but not by bundle or box number. (For a time, the incoming Guinea letters were registered and filed with the Danish West Indian correspondence.) 5 The Chamber of Customs’s filing system called for missives coming into the colonial office to be numbered, abstracted at greater or less length in the appropriate correspondence journal (in this case, the Guinea Journal), indexed (if rather sketchily and arbitrarily), and then filed away in the order in which they arrived. As administrative cases developed, however, letters were pulled from their original chronological places in the files and filed forward in the chronology, together with subsequent communications, under fresh journal numbers—often repeatedly—leaving permanent gaps in the original series; annotations in the journal referred the clerical staff back to the number from which material relevant to a case had been removed and, if it was then moved again, forward to its next resting place. In the case of complicated administrative affairs, skeins of journal numbers must be followed back and forth through the archives, sometimes across the span of decades. xii list of abbreviations

GJ(S) Both the Guinea journal and the correspondence files themselves Guin. kopibog The Chamber of Customs’s Guinea correspondence copy-book6 FJ, FJS Finance Deputation (or ministry) correspondence journal and files DfuA Departementet for udenlandske Anliggender (the Depart ment for Foreign Affairs) FaUP Fonden ad Usus Publicos (the Fund for Public Uses) Rtk. Rentekammeret (the Exchequer) RAKTS Kort- og Tegningssamlingen (Rigsarkivet, the Maps and Drawings Collection)

In general, punctuation has been altered without further ado wherever it seemed advisable in the translated quotations here; the old-fashioned capitalization of substantives has been modernized. Proper names are spelled as in the originals, which is to say that the same name may be spelled several ways in the same document. Editing marks, particularly in Thonning’s drafts, have usually been executed in quoted passages, although on occasion, where a change appears to reveal something about the development of the writer’s thinking on the subject, words struck out and insertions have been reproduced thus: words were \inserted/ struck out. Uncertainty regarding a manuscript word is expressed thus: {?}.

6 The colonial office’s outgoing Guinea correspondence was recorded until 1816 in the West Indian copy-books. Fig. 1 overleaf, pp. xiv-xv. Peter Thonning's map of the territory around the Danish establishments on the Guinea Coast, “Kort over de danske Besiddelser med deres allierede Neger Nationer i Guinea, forfattet Ao. 1802 af P. Thonning“”, RAKTS, U-samling, DfuA U 1. (By courtesy of the Danish National Archives.)

INTRODUCTION

ON THE GEOGRAPHY OF COLONIALISM

For the best part of two centuries, beginning in the late 1650s, Denmark held a colonial position on the Guinea Coast of Africa, in what is today Ghana. Denmark’s African establishments consisted of a line of forts and a few lodges on a hundred-mile stretch of coast between Accra and the town of Keta, just east of the Volta River.1 Perhaps a hundred thousand enslaved Africans were exported through the forts to the Americas,2 and the protection of this traffic was these establishments’ sole function in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is not commonly known that Denmark ever had any part in the history of Africa, but all around the world, in the course of Europe’s long colonial expansion, the Danes sailed the same seas, traded in the same commodities, and entertained much the same imperial ambitions as the Spanish, the Portuguese, the British, and the Dutch. Ludewig Rømer, a slave trader in the Danish establishments, supplied a succinct account of the far-flung transactions involved, by way of introduction to a book about the Danish trade to Guinea published for a general readership in Copenhagen in 1756. It is presumably well known to all that before America was found, and even for some time after, the Europeans brought coffee, sugars, [etc.] from Turkey and the Canary Islands, which was at such prices as those nations from which they brought it themselves saw fit to place thereon. After America was discovered, all nations sought to occupy a portion of land in this climate, so they could through transported folk of their own nation and by their labor

1 See Georg Nørregård, Danish settlements in West Africa 1658–1850, Sigurd Mammen, transl. (Boston: Boston University Press, 1966 [originally published in Danish, with the author’s name spelled “Nørregaard”, as Guldkysten: De danske etablissementer i Guinea, Vol. 8 of the 2nd. edition of Vore gamle tropekolonier, Johannes Brøndsted, ed. (Copenhagen: Fremad, 1968 [Westermann, 1952–1953]), and Ole Justesen, “Kolonierne i Afrika”, in Ole Feldbæk and Ole Justesen, Kolonierne i Asien og Afrika (Copenhagen: Politikens Forlag, 1980), pp. 289–468. 2 Per O. Hernæs, Slaves, Danes, and African Coast Society (Trondheim: Department of History, University of Trondheim, 1995), pp. 129–303 (“The volume of the Danish transat- lantic slave trade 1660–1806”), and Erik Gøbel, Det danske slavehandelsforbud 1792 (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2008), pp. 59–65, 309. 2 introduction

obtain products they needed in Europe, so that considerable capital might not flow out of their countries.3 These transported European laborers proved unable to tolerate tropical climates, and West Indian planters turned instead to African slaves, which could be obtained on the Guinea Coast at little cost. The developing trade for slaves on the coast in turn encouraged European manufactures, since so many kinds of linen and woolens are sold there; it thereupon pro- motes their East Indian trade, so that the nations that previously had enough in one shipload of East Indian goods later had to have 10 and more, as the negroes4 were particularly desirous thereof. They then got sugar, indigo, coffee, cotton, [etc.] in the West Indies in abondance, so they could dispose of their excess of goods both to other nations that had no colonies in America and to those who had not ordered their commerce so well, whereby they attracted great capital to their countries. It seemed obvious to Rømer that the key to all this exchange was the slave trade on the Guinea Coast.5 In the late eighteenth century, European opinion finally began to revolt against the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade, and the notion became current that plantations of the same tropical agricultural commodities that had made the West Indies such crucially profitable colonial territories could perhaps be established in comparable climes in West Africa, thereby rendering the Atlantic passage needless.6 As events fell out, Denmark was

3 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the author of the work in hand. 4 The Danish word neger is here translated simply as negro when it appears within quotations; otherwise, African is preferred here. 5 [L. F. Rømer], Tilforladelig Efterretning om negotien paa Kysten Guinea …. (Copenhagen: Trykt og bekostet af Ludolph Henrich Lillie, Imprimatur, J. P. Anchersen, 1756), pp. 2–5, and Ludewig Ferdinand Rømer, A reliable account of the Coast of Guinea (1760), Selena Winsnes, transl. (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2000), pp. 30–31. 6 See Hopkins, “The Danish ban on the Atlantic slave trade”, pp. 164–167, and, for example, Jean-Paul Nicolas, “Adanson et le mouvement colonial”, English abstract, in Adanson: the bicentennial of Michel Adanson’s “Familles des plantes”, Part 2, George H. M. Lawrence, ed. (Pittsburgh: The Hunt Botanical Library, Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1964), pp. 436–449, on p. 444; Eveline C. Martin, The British West African settlements, 1750–1821, reprint (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1970 [1927]), pp. 153–154; Christopher Fyfe, A history of Sierra Leone (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 46, 72–73, 94; A. G. Hopkins, An economic history of West Africa (Columbia University Press, 1973), p. 137; Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: biography of a self-made man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), pp. 221–222; Edward E. Reynolds, “Abolition and Economic change on the Gold Coast”, in The abolition of the Atlantic slave trade: origins and effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, David Eltis and James Walvin, eds. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), pp. 141–151; Deirdre Coleman, Romantic colonization and British anti-slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral capital (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), especially Ch. 5, pp. 259–330. on the geography of colonialism 3 the first of the maritime nations of western Europe to legislate against the slave trade. Although there was little talk in Copenhagen in 1792, when the Atlantic trade was banned, of ending the institution of slavery itself in the Danish West Indies (now the United States Virgin Islands), it was understood that this must sooner or later occur,7 and it could be predicted that the production of sugar and other tropical products there would then decline drastically. Indeed, at the very time that it was moving to delegiti- mize the slave trade across the Atlantic, the Danish government was actively investigating the suitability of the lands around its African forts for plantation agriculture.8 For an administrative generation or two, in fact, corresponding broadly to the very long reign of King Frederik VI, the Danish government wrestled with the idea of relocating at least some of its production of tropical colonial crops from the Danish West Indies to West Africa.9 Frederik’s successor, Christian VIII, wanted no part of Africa10 but found himself unable, in the decade he reigned, to quite rid his kingdom of its Guinea establishments. It was Frederik VII—in whose time the nation peacefully transformed itself from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy—who finally ended Denmark’s long African venture: in 1850, Denmark’s African establishments and what passed for a territorial claim around them were sold to Great Britain. For almost five decades, the central figure in Denmark’s effort to transplant the plantation production system of the West Indies to Africa was Peter Thonning, the head of the Danish colonial office from 1815 until 1823 and again from 1831 to 1840, in which capacity he supervised the administration of the possessions in the East Indies, Africa, and the West Indies.11

7 Gøbel, Det danske slavehandelsforbud 1792, p. 69. 8 See Hopkins, “Peter Thonning, the Guinea Commission, and Denmark’s postaboli- tion African colonial policy”. 9 See Nørregård, Danish settlements, esp. pp. 172–185; the plantations are also discussed in Jeppesen; R. A. Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations: 1780–1831” unpublished thesis, University of Ghana, 1967, esp. on pp. 298–312; Edward Reynolds, Trade and economic change on the Gold Coast, 1807–1874 (Harlow, Essex: Longman Group Ltd., 1974), pp. 63–67; Ole Justesen, “Danish settlements on the Gold Coast in the nineteenth century: an outline”, Scandinavian Journal of History, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1979, pp. 3–43; and Ray A. Kea, “Plantations and labour in the south-east Gold Coast from the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth century”, in From slave trade to legitimate commerce, Robin Law, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 119–143. 10 King Christian was more interested in far eastern entrepôts: see Aage Rasch, Dansk Ostindien 1777–1845, Vol. 7 Vore gamle tropekolonier, 2nd. ed., pp. 245, 254–257, and the maps of the Nicobar Islands among Christian VIII’s papers, Kongehusets Arkiv, Christian VIII, No. 247, 1803–1834, Sager vedr. kolonierne. 11 Hopkins, “Peter Thonning and the natural historical collections of Denmark’s Prince Christian”. 4 introduction

Thonning was without question the leading authority on colonial affairs in the kingdom, the only senior member of the central administration in Copenhagen who had ever set foot in tropical Africa. The Danish government had sent him out to the Guinea Coast to study natural history as a young man at the turn of the century, and his experience there and the broader views of the colonial world that he subsequently developed suffused Denmark’s African colonial policies quite thoroughly. When, in the early 1830s, Frederik VI seated a Guinea Commission to advise him on his African colonial policies, he appointed Thonning to it. This Commission’s formal investigation was conducted not on the coast of Africa, but in offices in Copenhagen: its study was based mainly on the archived administrative correspondence between the Guinea establishments and the metropolis over the course of a couple of generations. It called in reports from the establishments, but it held no hearings, called no witnesses, and met on only a few occasions. Thonning, the Commission’s most influential member, assembled and laid before its other members a large body of both historical and contemporary evidence and distilled it all into a forceful argument for the government’s direct involvement in the establishment of a plantation colony in West Africa. The Commission’s voluminous report, sixteen years in the making, was an extraordinary exercise in colonial geography and administrative historiography. The Commission’s perspectives were very broad, and the record of its research, preserved only in manuscript at the Danish National Archives (Rigsarkivet) in Copenhagen, allows the Danish enterprise in Africa to be situated very firmly against the background of developments in the whole of the colonial Atlantic. In the standard reckoning, the colonial period of African history does not begin until formal territorial regimes were imposed by the European powers toward the end of the nineteenth century, but, by that time, the seeds of European colonialism in Africa—settlers; crops and their culture from across the sea; and tentative new colonial approaches to metropolitan authorities, capital, and markets—had been germinating at least since the latter part of the eighteenth century.12 In the Danish case, at any rate,

12 See K. Onwuka Dike, Trade and politics in the Niger delta, 1830–1885 (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1956), pp. 4–5, 13–14; H. W. Daendels, Journal and correspondence of H. W. Daendels, Governor-General of the Netherlands settlements on the Coast of Guinea, Part 1, November 1815 to January 1817 (Legon: Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, 1964), passim; “Agriculture coloniale—Introduction et multiplication de la cochenille”, under the heading “Nouvelles scientifiques et littéraires”, Revue encyclopédique, Tome XXV, 1825, pp. 241–242; Guvernør Edward Carstensens indberetninger fra Guinea 1842–1850, Georg on the geography of colonialism 5 colonial designs were being not only drawn up but acted on with some energy (though with little economic success) in what is usually termed the pre-colonial period. As the Danish government turned its attention to Africa, the questions it took up were very largely geographical, and this account of Denmark’s African plans and ambitions from the 1780s until 1850 is largely a study in historical geography, as a broadly based history of any colonial undertaking must almost necessarily be. Indeed, from this perspective, the notion of the history of colonialism seems almost to miss the central point, for if ever there was an inherently geographical enterprise, it was Europe’s colonial expansion out into the rest of the world in the modern period. The history—the geography—of colonialism entailed enormously complex and endlessly ramifying new physical and intellectual connections between the continents and up and down the latitudes. The stuff of colonial history—exploration of unknown coasts and territories, encounters with foreign peoples, military conquest, overseas settlement, agricultural undertakings in unfamiliar climates, the rise of global patterns of commerce, entirely unprecedented movements of people and products and ideas back and forth across the seas—all this is the fundamental subject matter of geography. Colonialism was not just a matter of European capital seeking return on the world’s markets: it required complex operations in very specific and concrete geographic circumstances on the ground in other parts of the world, altogether remote from the experience of the rulers and the com- mercially interested citizens of the colonial powers, who found themselves obliged to come to grips somehow with strange and very imperfectly understood overseas domains. Whole new edifices of understanding had to be erected: massive amounts of information poured in from around the world, and out of this welter of new knowledge there constantly arose new opportunities and ways of thinking. New administrative structures per- force developed, and these systems required the crafting of new colonial policies of essentially constitutional scope. Colonialism of course also allowed European monarchs and their ministers to entertain urgently

Nørregård, ed. (Copenhagen: Selskabet for Udgivelse af Kilder til Dansk Historie, i kommission hos G. E. C. Gad, 1964), pp. 88–90 (Carstensen, Brest, June 30, 1844) and pp. 91–95 (Carstensen, another letter of the same date); and British policy towards West Africa, select documents 1786–1874, C. W. Newbury, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 147–148. Governor Carstensen’s reports have now been translated: Closing the books: Governor Edward Carstensen on Danish Guinea 1842–50, Tove Storsveen, transl. (Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2010). 6 introduction compelling new visions of national aggrandizement: these, too, were necessarily founded on uncertain contemporary apprehensions of the world’s geography. The field of geography is far more than an assemblage of mappable, mundane particulars. It encompasses an enormously involved and highly developed body of knowledge of the world, as well as endlessly varying conceptions of our places in it, for geography is naturally not static: like history, it is constantly being debated and reworked as a society develops.13 Geography’s academic practitioners commonly frame its study to include,14 first, the study of the spatial—that is to say the geometric, or locational—aspects of places, the connections among them, and the operative scales of natural phenomena and human endeavors. Distances, directions, dimensions, magnitudes, and movements and routes—all susceptible of mapping—are obviously fundamental to an understanding of geography, and, indeed, maps were found to be magically powerful colonial tools.15 The formal study of geography next concerns itself with the functioning of the natural world and everything in it, from the ground up and from the heavens down (for the height of the sun’s rays in various latitudes through the changing seasons creates the earth’s climates and ultimately determines the forms life takes). Even as understanding of the local and global workings of that physical geographic basis develops, geographers turn to the truly myriad and formative relationships between human beings and their natural environments. This inseverable connection, the very substance of our existence on earth, is expressed not only in every material aspect of every culture, but also in myth and art and religion and literature. Geography is not just a set of concrete externalities,

13 John Kirtland Wright urged the application of the term geosophy to the apprehension and understanding of the geography that surrounds us all, but the usage never took hold: Human geography in nature: fourteen papers, 1925–1965 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 82–88; see David Lowenthal, “Introduction”, in Geographies of the mind: essays in historical geosophy in honor of John Kirtland Wright, David Lowenthal and Martyn J. Bowden, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 3–9, on pp. 5–6. 14 William Pattison, “The four traditions of geography”, Journal of Geography, Vol. 63, 1964, pp. 211–216. 15 See, for example, J. B. Harley, Maps and the Columbian encounter (Milwaukee: the Golda Meir Library, University of Wisconsin, 1990), and Matthew Edney, Mapping an empire: the geographical construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). This is not to say that the relationship between cartography and administration, colonial or otherwise, was always straightforward, for maps, with their mathematical contrivances, inherent angular manipulations, distortions, omissions, and subtle rhetorical devices, are extraordinary abstractions from earthly realities. on the geography of colonialism 7 merely present there in the landscape as a background to our lives: it impinges on our senses and emotions and fills the human intellect with the concepts we have invented and the language we have strung together to represent and manipulate our world. Finally, the subtlest and most difficult of geography’s undertakings, perhaps, is the attempt, taking all of these things into consideration, to capture and convey compellingly the essential but ever-changing character of places and regions. The geography, thus properly understood, of West Africa and the wider Atlantic world was stood on its head by the abolition of the slave trade beginning around the turn of the nineteenth century. The classic triangle of Atlantic commerce that Rømer had described—manufactures to Africa, enslaved labor to the New World, tropical American agricultural commodities back to industrializing Europe, and so on around—slowly began to break up.16 Fixed points and geographical perspectives were being realigned, and with them the traffic of the colonial world. At the beginning of the period under consideration here, much of what we now call geography fell within the scope of the study of natural history, which, in those days, besides botany and zoology, encompassed peoples’ livelihoods, economies, techniques, material culture in general, and the structures and workings of societies, in addition to what are now the independent natural scientific studies of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century natural history is associated with the names of such men as the master Linnaeus (for he was no mere taxonomist but rather a natural historian, a real geographical thinker);17 of Alexander von Humboldt, whom modern geographers commonly regard as the father of their science (and who departed for South America in 1799, the same year Peter Thonning took ship, in the same intellectual errand, for the Guinea Coast of Africa); of James Cook and his distinguished scientific shipmates, of whom the memory of Sir Joseph Banks is perhaps the most illustrious;18 and of that great American statesman and geographer Thomas Jefferson,19 among many others. Darwin himself emerges from

16 See Philip D. Curtin, The rise and fall of the plantation complex: essays in Atlantic history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 178–179. 17 See Lisbet Koerner, “Purposes of Linnaean travel: a preliminary research report”, in Visions of empire: voyages, botany, and representations of nature, David Philip Miller and Peter Hans Reill, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 117–152, esp. pp. 125–130. 18 It is said of Banks, to be sure, that, his huge reputation as a patron of natural history notwithstanding, he published little. See Koerner, “Purposes of Linnaean travel”, p. 129. 19 Jefferson—a little oddly, for a man who designed the Federal survey of the Public Lands of the United States and dispatched Lewis and Clark across the North American 8 introduction this intellectual background, and the intricate and ancient relationship he puzzled out—the more or less successful adjustment of organisms to their surroundings: their fitness, their likelihood of surviving in particular environmental circumstances—was fundamentally geographic. These men, it can be noted, were travelers (or could command others’ voyages)— explorers, workers in the field—and it is clear that the vigorous development of the study of natural history in the modern era was inseparable from Europe’s colonial expansion around the globe.20 Sheer distance—great, insurmountable remove—was the essential element in the relationship between crown and colony. It seems a particularly notable characteristic of the colonial correspondence as a historical geographical source that it was often found desirable to go into greater detail in describing situations than might have been deemed necessary in a domestic exchange. This colonial exchange may in general have tended to generate—and not incidentally—a peculiarly geographical and ethno- graphical record: there was so much that was foreign and out of the usual European order of things to be accounted for and dealt with in such transoceanic communications.21 The writings of a colonial observer such as Peter Thonning, who was thoroughly imbued with the ideals of eighteenth-century natural history and filled with enthusiasm at finding himself in such strange and beautiful surroundings, are of particular significance: he was expected to take formal scientific note of everything he saw, and he did so. continent—is not widely regarded as a geographical thinker by academic geographers: William A. Koelsch, “Thomas Jefferson, American geographers, and the uses of geography”, Geographical Review, Vol. 98, No. 2, 2008, pp. 260–279. (I am grateful to Christina Anderson for calling Koelsch’s article to my attention.) 20 See, to name a few examples, Lucile H. Brockway, Science and colonial expansion: the role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York: Academic Press, 1979); James E. McClellan III, Colonialism and science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English enlightenment: useful knowledge and polite culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 201–207; Richard H. Grove, Green imperialism: colonial expansion, tropical island Edens and the origins of environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Richard Drayton, Nature’s government: science, imperial Britain, and the ‘improvement’ of the world (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 63–67; Colonial botany: science, commerce, and politics in the early modern world, Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Coleman, Romantic colonization and British anti-slavery; and, for a Danish case, Hopkins, “Danish natural history and African colonialism”. 21 It was one of the common aims of eighteenth-century natural history and of both domestic and colonial governance to record important local knowledge and to systematize and institutionalize its transmission. Thonning, sent out to study the natural history and economic potential of the Danish possessions on the coast, exemplifies both tendencies. Hopkins, “Danish natural history and African colonialism”, esp. pp. 379–380. on the geography of colonialism 9

The history of colonial geography, although it deals in large measure with the physical and cultural characteristics of places and their workings and evolving interconnections, must also concern itself with the forms that knowledge takes and with its communication, and therefore must also take into account individual ability and expression. None of the huge and complex body of new geographical knowledge that began to accumu- late in the colonial era was easy to come by, to convey, or to incorporate into serviceable systems of understanding in European centers of learning, policy-making, and investment. In this view, the crux of colonial administration was the complexity and difficulty of the dialogue back and forth across intervening oceans.22 The princes of Denmark never saw their colonies and outposts in Africa, India, and the West Indies with their own eyes. These were not the landscapes of their birth and upbringing and daily round: the very skies would have struck them as foreign. Nevertheless, few royal interests and prerogatives stopped at the water’s edge in the colonial period, and, in almost as many ways as a highly organized modern state can contrive, the Danish monarchy’s interests and preoccupations were projected down onto the coast of Africa. There could be no question of the immediate, royally supervised discharge of any function of government. In the new colonial relationships between metropolitan figures of authority and their domin- ions across the sea, the written word necessarily assumed the utmost executive importance. The most urgent and the most trifling of commands, queries, and reports had all now to be committed to writing and sent off across the sea in sailing ships, and the administrative and political implications of this physical separation were not insignificant.23 The geography of the colonial world, particularly from the metropolitan perspective, was thus to a very large degree a literary construction—or perhaps epistolary would be the more appropriate term, for the letters alluded to include, besides fairly elaborate exercises in colonial rhetoric, the most prosaic of accounts. Even for colonists on the ground, with the

22 This is the import of the title of Philip D. Curtin’s book, The image of Africa, British ideas and action, 1780–1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964). Curtin said of metropolitan colonial thought in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that “the actual setting was something of a dream world…. [S]ites were selected with amazing nonchalance” (p. 115). 23 Thomas Jefferson, assailing George III’s dispositions regarding the royal review of colonial legislation in a late pre-Revolutionary document, complained that “the law cannot be executed, till it has twice crossed the Atlantic”: “A summary view of the rights of British America”, in The life and selected writings of Thomas Jefferson, Adrienne Koch and William Peden, eds. (New York: Random House, 1944), pp. 293–311, on pp. 304–305. 10 introduction realities of the place before their eyes and on their palates and under their skins, the undertaking depended on putting words to paper, for these societies were oriented as much to the sea and back to the Old World as to new frontiers. The slow traffic in words among the continents crossed and recrossed the Atlantic with the prevailing winds, picking up colonial freight here and there along the way: late-eighteenth- and nineteenth- century African schemes, arising both on the coast and in Europe, are thoroughly suffused with the history of the enormously expansive and profitable European experience, three centuries old when this story opens, in the New World and in the East. This account of Denmark’s West African enterprise is drawn quite directly from those words, put down long ago in letters and ledgers and laws and on miscellaneous scraps of paper and filed away in the administrative archives in Copenhagen. The Guinea Commission distilled its reading in the colonial archives down into an administrative case, a relatively succinct history and geography of the Danish colonial venture on the coast and an outline of the future it envisaged for the establishments: its final report, for all its thousand pages, boiled away much of the color and character of the original writings the Commission consulted, in which individuals placed in extraordinary circumstances tried to communicate their ideas and to influence their government’s policies across all but unbridgeable gulfs of distance and experience. Their formulations are a central concern here: much of the aim of this book is to restore some tim- bre and immediacy to the dry old voices in the archived letters the Guinea Commission studied almost two centuries ago. This source material has been kept as much as possible in plain view: a great deal of the original language is translated and reproduced here. The Danish colonial enterprise in West Africa ended in 1850, when the establishments were transferred to the English crown; exports of tropical agricultural commodities from the Gold Coast colony expanded vigorously thereafter. There is little tangible legacy of the Danish period of Ghana’s history in the culture and landscapes of the southeastern coastal region, beyond a few houses, a number of family names and proud traditions among people descended from Danish fathers and African mothers, some lingering Danish linguistic elements, and of course the old forts themselves, which are profoundly stirring edifices.24 Few original records

24 See Jesper Kurt-Nielsen, Anne Mette Jørgensen, Nikolaj Hyllestad, Jørgen Frandsen, and Hans Mikkelsen, “Frederiksgave—Nationalmuseet genopfører slaveplantage i Ghana”, Nationalmuseets Arbejdsmark, 2008, pp. 55–68; Richard Rathbone, “The Gold Coast, the on the geography of colonialism 11 relevant to the Danish period are preserved in Ghana.25 The Danes utterly abandoned their African position in 1850, leaving almost nothing behind, and it is in the archives and libraries of Copenhagen, rather than in archaeological traces,26 in African oral traditions, or in remnants in the modern culture that this account of the Danish experience of the place has been sought. Although the Danes’ own colonial ambitions for the West Coast of Africa in the end evaporated, the ramifications of colonialism within Danish society, as everywhere, were practically endless: so many people’s lives were affected, in one way or another, by a colonial report, a letter from a younger son stationed on the coast, a golden guinea earned in the slave trade, a pressed plant or some other exotic and beautiful scientific token, a bit of carved ivory or a disturbing mask, or even a restorative afternoon cup in a country where, to this day, tea and coffee and spices are advertised as “colonial wares”. Splendid mansions in Copenhagen, now

closing of the Atlantic slave trade, and Africans of the diaspora”, in Slave cultures and the cultures of slavery, Stephan Palmié, ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), pp. 55–66, on pp. 59–60; Letters on West Africa and the slave trade. Paul Erdmann Isert’s Journey to Guinea and the Caribbean Islands in Columbia (1788), Selena Axelrod Winsnes, transl. (Oxford: British Academy, Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 3; Selena Winsnes, “Voices from the past: remarks on the translating and editing of published Danish sources for West Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries”, History in Africa, Vol. 14, 1987, pp. 275–285, and Irene [Quaye] Odotei, “The Ga and their neighbors 1600–1742”, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Ghana, 1972, chapter 6 (http://irenekodotei.org/ content/chapter-vi, June, 2011). 25 J. O. Bro-Jørgensen and Aa. Rasch, Asiastiske, vestindiske og guineiske handelskompagnier, Vejledende Arkivregistraturer XIV (Copenhagen: Rigsarkivet, 1969), pp. 293–298; Danish sources for the history of Ghana, 1657–1754, Ole Justesen, ed., and James Manley, transl. (Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2005), pp. [v]-vi, xiii; and Niels Bech, “Christiansborg i Ghana 1800–1850. Det tropiske hus af europæisk oprindelse”, Architectura, Vol. 11, 1989, pp. 67–111, on p. 111. I am grateful to Erik Gøbel for calling Bech’s article to my attention. 26 See Henrik Jeppesen, “Danske plantageanlæg på Guldkysten 1788–1850”, Geografisk Tidsskrift, Vol. 65, 1966, pp. 48–72 (followed, on pp. 73–88, by an English version, “Danish Plantations on the Gold Coast”); Yaw Bredwa-Mensah, “Slavery and plantation life at the Danish plantation site of Bibease, Gold Coast (Ghana)”, Ethnographisch-archäologische Zeitschrift, Vol. 38, 1996, pp. 445–458; Theodore W. Awadzi, Yaw Bredwa-Mensah, Henrik Breuning-Madsen, and Enoch Boateng, “A scientific evaluation of the agricultural experiments at Frederiksgave, the royal Danish plantation on the Gold Coast, Ghana”, Geografisk Tidsskrift, Vol. 101, 2001, pp. 33–41; Yaw Bredwa-Mensah, “Global encounters: slavery and slave lifeways on nineteenth century Danish plantations on the Gold Coast, Ghana”, Journal of African Archaeology, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2004, pp. 203–227; and Christopher R. DeCorse, “The Danes on the Gold Coast: culture change and the European presence”, The African Archaeological Review, Vol. 11, 1993, pp. 149–173; as well as A. W. Lawrence, Trade castles and forts of West Africa (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963). I am grateful to both Ole Justesen and Per Hernæs for calling Yaw Bredwa-Mensah’s work to my attention. 12 introduction public buildings and embassies and corporate headquarters, were owned in the eighteenth century by great shippers, merchants in sugar and slaves and East Indian goods.27 When the Danish monarch rides in state through the cobblestoned streets of old Copenhagen in the twenty-first century, the dark harness of the magnificent team pulling the royal carriage is picked out in Indian cowrie shells, the common currency of the old West African trade. In particular because of Peter Thonning’s own experience in West Africa, the human geography of this coastal region of southeastern Ghana—its people and their livings—is woven deeply into this narrative of Danish colonialism in Africa. It is in the nature of the colonial archives, however, that while they shed much light on West Africa, the papers record Danes’ experience of the place: it is all seen through Scandinavian eyes. Furthermore, although southeastern Ghana is the African setting of this book, the scene shifts continually back to the metropolitan terminus of the colonial exchange, for this is in the main an account of the geographical understandings of tropical West Africa—and the wider colonial world—on which the Danish colonial undertaking was based. In the colonial reports and plans he prepared for his government over the course of decades, Thonning repeatedly included more or less elaborate statements about the social and political structures of the African nations in whose midst the Danes in their coastal strongholds were so pre- cariously established. Both in the era of the slave trade and in the period in which the Danish government was contemplating an agricultural colonization, the Danes dealt primarily with the Gã (often spelled Gah) or Accra, the Akuapem (the most common Danish rendering of which was Aquapim), the Adangme or Adampi, and the Anlo or Augna, and, to a less direct degree, the Akyem or Akim, the Krepe, the Akwamu or Akvambo, the Avenor or Avinno, the Kwawu or Kwahu, and the Agotime or Akotim.28 The dominant political influence and military power of Asante

27 Kåre Lauring, Købmand, sømand, og supercargo [Søhistoriske Skrifter XX] (Helsingør: Handels- og Søfartsmuseet på Kronborg, 1998); see Drayton, pp. 61–63. In a note [no. 86, p. 288], Drayton, citing Eric Williams’s Capitalism and slavery, published in the 1940s, writes: “After two generations of denial, British historians are gradually coming to terms with Williams’s vision of the eighteenth-century economy”, but see also Seymour Drescher’s two essays on Williams in From slavery to freedom (New York: New York University Press, 1999), pp. 355–398. 28 See, for these modern equivalents of the various Danish spellings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, R. A. Kea, “Population and economy: a late eighteenth century Danish account of Asante and the south-eastern provinces, Asantesem: the Asante Collective Biography Project Bulletin, Vol. 11, 1979, pp. 57–59. Other modern variants occur. on the geography of colonialism 13

(or Ashante), some distance inland, beyond the territories of the Akuapem and the Akyem, always loomed very large over eighteenth- and nineteenth- century speculations about the feasibility of a European agricultural colony in this area. Of these, all that were of the greatest significance to the Danes were complex, hierarchically structured states, largely agricultural but with urban capitals and markets, involved in long-distance trade and enmeshed in constantly evolving mutual political relations;29 they disposed of considerable military power. Thonning and other contemporary observers referred to them as republics. The Danes in their forts enjoyed commercial and political relations of very long standing with these nations; these were in part codified in written schedules of payments30 to the leaders of the African communities the Danes called allies.31 These African nations were neither vassals, nor, indeed, except at times, enemies of the Danes on the coast, but, rather, their economic, political, and cultural interlocutors in a remarkable international cultural exchange here at the margin between Africa and the Atlantic.32 As Thonning remarked in more than one context, this relationship dated back to the time of the early Portuguese explorations and mercantile ventures along this coast. Neither Thonning himself nor the Guinea Commission, in the years it struggled with Danish African colonial policy, appear on the whole to have been much concerned with the unfolding from year to year of political or military developments among African societies, although the regular administrative correspondence from the coast was often full of such report. Indeed, a number of scholars have based extraordinary reconstruc- tions of the economic and political histories of some of the peoples of the Gold Coast,33 as well of their relations with the Danes in their forts, at least

29 On the fluidity of Asante’s relation with the Dutch, in particular, see Larry W. Yarak, Asante and the Dutch 1744–1873 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 279. 30 Yarak, p. 167, called these “ground-rent or tribute (depending on the perspective)”. 31 The alliances in question, which were by no means uncomplicated, came to be arrayed mainly against the expansive power of Asante: J. D. Fage, Ghana, a historical interpretation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), p. 55, and George Metcalfe, Maclean of the Gold Coast (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 37–38, 42. 32 These encounters between Africa and Europe were of momentous significance: Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic creoles and the origins of African-American society in mainland North America”, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, Vol. 53, No. 2, April, 1996, pp. 251–288, esp., for example, p. 254. 33 See, in particular, Kea’s massive master’s thesis, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, and M. A. Kwamena-Poh, Government and politics in the Akuapem state 1730–1850 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), as well as J. K. Fynn, Asante and its neighbours 1700– 1807 (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1971). 14 introduction in part on the difficult, problematically indirect, necessarily fragmentary, but nevertheless extensive and often unique evidence in the Danish colonial archives.34 Thonning’s interest in the political history of African societies, for his colonial purposes, at any rate, seems to have been more general than particular, but his thoughtful accounts of those societies (including their political structures) are rare and rich contemporary records deserving of note by Africanist specialists. Thonning’s and his government’s ultimate aims were clearly imperialistic (if usually only implicitly and rather tentatively so), but the autonomy of the African polities—except, as was repeatedly pointed out, immediately under the cannons of the European forts—was scarcely in question until, perhaps, rather late in the Danish period. Examples of European military adventurism abound, but the Danish sources often speak of “influence” in African affairs,35 rather than of “jurisdiction”, and little is said of any sort of real dominion, until, indeed, the local African governments began to appear vulnerable to the inland projection of the force of European weaponry such as field artillery and rockets. Coastal towns were of course subject to overwhelming bombardments from European naval vessels.36

34 See Ole Justesen’s Danish sources for the history of Ghana, 1657–1754, Hernæs, Slaves, Danes, and African Coast society, and Ivor Wilks, Asante in the nineteenth century: the structure and evolution of a political order (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), as well as Reynolds, Trade and economic change on the Gold Coast. Kea’s thesis embodies, among much else, an extensive exploration of the Danish colonial archives, including some of the material reviewed here. It appears that the papers of the Guinea Commission had not yet come to light at the time: see “Supplement”, Poul Erik Olsen, comp., in Scandinavians in Africa, J. Reindorf, comp., and J. Simensen, ed. (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1980), pp. 110–120. See also R. A. Kea, “The Danes and the Gold Coast: Ten Danish Documents of the Early 1830s”, Asantesem: the Asante Collective Biography Project Bulletin, Vol. 10, 1979, pp. 64–71. Kea’s major published work in this area treats of an earlier period: Settlements, trade, and polities in the seventeenth-century Gold Coast (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Sandra E. Greene also worked with Danish archival materials in Gender, ethnicity, and social change on the Upper Slave Coast (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1996), as did Kofi Affrifah, in The Akyem factor in Ghana’s history (Accra: Ghana Universities Press, 2000). The broadest historical geographical study of Ghana to date, Kwamina B. Dickson, A historical geography of Ghana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), makes no reference to Danish archival sources. Jean M. Grove and A. M. Johansen, “The historical geography of the Volta delta, Ghana, during the period of Danish influence”, Bulletin de l’Institut fondamentale d’Afrique noire, Series B, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 1374–1421, drew on a good range of published contemporary and secondary Danish literature but not on archival sources. 35 See Fynn, pp. 127. 36 Larry Yarak pointed out in a conversation at a workshop on European forts on the coast of West Africa, in Trondheim, Norway, in June, 2011, that a warship might be more heavily armed than a fort. on the geography of colonialism 15

The use of European sources in writing African history has not been uncontroversial. Ray Kea once found it advisable to say of European archival and published sources that they provide a wealth of information on such matters as social structure, political and military organization, production, trade and markets, and settlement patterns. The greater part of this information was obtained from local informants, principally brokers, merchants, and office-holders. It is not farfetched therefore to consider many of the documentary sources African ‘texts’ which were transmitted through the letters, reports, accounts, etc. of Europeans.37 Similarly, Ivor Wilks once wrote: My purpose was to use the writings—diaries, accounts, narrative descriptions, or whatever—of European merchants on the Gold Coast in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in order to reconstruct the political history of an African state—Akwamu—in that period.38 In the present work, the intent and the perspective are quite otherwise: the archived records are used to reconstruct the history and geography of Danish colonial undertakings in West Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Guinea Commission examined quite an array of significant geographical factors, both physical and cultural, in assessing the feasibility of a new agricultural colony on the Guinea Coast: a certain portion of the Commission’s discussion, however, revolved around the cultural propensi- ties of the African people among whom it was contemplated to plant a colony. The reader is asked to bear in mind that the words quoted here are those of the times and of the individuals who committed them to paper many generations ago. The entire work is built on contemporary apprehensions and expressions, and some of these were decidedly one-sided, Eurocentric, and in occasional cases overtly and hatefully racist. However, such derogatory, contemptuous, and simply misinformed statements flowing from the pens of colonial officials both on the ground in West Africa and in Copenhagen sometimes contributed significantly to the formation of colonial policy, just as did strongly opposed sentiments and powerful counterarguments advanced by Peter Thonning, the main figure of this account.

37 Kea, Settlements, trade, and polities, p. 8. 38 Ivor Wilks, Akwamu 1640–1750, a study of the rise and fall of a West African Empire (Trondheim: Department of History, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 2001 [1958]), p. xxii. 16 introduction

When the Danish word neger appears in the archived documents, is here translated simply as negro; outside quotations, African is used.39 (It should also be noted that in the colonial setting, neger was often used to denote an African slave.) The term mulatto was universally applied at this time to people of mixed European and African descent; here the terms Danish-African, or, more generally, Eurafrican are preferred, except, again, within quotations.40

39 Selena Winsnes, who has translated a series of Danish books on the Guinea Coast, prefers Black for neger: see Letters on West Africa, p. 12. 40 See George E. Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa: commerce, social status, gender, and religious observance from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), p. xxi. PART ONE

EARLY COLONIAL EXPERIMENTS

CHAPTER ONE

THE GUINEA COMMISSION COMMENCES ITS INVESTIGATION: ISERT’S COLONIAL EXPEDITION OF 1788

On January 9, 1833, King Frederik VI of Denmark signed a resolution creating a Guinea Commission:1 We have Most Graciously found fit to provide that it shall be closely studied whether Our establishments on the Guinea Coast should be maintained in the manner which is now followed, or whether circumstances might make it advisable that a colonization plan should be put into execution, and that in such case a well-grounded proposal regarding the way in which this can most appropriately occur is to be made. The king appointed to this commission four members of his central administration, a naval officer who had served as interim governor of the African establishments for a few months in 1827 and 1828, and a private financier. The commission’s ranking member was the director of the Exchequer, but its investigation was in the main conducted by Peter Thonning, a senior officer in the Chamber of Customs, which at this time administered Denmark’s colonial territories and enclaves in Africa, India, and the West Indies.2 More than thirty years previously, Thonning had as an up-and-coming young student of natural history been sent by the state on a scientific expedition to the Guinea establishments. He had spent three years on the Guinea Coast and had returned to Denmark with an extraordinary collection of plants and insects and a fine command of the enclave’s natural history, or what, broadly speaking, we might today call its physical and cultural geography. The extraordinarily rich map he had compiled of the environs of the Danish forts on the coast was never superseded in the Danish colonial period. The royal family had made a place for him as a tutor in the natural sciences to one of the princes, and he had also been

1 GK I, royal resolution, January 9, 1833, copy at GJS 536/1848; Guineiske resolutioner 1832–39, No. 256. 2 The full name was the West India and Guinea Chamber of Revenue and Customs; after 1816, its operations were combined with those of the Commerce Collegium or Board of Commerce: Erik Gøbel, A guide to sources for the history of the Danish West Indies (U. S. Virgin Islands), 1671–1917 (Odense: University Press of South Denmark, 2002), p. 51. 20 chapter one placed in charge of the natural history collections of Prince Christian Frederik (later Christian VIII).3 This crucial royal connection had led after a few years to his appointment to a permanent position at the Chamber of Customs. From 1815 to 1823 he had run the Chamber of Customs’s Indies or colonial office.4 This was a time of economic retrenchment, after Denmark’s disastrous involvement in the Napoleonic Wars, and Frederik’s willingness to continue to man and maintain his African establishments can in large measure be attributed to Thonning’s persistent and persuasive arguments in favor of a long and expansive colonial view.5 Thonning was a competent bureaucrat and in 1823 he was moved from the colonial office to fiscally more significant tasks,6 but in 1831, shortly before the Guinea Commission was seated, he was once again placed in charge of colonial affairs.7 It can safely be said that his African colonial expertise and his influence on African policy were unmatched in Danish society. He had almost complete control of the Guinea Commission’s agenda. In a letter notifying the Danish colonial government on the coast (the ‘Council on the coast’) of the royal decision to form the Guinea Commission, the Chamber of Customs (and it was of course Thonning who drafted this missive) sent a set of carefully specific questions about geographical conditions and agricultural production down to Fort Christiansborg, the seat of the colonial government, in what is now Accra, the capital of Ghana.8 Having thus set inquiries on the coast in motion, Thonning began

3 Hopkins, “Danish natural history and African colonialism”; Hopkins, “Peter Thonning and the natural historical collections of Denmark’s Prince Christian”. 4 GTK, Toldkammerkancelli- og Sekretariatsager, A. Kgl. Expeditioner vedk. Protokoller og Sager, Frederik VI’s resolutioner og rescripter vedkommende Generaltoldkammerets sager 1808–39, No. 29, October 17, 1815; “Thonning, Peter”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 3rd ed., Sv. Cedergreen Bech, ed. (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1979–84); Kai L. Henriksen, “Oversigt over dansk entomologis historie”, Entomologiske Meddelelser, Vol. 15, 1921–37, pp. 114–115. 5 Hopkins, “Danish natural history and African colonialism”, pp. 404–405. Vincent Carretta, in remarks on a paper on the Danes in Africa presented at a conference in Ghana, August 9, 2007, kindly drew attention to the similarities between Thonning’s early African experience and ideas and those of Henry Smeathman a generation before; see Carretta, pp. 221–222. See Coleman’s chapter on Smeathman, pp. 28–62. 6 GTK, Toldkammerkancelli- og Sekretariatsager, A., Kgl. Expeditioner vedk. Protokoller og Sager, Frederik VI’s resolutioner og rescripter vedkommende Generaltoldkammerets sager 1808–39, No. 51, Sehested’s representation, August 19, 1823, royal resolution of November 8, 1823. 7 GTK, Toldkammerkancelli- og Sekretariatsager, A., Kgl. Expeditioner vedk. Protokoller og Sager, Frederik VI’s resolutioner og rescripter vedkommende Generaltoldkammerets sager 1808–39, Allerunderdanigst Note, Lowzow, Copenhagen, August 31, 1831, unnumbered, between Nos. 86 and 87. 8 Guin. Kopibog, November 15, 1832 (No. 377), to the government on the coast. the guinea commission commences its investigation 21 exploring back through a half-century of the colonial office’s working archives in search of records relevant to the colonization of West Africa. The earliest records studied by the Guinea Commission date to the late 1780s: these were thirteen manuscripts dealing with the small colony planted on the Guinea Coast by Poul Isert.9 In 1787, after a number of years’ service as doctor in the Danish forts on the coast, the German-born Isert had returned to Copenhagen and, in 1788, published a colorful account of his time on the coast and of a half-year sojourn in the Lesser Antilles, where the brutality of the slave plantation was brought forcefully home to him. His book suggested that the West Indian plantation system that supplied international markets with sugar, coffee, chocolate, and other tropical commodities could be transplanted to the coast of Africa, thereby eliminating the evils of the Atlantic trade: “Why were our forefa- thers not sensible enough”, Isert wondered, “to establish plantations of these products in Africa?” If the cultivation of tropical luxury crops could be established on the West African coast, he argued, “the shameful exportation of Blacks from their happy fatherland could gradually be stopped”.10 Land suitable for plantation agriculture could easily be obtained in Africa, Isert argued in his book. Slave labor could not be dispensed with, to be sure, but the brutality of the institution could be ameliorated somewhat by an arrangement whereby slaves purchased locally could be freed after a certain numbers of years of servitude.11 Peter Thonning’s remarks on a few passages in the Danish edition of Isert’s book are preserved in the Guinea Commission’s archives: he noted that Isert was particularly taken

9 One of two folders marked Designation II remains with the Commission’s papers, in GK II, Den Isertske Tractat m. m.; the other, containing most of the original “Isertske” documents, is now to be found in a highly miscellaneous bundle of some of the records of the Slave-trade Commission seated in 1791 (and which reported to Crown Prince Frederik through the Chamber of Customs): Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, samt forskellige Vestindiske papirer, 1778–1809, No. 2, Iserts Fredriksnopel. Aquapim. These documents, in this much older context, bear the Guinea Commission’s designation numbers and Thonning’s short descriptive headings and other annotations. 10 Letters on West Africa, pp. 3–4, 8, quotation from p. 190. See also Grove and Johansen, p. 1406. Isert was a native speaker of German, and his Reise nach Guinea was first published in German, but it was soon translated into Danish, as well as into Swedish, French, and Dutch: Letters on West Africa, pp. 10–12. The book is generally acknowledged to have had a substantial impact in Copenhagen: Henning Højlund Knap, “Danskerne og slaveriet. Negerslavedebatten i Danmark indtil 1792”, in Dansk kolonihistorie. Indføring og studier, Peter Hoxcer Jensen et al., eds. (Århus: Forlaget Historia, 1983), pp. 153–174, on pp. 157, 169; Poul Ulrich Jensen, “Dansk Guinea” also in Dansk kolonihistorie, pp. 79–90, on p. 85; Georg Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 173. 11 Letters on West Africa, p. 190. 22 chapter one by the country of Akuapem, in the hills north of Fort Christiansborg, which stands literally on the rocks at the water’s edge, with Atlantic swells thundering at its foundations. Akuapem “has a far different appearance than in the shore regions”, Thonning wrote. “Tall trees, which at the bottom are mixed with impenetrable bushes, cover the rocks. The ground is no longer at all sandy, but either clayey or good loose garden earth”.12 There was also good fresh water, which was always in short supply in the environs of the forts on the shore. The climate in the hills also appeared to Isert to be much healthier than on the coast. Everything the Akuapem people planted bore more than hundred-fold, and the people therefore worked no more than three or four weeks out of the year. To describe Isert as something of an adventurer would perhaps be to also disparage all the other spirited individuals who for whatever reason elected to leave all behind and travel to the fearsome coast of Africa, but Isert was exceptionally restless. Like so many other educated men of his day, he took an interest in natural history, and in 1785 he had sent a few botanical specimens to Sir Joseph Banks from Ouidah, some distance down the coast to the east from the Danish establishments, where he was engaged for a time in trade.13 In his letter to Banks,14 he situated himself rather neatly against the backdrop of Banks’s own travels, natural historical interests, and colonial ambitions.15 “Since I came into this service”, Isert wrote to Banks, I have had an Opportunity to make several Discoveries in a short Distance from our settlements…. It would afford me a great deal of pleasure to make a Voyage up into the Heart of the Country, which as yet is without Description, but as it is not possible while I am in this service, and will take a great part of money, I conclude to make You sir! a proposition, if it should please You I will

12 GK V, Thonning’s notes, in a file marked 1/4 46, Endvidere Observerede i Betænk., which is in a file marked Diverse notater ang. forskellige udkast til betænkning. (ca. 1846– 47?), which is itself in a file marked Udkast til betænkningen afsluttet 26. februar 1847. In this same place are Thonning’s notes on T. Edward Bowdich, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, with a statistical account of that kingdom, and geographical notices of other parts of the interior of Africa (London: J. Murray, 1819); Bowdich translated a long passage from Isert’s characterization of the soils and climate of Akuapem on his pp. 165–167. 13 Letters on West Africa, pp. 219–220; The Banks letters, Warren R. Dawson, ed. (London: Printed by Order of the Trustees of the British Museum, 1958), pp. 412–413. See Robin Law, Ouidah: the social history of a West African slaving ‘port’, 1727–1892 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), p. 35. 14 Letters on West Africa, p. 224–225. 15 Banks founded the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa a few years later, in 1788: Curtin, The image of Africa, p. 17. the guinea commission commences its investigation 23

go into the English service for natural Philosoph, make Discoveries for the Society & find naturals and fruits to that Musaeum. He asked for the large sum of four to five hundred pounds sterling a year for this expedition, for travel in Africa was expensive. The scheme of my Voyage schould be as followes: if I return to Christiansburg, I make a Voyage to Akim[,] Aquapim & to Assianthée,16 from which I return to the windward Coast & to the River Sierra Leona, Gambia & Senegal, where from I hope to go to the West Indies & especially to the English Island of Jamaica, where I schale have an Opportunity, to collect manny things that we know not, but from our great Brown pictures,17 to bring in our Classifications. Isert was certainly open to suggestion, however: if “his Majesty would send schips out for Discoveries, or to south Sea Islands I am always ready to com to Europe & go with them”. Banks appears to have paid this proposition no mind.18 Isert’s book was by no means a model of graceful prose style19 or organi- zational coherence (it was composed in the form of a series of letters home and rambled freely), and it was only indifferently reviewed in Copenhagen.20 Nevertheless, there was no doubt of the authority of his first-hand observations and of the breadth of his experience, and when, early in 1788, Isert broached the subject of a Danish plantation colony in Africa before the minister of finance, Count Ernst Schimmelmann (himself a native speaker of German), he was well received. The Danish state did not at this time exercise direct control over the African enclave: the administration of the Guinea establishments had been contracted to a private slave-trading concern, the so-called Guinea Entrepreneurs, themselves the successors of the Baltic and Guinea Company.21 Count Schimmelmann, whose family was deeply involved in

16 That is to say, in modern terms, Akyem, Akuapem, and Asante. 17 He was referring here to Patrick Browne’s Civil and natural history of Jamaica, London: by the author, 1756; see E. C. Nelson, “Patrick Browne M.D. (c. 1720–1790), an Irish doctor in the Caribbean: his residence on Saint Croix (1757–1765) and his unpublished accounts of volcanic activity on Montserrat”, Archives of Natural History, Vol. 28, 2001, pp. 135–148. 18 The Banks letters, p. 413. 19 Letters on West Africa, p. 10. 20 Kritik og Antikritik, May 13, 1788, No. 23, pp. 365–66; Nyeste Kjøbenhavnske Efterretninger om lærde Sager, 1788, No. 39, pp. 621–623. 21 Scandinavians in Africa, p. 11; Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 150. On the Baltic and Guinea Company, see Jul. Schovelin, Fra den danske handels empire (Copenhagen: Det Nordiske Forlag, 1899), p. 143–145. 24 chapter one

Denmark’s colonies, was one of the new company’s directors,22 but he chose to take Isert’s new African project to the crown through channels of his own. Schimmelmann had, not long since, been among the conspira- tors behind the young Crown Prince Frederik’s palace coup (entirely bloodless, so thoroughly did Frederik surprise his feeble-minded father’s keepers upon his coming of age in 1784) and now had charge of the Finance Deputation (the ministry of finance), the Commerce Collegium, and various other lesser public agencies; his influence was simply enormous.23 What Schimmelmann and the rest of the administration may have made of such a character as Isert is not easy to assess: considerable romance may have attached to the celebrated sojourner on the coast, and his dinner conversation may have been quite riveting. His scheme at any rate opened fairly breathtaking national prospects. Isert may not have been the ideal agent for such an undertaking, but he and the opportunity had suddenly presented themselves. By the summer of 1788, Isert and Count Schimmelmann’s German-born private secretary Ernst Philip Kirstein,24 were drafting formal legislative proposals for a small but ambitious African colonial undertaking in the hills of Akuapem. There is to be found among Schimmelmann’s official papers an outline of the “expediency of colonizing the Guinea possessions and a refutation of the most common objections thereagainst”.25 The document is not signed or dated, but Peter Thonning, who laid it before the Guinea Commission forty-five years later, made a note that it was in Kirstein’s hand, with which he was familiar: in 1833, Kirstein was Thonning’s

22 See Joseph Evans Loftin, Jr., “The abolition of the Danish Atlantic slave trade” (unpublished dissertation, Louisiana State University, 1977), pp. 64–65; Erik Gøbel, “Danske over- søiske handelskompagnier i 17. og 18. århundrede. En forskningsoversigt”, Fortid og Nutid, Vol. 28, No. 4, 1980, pp. 535–569, on pp. 562, 565. 23 “Schimmelmann, Heinrich Ernst”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 2nd. ed., Povl Engelstoft, ed. (Copenhagen: J. H. Schultz Forlag, 1933–44) 24 “Kirstein, Ernst Philip”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 2nd. ed. 25 GTK, Vestindiske og Guineiske Sager, Diverse Dokumenter, Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, samt forskellige Vestindiske papirer, 1778–1809, “Udførlig Deduction af Hensigtsmæssigheden af at colo- nisere de guineiske Besiddelser og Gjendrivelse af nogle af de almindeligste Indvending erne derimod”, in German, in file labeled No. 2, Iserts Fredriksnopel. Aquapim. The quoted heading is from the Guinea Commission’s characterization of the document in its Designation II, a copy of which ended up among Schimmelmann’s papers when the documents it contained in the Commission’s day were at some point returned to their original archival place. The attribution to Isert and Kirstein is to be found in another copy of Designation II among the Guinea Commission’s archives: GK II, “Den Isertske Tractat m. m.”, Designation II (No. 1). the guinea commission commences its investigation 25 superior at the Chamber of Customs.26 Thonning annotated the document across the top, for the benefit of the Guinea Commission: “this introduction is recommended, being written with much clarity, expert knowledge, and practicability”. Elsewhere, he inserted the annotation, Seems to have been written in the first half of the year 1788, that is, after Isert had written his travel-descr. and before his second journey out to Guinea…. [T]his treatise was presumably written by Kirstein in consultation with Isert.27 Experiments with West Indian crops in the vicinity of the European forts on the Guinea Coast had confirmed that sugar cane, coffee, indigo, cotton, and cocoa could be cultivated with success, Isert and Kirstein wrote.28 Sugar cane and cotton, indeed, grew wild there. However, Europeans had from the beginning of the colonial period cultivated these products in the West Indies, and when the original inhabitants of the Antilles had been extirpated, it had become customary to import African slaves. In time it came to be thought that these crops were peculiar to the West Indies, and Africa, in an era of colonial expansion, had been left to the slave trade. Any African colonial proposition had thereafter been a direct threat to the plantations of the West Indies, which had come to have enormous economic significance. While the establishment of colonies in the West Indies had required heavy outflows of national capital (for there had been few people in the islands with whom to trade), Isert and Kirstein went on, commerce in the mother country’s own manufactures could form the economic basis of an African colony. The necessary slaves could be purchased far more cheaply than in the West Indies for such trade goods as powder, rifles, spirits, brass vessels, iron, copper, lead, and cottons, most of which were produced in Denmark. The harshly productive discipline of the West Indian plantations could never be imposed in Africa, Isert and Kirstein admitted, but planters would on the other hand be free of the need to import food from Europe or America.29 The shipping connection between Europe and

26 G.N. Kringelbach, Den civile centraladministrations embedsetat 1660–1848, reprint (Lyngby: Dansk Historisk Håndbogsforlag, 1977 [1889]), p. 209. 27 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, No. 2, Iserts Fredriksnopel. Aquapim, unsigned, undated document listed by the Guinea Commission as Designation II, No. 1, p. 20. 28 From GK, Green Books, Designation II, No. 1. 29 It was commonly conceived that almost all the available land in the sugar islands of the West Indies was given over to cane and that these societies, although they were exceedingly wealthy, could not feed themselves: see Christopher Iannini, “ ‘The itinerant man’: 26 chapter one

Africa was easier than that to the Caribbean, and the Guinea Coast was not subject to the visitations of hurricanes. It was proposed to plant a European colony in the hills a little way from the coast, where the settlers would be spared the worst of the equatorial heat, and where, amidst groves of palms, they could subsist on the fruits, vegetables, fish, and game of the country. Such luxury crops as indigo, tobacco, and cotton could be produced within a short time, and plantations of coffee could soon be established: this valuable commodity could in due time become the colony’s staple crop. Although the place’s fertility and suitability for West Indian crops was undeniable, Isert and Kirstein allowed that regular large-scale plantation production would be subject to so many local conditions and unforeseen risks that it remained to be seen if the crops produced would be able to hold their own on the European market. The Guinea Commission’s archival investigation into the history of plantations in the Danish stretch of the Guinea Coast carried it back no further than to Isert’s project, but Isert’s colonial ideas had not emerged from a vacuum.30 A number of Europeans had speculated on the agricultural potential of the territory around the Danish forts over the years. Ludwig Rømer, to whose descriptions of the Guinea Coast, published in the 1760s, Isert referred in his own book, had written that the European slavers on the coast found it useful to maintain small plantations of local foodstuffs to sustain their captives while awaiting ships to the West Indies and on the crossing, and that such plantings, under European supervision, were very productive.31 The old Guinea Company, to which the crown had contracted the African slave trade and the administration of the Guinea forts between 1765 and 1775,32 had sent a couple of small parties of Moravian missionaries down to the coast in the 1760s with the express intention of establishing plantations; some of these settled near Fort Fredensborg, thirty miles or so east of Christiansborg, but nothing came of their agricultural projects.33

Crèvecoeur’s Caribbean, Raynal’s revolution, and the fate of Atlantic cosmopolitanism”, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, Vol. 61, 2004, No. 2, pp. 201–234, on pp. 209–211, and Justin Roberts, “Working between the lines: labor and agriculture on two Barbadian sugar plantations, 1796–1797,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, Vol. 63, 2006, No. 3, pp. 551–586. 30 Nørregård pointed this out in Danish settlements, p. 173, and Kea also took note of it in “Ashanti-Danish relations”, p. 300. 31 See Ludewig Ferdinand Rømer, Tilforladelig efterretning om Kysten Guinea (Copenhagen: Trykt hos Ludolph Henrich Lillies Enke, 1760), pp. 298–299; Rømer, A reliable account of the Coast of Guinea, pp. 56, 215; and Letters on West Africa, pp. 29, 35, 41. 32 Gøbel, “Danske oversøiske handelskompagnier”, pp. 560–561. 33 Nørregård, Danish settlements, pp. 130, 173. the guinea commission commences its investigation 27

In July, 1773, Henning Bargum, the director of the Guinea Company, wrote a scathing letter to his officers on the coast, attaching a fresh copy of a list of questions he had originally sent down in 1766, in which he inquired, among other matters, about the state of agriculture in the enclave.34 The letter expresses nicely the difficulty of the administrative relationship between motherland and colony, for the metropolis was always hampered by the tenuousness and uncertainty of the transoceanic correspondence as it laid its colonial plans and attempted to execute them. I have now so often written the Government and the Privy Council regarding one thing and another concerning the fortresses [Bargum wrote]; I have striven to put my questions on such a level that the Government might be able to perceive my objects; indeed, I have, and God knows with what pains, devised several things that assuredly would be to the advantage of the fortresses, trade, and the officers, if one could only obtain the needed knowledge of actual conditions, but all in vain. Truly, I do not write this letter without being very agitated, indignant, and bitter over the Government’s remissness in this matter…. The archive itself will be my witness; indeed! I have even had minute-books prepared and bound, but I am convinced that both they and my letters lie untouched, a circumstance that really does no honor to the Government…. As dear therefore as your honor, livelihood, and advancement may be to you, thus seriously do I remind you to implement what is demanded. Among much else, he angrily reiterated his earlier demand that a map of the territory be made; he had long since sent “mathematical instruments” down for this purpose. He wanted ground plans and views of the forts. He wished to know if there existed plantations of coffee, indigo, cotton, or other crops. He asked that a cask of soil be sent home to Copenhagen for analysis, with samples of local crops such as yams and lemons. A year later, the administration on the coast responded with quite a wide-ranging report; an idea of the character of the land begins to emerge.35 Three kinds of beans were grown in the coastal area, and others, which would not grow near the shore, were cultivated farther inland. There were three sorts of yams and two of millet, the large, which is called

34 Guineiske Compagni, No. 143, Skrivelser fra direktionen til Gouvernementet og det sekrete råd i Guinea, 1772–78, Bargum, Copenhagen, July 22, 1773 (with postscript of July 23). 35 Guineiske Compagni, Kompagniets københavnske arkivalier, Direction og hovedk- ontor, Guvernementets gensvar på hoveddirektør Fr. Bargums notice af 23. Juli 1773 ang. Tilstanden på Kysten, 1766–1773, No. 22, Aarestrup, Biørn, Kiøge, Gjønge, Rasmussen, and Weite, June 8, 1774; the letter was published almost twenty-five years later (and sixty years before the Guinea Commission began its study) in Archiv for statistik, politik og huusholdnings videnskaber, Frederik Thaarup, ed., Vol. 3, (Copenhagen: published by Professor Thaarup, 1797–98), pp. 161–192. 28 chapter one magis [maize], and another very small, “no larger than hempseed”; the two flours were often mixed together.36 Various important foodstuffs, including “pisang”, were not grown in the vicinity of the forts, but farther into the country, where there was water. Sour wild lemons and bitter pomegran- ates were to be found here and there. The Africans gathered various greens. There were good shallots, but they were very expensive. The Africans traded all these things among themselves and also brought them to the forts, transporting them in loads “as large as a negro can carry on his head”. There were two kinds of cotton, the one as white and as fine as that grown in the West Indies; the Africans made fishing nets of it. The other, called silk-cotton, very short in the fiber, could not be spun and was used only to fill cushions. The Government had obtained some coffee beans from farther inland and had without success tried to grow them. French sea-captains knowledgeable in such matters had told them that the shrubs that grew everywhere here were indigo plants, just like those of Saint Domingue, but the Africans obtained a fast dark-blue dye from the leaves and roots of a couple of other plants altogether, with which they dyed both wool and linen. The report described the method by which the Africans extracted fiber from pineapple leaves.37 “No white has yet to date laid out any plantation that is known to us at the established places, except the Dutch”, who had established a cotton plantation at Axim, the first Dutch fort on the Upper Coast; it was not expected that it would repay the trouble and expense involved. Plantations of provisions and cotton could presumably be established, but the outcome and value of such an effort was highly uncertain. The Government feared that the Africans would not tolerate any such undertaking, “although lovely fields and great areas lie quite deserted and uncultivated”, because the Africans were so “envious and fearful of the whites’ ascendancy that they do not dare let them make any progress”.38 The Government was shipping home a cask of the rather salty soil around the forts, as well as samples of yams and cotton, but knew of no way to preserve lemons for such a journey.39 Old women panned for gold in the streams that ran down to the sea, but there were real mines, with shafts and passages, two weeks’ travel into the

36 Thaarup, Archiv for statistik, Vol. 3, p. 162. 37 Thaarup, Archiv for statistik, Vol. 3, pp. 163–164. On pineapple fiber, see Grove and Johansen, p. 1389. 38 Thaarup, Archiv for statistik, Vol. 3, p. 165. 39 Thaarup, Archiv for statistik, Vol. 3, pp. 166, 191. the guinea commission commences its investigation 29 interior. If any white person here took an interest in extracting gold, however, it would surely cost him his life.40 Everything the Europeans required had to be bought from the Africans, who owned all the land. The Government pointed out to Bargum that the establishments’ standing instructions required that the “inventory negroes” (the slaves carried on the forts’ books as part of the fixed inventory) were to be set to gathering firewood with which to cook and burn lime and to supply visiting ships with fuel, but when an attempt had been made to carry out this order in 1769, the Africans had blockaded the forts, so that not so much as a chicken could go in or out. There were cattle (although these were never milked), swine, shorthaired sheep, goats, chickens, Spanish ducks, and wild guinea fowl, some of which the Government hoped to send home to Copenhagen as soon as it could.41 The state of the trade was much as it always had been, except that the prices of slaves and tusks had risen by fifty per cent in the last thirty years, while the value of European trade goods had fallen. The slaves brought in were either war captives, miscreants, or people kidnapped on country footpaths. The trade in ivory and gold was reliable, but commerce in European goods was subject to tremendous variation in demand: items that for a time were simply indispensable in the trade might fall absolutely from fashion. At present the Government recommended textiles printed with the figures of animals, buildings, or people. The only way to increase the volume of trade would be to build more forts and to ensure a steady flow of well-assorted cargoes of trade goods. It would not be feasible, however, to place factories inland because of the expense of transportation and defense. Nor would the other Europeans on the coast smile on such an undertaking.42 In some places farther east, honey, wax, and various kinds of wood were available; the honey to be had on the Danish stretch of the coast was always highly adulterated and very expensive. (There were no domesticated bees here, and the Government ruled out the idea that bee-keeping might profitably be encouraged.) Locally-cut lumber was so expensive and difficult to obtain that it was cheaper to import the planks from Europe, as was indeed the common practice among all the Europeans on the coast.43

40 See Dickson, Historical geography of Ghana, pp. 87–88, and W.E.F. Ward, A history of Ghana, 2nd ed. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1958), p. 21. 41 Thaarup, Archiv for statistik, Vol. 3, pp. 166–169. 42 Thaarup, Archiv for statistik, Vol. 3, pp. 169–171. 43 Thaarup, Archiv for statistik, Vol. 3, pp. 172, 191–192. 30 chapter one

The Government hoped that it would be apparent that the Company “is not in any way the owner of any ground or arable land here in this country that could be used for cultivation, except precisely the ground the [establishments] are built on”. The terrible mortality among the whites here “forbids any further suggestion” of sending out whites to cultivate the soil. If it were not so, we would doubtless ask for some Danish families to be sent out to us, who could take the roving mulatto youth in, and prepare cloth of the cotton that grows here, and also make a beginning on cultivating some of the barren and yet somewhat usable land in the European manner. If these families lived, one might try to find one or more whites on the Portuguese islands that lie three weeks’ journey from the coast beneath the Line to settle among them to instruct them in what way the soil in the hot countries can best be made useful for the support of human life.44 A few other early traces of these agricultural and colonial impulses can be found here and there in the record: Andreas Bjørn, when he was the commandant at Fort Fredensborg for the Baltic and Guinea Company, in 1779, kept a garden, which he later stated had “often supplied the main fort with European vegetables and garden fruits”; he had planted another at the newly-built Fort Kongenssteen, on the Volta, in 1784.45 Jens Adolf Kiøge, the governor through most of the 1780s, aggressively expanded the sphere of Danish influence down the coast to the east: another new fort, Prindsenssteen, was built at Keta, at the far eastern end of the enclave, and Kiøge’s reports spoke in expansive terms of the prospects for colonization.46 Niels Lather, one of the Company’s slave traders, claimed many years later to have been “the first who, in the year 1785, investigated the character of the land, whether it was suitable for plantations”. He had directed a report to Schimmelmann in 1786 and “had myself had it in mind, in the year 1787, to go home to Europe in this regard”, but, having been placed in command of Fort Prindsenssteen, “I therefore passed my plan on to Dr. Isert, whose integrity and good character I was familiar with, [and]

44 Thaarup, Archiv for statistik, Vol. 3, p. 192. 45 “Bjørns Beretning 1788 om de danske Forter og Negerier. Kbn, Aug. 14, 1788”, in Thaarup, Archiv for statistik, Vol. 3, pp. 193–230, on pp. 209, 213; Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 146. 46 Nørregård, Danish settlements, pp. 146–149. the guinea commission commences its investigation 31 asked him to travel home and see to the completion of the whole matter in his own name”.47 Jens Jensen Berg, the master of the slaver Christiansborg, in which Isert had sailed from Africa to the Danish West Indies on his way home to Denmark late in 1786,48 had explored some way along the coast while waiting for his cargo that year. In a short memoir written in 1810 he related that he “often conversed with the fetish priests”, from whom he learned much of value regarding the African nations’ “industry and customs, as well as the character of the soil &c.”49 He had taken small boats into the mouth of the Volta and was of the view that the river was navigable for ships of medium draft, an important matter for trade and colonial establishments. The country brings forth indigo plants and cotton, which, when cultivated properly, will, especially on the islands [of the Volta], provide abundant production. Coffee will also be able to thrive, a number of tree species, ivory, gums, animal hides, palm oil &c. are obtained from the interior, everything has good prospects. Besides that the country is rich in grain, domestic and wild animals, as well as fish.50 The little Danish society on the coast was extremely circumscribed, and Berg can be presumed to have conversed with Lather, perhaps at considerable length, and he spent weeks in close quarters with Isert on the passage to the West Indies.51 It is not so much to go on, but, beneath the overwhelming westward flow of the slave trade to the Americas, the tug of a little local undercurrent of

47 GJS 12/1794, Mynsterskriver Sletting, Copenhagen, January 2, 1794, to the king, on Niels Lather’s behalf, quoting at length from a letter from Lather. Lather’s claim to have given Isert his plan was safe enough: Isert was by this time long dead. 48 Letters on West Africa, pp. 175 ff. 49 Regarding fetishes, their shrines, and the fetish priests, see Kwamena-Poh, p. x, 133– 136, Dickson, p. 207, and “fetish”, in David Owusu-Ansah, Historical dictionary of Ghana, 3rd. ed. (Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 2005). 50 “Skibskaptajn og Grosserer Jens Jensen Bergs Selvbiografi”, H.W. Harbou, ed., Personalhistorisk Tidsskrift, 4th series, Vol. 3, 1900, pp. 185–211, on pp. 193–194, 196. (Isert had also speculated that the Volta was navigable: Letters on West Africa, p. 79.) Berg wrote that he had reported periodically to the directors of the Baltic and Guinea Company and in 1810 expressed the hope that his reports were preserved in the company’s archives, for his own copies had been lost in the bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807 (pp. 193, 199). Those archives are in fact lost: Gøbel, “Danske oversøiske handelskompagnier”, p. 565. Berg was apparently still advancing colonial plans in Copenhagen in 1789; he also promoted the colonial potential of the Nicobar Islands, in the Indian Ocean: pp. 198–199, 201, 206–207. 51 See Christian Degn, Die Schimmelmanns im atlantischen Dreieckshandel (Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz Verlag, 1984), p. 234. 32 chapter one plantation colonialism could be felt rather early there in the Danish enclave on the West African coast. Such are beginnings. A couple of other unsigned and undated documents in Kirstein’s hand among Schimmelmann’s papers outlined a sort of administrative constitution for the colony it had been decided to entrust to Poul Isert. According to Peter Thonning’s annotations for the Guinea Commission in the 1830s, there was talk here of a plantation investment by a “private partnership”, which he did not think feasible; “however, there are many useful ideas here, also for a royal administration”.52 The fourth item of this set of documents regarding Isert’s colony was what Thonning took to be a draft of Schimmelmann’s instructions to Isert, “prepared on the highest authorization”—that is to say, with the approval of Crown Prince Frederik.53 Schimmelmann and the crown prince were clearly thinking in the long term: it would be expedient, Schimmelmann thought, if a large uncultivated area could be obtained from the Africans right at the start, on locally appropriate but binding terms. This territory should communicate with the Volta River. It was essential that the colony should be able to sustain itself, although Isert was expressly reminded, perhaps with recent events in North America fresh in mind, of the colony’s “indissoluble and continuing bond to the motherland”.54 The cultivation of foodstuffs for the colony itself was to take precedence over the production of crops for export. When the colony found itself in a position to turn to commercial agriculture, a beginning was to be made only with the easiest of the West Indian crops. Isert was to be permitted to make use of slaves who otherwise faced being transported to the West Indies, but these were to be “considered purely as serfs, who are to be used only for cultivation and work in the fields”; nor could they ever be sold out of the colony again. As for the

52 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, No. 2, Iserts Fredriksnopel. Aquapim, Designation II, unsigned and undated documents in German bearing the Guinea Commission’s numbers and annotations; quote from Thonning’s annotation on the document marked Designation II, No. 3; GK, Green Books, Designation II, Nos. 2 and 3. 53 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, No. 2, Iserts Fredriksnopel. Aquapim, Designation II, an unsigned and undated document in German (Designation II, No. 4); quote from Thonning’s characterization on Designation II; the following paraphrase is from GK, Green Books, Designation II, No. 4. The orders were reproduced a decade later in Thaarup’s Archiv for statistik, pp. 233– 239, where they were attributed to Schimmelmann and Christian Brandt, the director of the Chancellery, and dated July 10, 1788; Thaarup’s rendering is translated into English in Letters on West Africa, pp. 235–238. 54 Letters on West Africa, p. 236; Green Books, Designation II, No. 4. the guinea commission commences its investigation 33

European settlers, “it is desired that these always make up one race, a people in themselves, and it must always be the law for the Colony that between the Europeans and the country’s black inhabitants lawful marriages or alliances do not take place”, on pain of expulsion. No child of such a liaison could inherit from its European parent.55 Peter Thonning reacted strongly to this racist social basis of Isert’s colony in the 1830s: “this provision must be quite disregarded”. On the contrary, he wrote in a marginal annotation on the original from the Schimmelmann files, a colonial administration must strive for “complete equality for all colors, if one does not wish to lay the basis at the colony’s beginning for a Sicilian vespers, the root of which can then scarcely be eradicated”.56 (The figure of speech alludes to a massacre of French occupiers by Sicilian natives in 1282.) Schimmelmann and Brandt knew that it would be “impossible to be able to foresee all contingencies which might arise”; they had outlined “the purpose of the establishment, the principles upon which it should rest”, but otherwise left the direction of the undertaking entirely to Isert. The colony was to be known as the Royal Danish African Mission.57 The Guinea Entrepreneurs expressed deep reservation about the project. Their only interest lay in the export of slaves to the great plantation factories of the Americas, and they were not inclined to view the establishment of plantations in Africa itself with favor. In a letter to Schimmelmann shortly before Isert was issued his orders,58 they wrote that if trade goods and supplies were to be advanced to Isert’s colony from the forts’ inventories, the Entrepreneurs would require some assurance of compensation “with reasonable interest”. They reminded Schimmelmann that Isert’s colony should not be permitted to engage “in the slightest” in trade in slaves, gold, or ivory, which, by the terms of their royal octroy, remained their exclusive monopoly. The Guinea Commission next examined a draft of a letter from Schimmelmann and Brandt to Governor Kiøge on the coast. The governor was informed that it was to be wished that the colonial project should wake as little notice as possible, at the least in the beginning. Indeed, it

55 Letters on West Africa, p. 237; GK, Green Books, Designation II, No. 2. 56 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, No. 2, Iserts Fredriksnopel. Aquapim, document marked Designation 2, No. 2, annotation at § 2. 57 Letters on West Africa, pp. 237–238. 58 GTK. Dokumenter vedrørende Kommissionen for Negerhandelens bedre Indretning & Ophævelse m. m., 1783–1806, I, Pingel, Meyer, Prætorius, and Co., to Schimmelmann, July 5, 1788. 34 chapter one had been put in Isert’s hands to give it the appearance of a private affair. For this reason, only a small number of people were being sent down to the coast, but Schimmelmann expected to be able to expand the crown’s support of the colony if any progress was made. If the production of West Indian crops in Africa proved feasible, Schimmelmann and Brandt pointed out to Kiøge, the undertaking would be of considerable significance, especially now that rather a different view was being taken in Europe of the slave trade to the West Indies than hitherto. The country that possessed itself of other sources of sugar and coffee and the like, without having to depend on the slave trade, would be at a very considerable advantage.59 Isert was given a letter of credit for six thousand rigsdaler, which Governor Kiøge was asked to honor from out of the forts’ stocks of trade goods and to supplement with some thousands further, if necessary. It has been thought best not to allocate a larger sum at first, as the whole undertaking is only to be regarded as an experiment, and was only as such proposed to his Majesty, for no one can guarantee the luck of the outcome, but the prospects are nevertheless important enough that a modest sum ventured thereupon is not to be taken as misplaced.60 Isert and a party of a dozen craftsmen sailed for the coast of Africa on July 14, 1788, in the slaver Fredensborg, commanded by Captain Berg,61 but were four full months on their way to Fort Christiansborg. By late August, in the meantime, Governor Kiøge, who had left the coast in April, had arrived in Denmark and had been apprised of Schimmelmann’s and Isert’s project.62 He had always thought that something along these lines could

59 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, No. 2, Iserts Fredriksnopel. Aquapim, Designation II, No. 5, an unsigned, undated document [Schimmelmann and Brandt, July 10, 1788, to Kiøge], in German; copy in GK II, Den Isertske Tractat m. m.; GK, Green Books, Designation II, No. 5. This, it is to be noted, was written three years before the Danish regent, in March, 1792, issued his precedent-setting decree banning the slave trade from his African establishments or into the Danish West Indies, with effect ten years thence. An excerpt of the letter was published in Thaarup’s Archiv for statistik, pp. 239–240, and this is translated into English in Letters on West Africa, pp. 238–239. I thank Ulla Mark Svensson for her reading of this last passage, which Thaarup saw fit to omit, perhaps because it cast the humanitarianism of the Danish government’s momentous step to ban the slave trade in a less favorable light than was usual. See Daniel P. Hopkins, “The Danish ban on the Atlantic slave trade and Denmark’s African colonial ambitions”, especially p. 179 (note 23). 60 Thaarup, Archiv for statistik, p. 240; see Letters on West Africa, p. 239. 61 Dok. vedrørende Kommissionen for Negerhandelen, I, Pingel, Meyer, Prætorius, and Co., July 5, 1788, to Schimmelmann and Brandt; “Skibskaptajn og Grosserer Jens Jensen Bergs Selvbiografi” p. 196; Isert, January 16, 1789, to Schimmelmann and Brandt, in Letters on West Africa, pp. 241–245, on p. 241. 62 Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 152; Dok. vedrørende Kommissionen for Negerhandelen, I, Kiøge, Copenhagen, August 27, 1788, to Schimmelmann and Brandt. the guinea commission commences its investigation 35 be accomplished, he wrote to Schimmelmann and Brandt, but had never cared to float a proposal for fear of being regarded as a Project mager—a projector, a foolish schemer. He was very sorry, however, that Isert had been authorized to purchase land in what Kiøge regarded as Danish territory, for this undercut the Danes’ authority among the Africans. Had Isert forgotten, he asked, that he, Kiøge, and in Isert’s time, had fought to bring the Volta under Danish control and to make all the African peoples west of the river the king’s subjects? Reports from the coast would reveal if Isert was capable of this new undertaking, Kiøge allowed diplomatically, but he did not refrain from suggesting that it would be “unpleasant” for the acting governor, Johann Kipnasse, “that a man of so few years’ experience should have such confidence placed in him, ahead of many other native-born of the king’s own subjects who dearly love their king and fatherland”. (Kiøge had himself spent twenty-eight years on the Guinea Coast.63) In a report on the Danish establishments and the neighboring towns written in August, 1788, Andreas Bjørn, who was also at this time in Copenhagen64 expressed the opinion that the Danish enclave, especially if it could be extended another hundred miles or so farther down the coast, would be indisputably, among all the nations settled on the coast, the best possession, in which not only could the so favorable slave-, elephant-, and gold-trade be in the highest measure carried on, but also, to obtain the products that habit has made necessary and are cultivated only in hot climates, indeed here with half the trouble, against America, and best if some old Africans and West Indians were arranged to be brought here to encourage the cultivation of the land. May God provide that those high and mighty concerned might be able to sound out the so deep way to agriculture’s progress in Guinea in the fertile but deserted fields, whereby the country’s lacks could be remedied, to the great advantage of the inhabitants and to reduce the torture-abuse, indeed the bloody scenes of war to supply American possessions [with African slaves] to obtain products.65 Isert and his party arrived at Fort Christiansborg on November 14, 1788. Two months later, he sent Schimmelmann a long and enthusiastic report.66

63 Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 152. 64 Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 153. 65 The archival provenance is uncertain, but the report was published ten years later by Thaarup: “Bjørns Beretning 1788 om de danske Forter og Negerier. Kbn, Aug. 14, 1788”, in Archiv for statistik, Vol. 3, pp. 193–230; quote on pp. 229–230. 66 Isert, Frederiksnopel, January 16, 1789, published in Danish in Thaarup, Archiv for statistik, pp. 241–248 and in English in Letters on West Africa, pp. 241–245. There is a copy of the letter in Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen; what may be Isert’s original, marked “No. 6” (the Guinea Commission’s 36 chapter one

He had immediately put into execution the plan he had worked out on the voyage. At first disregarding his instructions to place the colony in the hills, Isert had traveled down to the Volta and as far up the stream as the large island he called Malfi (Mlefi), where, he said, the river was still navigable for vessels of medium draft; it can be thought that Captain Berg may have had some influence on his thinking at this point, although Isert did not mention Berg in this connection.67 The soil by the river was suitable for sugar cane and cotton, Isert thought, but there were no building materials to be had, and he found the place particularly unhealthy. While access to the Volta would undoubtedly be important, and while it could be hoped, Isert wrote, that the area would later be colonized by acclimatized Europeans, he had abandoned the idea of founding his colony there. He had traveled back overland to Fort Fredensborg, on the coast, and thence quite some distance inland to the hills of Akuapem, “whose healthy climate and good land were already very familiar to me”.68 After negotiations with the “Duke” Atiambo (Obuobi Atiemo), the leader of the Akuapem people,69 who convinced his council of the advantages of allowing a European colony among them, Isert was permitted to select a remote spot on which to make a beginning, reserving to the Danish crown “the right to build and cultivate anywhere in the duchy where no one else had already taken up the ground, and this constitutes seven eighths of a country of at least three hundred square miles”.70 All this was recorded in a formal treaty between Obuobi Atiemo and the King of Denmark, which Isert enclosed with his letter.71 The place Isert had chosen for his plantation colony was not far from Akuapem’s boundary with Krobo to the east,72 and Obuobi Atiemo (there is actually only a blank space where the name should have been inscribed) is in fact characterized in the treaty as the number) is filed at Finants Ministeriet, Kolonial Kontor, Guineiske Journalsager (GJS) number 311/1891. 67 Nor did Berg mention Isert in his little “Selvbiografi”: “Skibskaptajn og Grosserer Jens Jensen Bergs Selvbiografi”. 68 Thaarup, Archiv for statistik, p. 242. 69 The main source for the history of Akuapem is M.A. Kwamena-Poh’s Government and politics in the Akuapem state; on the treaty signed by Isert and Obuobi Atiemo, see especially pp. 97–101. See also Akwapim handbook, David Brokensha, ed. (Accra: Ghana Publishing Corporation, 1972). 70 Thaarup, Archiv for statistik, p. 242. These measures are roughly calculated from the Danish mil of 24,000 (Danish) feet: see Winsnes’s appendix in Letters on West Africa, p. 248, and the note on weights and measures in Danish sources for the history of Ghana, Vol. 1, p. xix. 71 See a translation of the text of the treaty in Kwamena-Poh, pp. 160–161. 72 See Kwamena-Poh, p. 39. the guinea commission commences its investigation 37 leader of Krobo, rather than of Akuapem. (Peter Thonning annotated one of the copies of the document that was circulated among the Guinea Commission forty-five years later, “I can’t imagine why the Akvapim regent is in this document called the caboceer [a word of Portuguese origin in common use on the Gold Coast at this period, often spelled cabuceer by the Danes, signifying ‘head’ or ‘chief’73] of Krobbo”, and speculated that a political union of some sort may have existed between the two peoples.)74 It was, in all, an extraordinary diplomatic compact. Isert’s plantation was twenty or twenty-five miles from the coast, “which makes the transport a trifle difficult”, he admitted, but the fruitfulness of the soil, the frequent rain, and the availability of stone and wood with which to build outweighed this liability, in his estimation. I will besides see to it that the plain from the coast up to the mountains is planted in cotton, for cotton does very well in that area…. This stretch is from Christiansborg to the Rio Volta 80 miles, and its breadth is calculated to be 20 to 40 miles.75 (To Danes, these were considerable extents of land: the large and fruitful island of Sjælland, from which Copenhagen itself drew its sustenance, is perhaps fifty miles by a hundred.) Isert had had the first buildings constructed in the African fashion and had moved into his own new residence on December 21, 1788; Obuobi Atiemo himself had planted the Danish flag in a prominent position. Isert and his workers were busy about the construction of a stone “Government House for the town to be”, which he had taken the liberty of naming Frederiksnopel, in honor of the crown prince;

73 See “Caboceer”, in Owusu-Ansah. 74 Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 174; see Thaarup, Archiv for statistik, pp. 248–251. The treaty was examined by the Guinea Commission as Designation II, No. 7: GK II, Den Isertske Tractat m. m. What may be the original of this treaty, marked “No. 7”, came to be filed at Finants Ministeriet, Kolonial Kontor, GJS 311/1891 (in association with documents marked VJ 949/1889) in connection with an inquiry through the Danish diplomatic service regarding the limits of the territorial rights acquired by England from Denmark in 1850. See Hopkins, “Peter Thonning’s map”, pp. 119–120. Winsnes suggests (Letters on West Africa, pp. 229–230) that the treaty may have been drafted in Copenhagen before Isert departed for the coast on the understanding that Isert would plant his colony farther east than he did, in Krobo territory, and there is indeed an undated copy of the Krobo treaty in Dok. vedrørende Kommissionen for Negerhandelen, box I, in a file marked “Isert”. See the facsimile reproduced in Degn, facing p. 236, and GK, Betænkningen, §2, Deres Majestæts Territorial-Rettighed, pp. 15–18. 75 Thaarup, Archiv for statistik, pp. 242–243; see Letters on West Africa, p. 242. 38 chapter one

and thereafter barracks, guard-house, and private buildings. My intention is that the town should be surrounded by a simple earthworks and trench, … for with such simple fortification, supported by about 24 cannons, we could assuredly stand against the might of all African kings. He had contracted with the Akuapem to cut a path all the way to the coast. The few slaves that he possessed were at work clearing ground and planting local provision crops, cotton, indigo, tobacco, and the seeds of European garden crops. He had also brought with him a few European domestic animals, and these were doing well in the hills. Isert now urged the government to proceed vigorously to colonize the territory he had acquired in the king’s name. The directors of the African Colony, he suggested, should issue a placard announcing the establishment of the colony, offering places to craftsmen and agriculturalists. These workers’ lack of experience with tropical products would be of no consequence, Isert said, for he would personally provide them with “both theoretical and practical” instruction. In particular, he thought that this placard should be issued in Altona, which was a Danish town at that time, and in Hamburg itself, just up the Elbe, “whereby”, he asserted, not very convincingly, “frequent emigration from the fatherland could be avoided”. A ship should be sent out as soon as a hundred and fifty colonists had been recruited. When it arrived on the coast, it should proceed a dozen miles or so past Christiansborg to a place he called Sikka (Sika or Ponny, on Thonning’s maps: Kpone, on a modern topographical map76) which was distinguished by a grove of eleven palms on a little hill near the beach, and anchor about a mile offshore. He appears to have hoped that the stream that enters the sea at this place would provide an avenue of transport at least into the vicinity of the colony, and he asked that the ship carry on its deck a large, copper-clad, half-decked ship’s boat, to be left behind on the coast. The ship should be well-stocked with trade goods of high quality for the purchase of slaves and foodstuffs.77 The colonists should include educated men, fluent in both Danish and German, to administer the new colony; officers and soldiers; a priest and two catechists; a couple of surgeons; and a corps of clerks. Three months thereafter, a second ship should be

76 Keta, NB 31–9, Army Map Service, Corps of Engineers, comp. (Washington, D. C.: Army Map Service, Corps of Engineers, U. S. Army, [1960]). 77 Isert, an experienced African trader, attached a long list of trade goods to his letter, specifying that he wanted forty thousand pounds of gunpowder, twenty thousand pots each of rum and grain alcohol, large numbers of rifles, and the like: Thaarup, Archiv for statistik, pp. 251 ff. the guinea commission commences its investigation 39 dispatched, so there would within a short time be three hundred Europeans in the place. Five days after writing this letter, Isert was dead of a virulent tropical disease, as Peter Thonning noted at the bottom of one of the copies of Isert’s letter that was circulated to the Guinea Commission in the 1830s.78 The Guinea Entrepreneurs’ administration on the coast sent news of Isert’s death to the company directors in Copenhagen along with this, his last letter, his list of trade goods, and a copy of the treaty he had signed with Obuobi Atiemo.79 Even had he lived, they wrote, they would not have been able to advance him anything but some cloths of poor quality. These varieties he would certainly not have accepted, for same would have been just as unsalable for him as they are for us, and other goods we could never have turned over, as we, according to our duty, wished to prevent poor Captain Isert from encroaching on branches of the trade to the prejudice of the R. octroy, which is exclusively assigned to [the Entrepreneurs]. On the other hand, they had seen from Schimmelmann’s and Brandt’s letter to the former governor Kiøge, which, in his absence, they had thought best to open, that it was the king’s wish that they should assist Isert in every possible way. The Government was at a loss to know how it was to carry out such contradictory instructions: the company’s trade prerogatives had to be preserved, but these new royal orders had also to be obeyed. It was something of a dilemma, to be sure, but it was doubtless quite typical of the colonial dialogue everywhere: just as the central administration had to try to steer its colony at an impossible remove, with little notion, by and large, of the day-to-day realities of the overseas territory, so the authorities in the colony itself were cut off from most of the social, political, and economic flux of the metropolis. The Government on the coast recommended that if Isert’s colonial undertaking was to be carried on, now that he himself was dead, the Entrepreneurs should contract to supply the colony with four or five hundred slaves at fixed prices, depending on sex and age, and in turn enjoy a monopoly on the colony’s purchases of slaves. It was clear from Isert’s letter and the list of trade goods he had prepared,

78 GJS 226/1836, Isert, Frederiksnopel, Januar 16, 1789, to Schimmelmann and Brandt, Designation II, No. 6, copy. 79 “Skrivelse fra Gouvernementet paa Kristiansborg til den Guineiske Handels- Direction”, signed Kipnasse, J.E. Richter, and P. Mejer, Febr. 2, 1789, published in Thaarup, Archiv for statistik, pp. 264–68; see also Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, Kipnasse, Christiansborg, Febr. 3, 1789, to Schimmelmann and Brandt, among a number of copies run together in one document. 40 chapter one they wrote, that he had intended to buy a large number of slaves, and there would have been nothing to prevent him from getting them from Fort Christiansborg’s immediate neighbors, the English and Dutch forts at Accra. If a cargo such as Isert had specified came out from Europe and was put without any restriction at the colony’s disposition, the Entrepreneurs’ own establishments would be placed at a terrible disadvantage. Count Schimmelmann wrote to a confidant in July, 1789, that he had just received the sorrowful news that Isert, the founder of the new colony in Africa, was dead. Isert had obtained a considerable district in the hills not far from the Volta and had already erected buildings and begun to cultivate cotton and cochineal, as Schimmelmann wrote, mistaking his tropical dyes. His impression was that the people of Akuapem favored the undertaking, but he feared that there would be more to sustaining the colony than there had been to its founding, for the people with the necessary enthusiasm and perseverance would be hard to find.80 Countess Schimmelmann also passed to an old friend the news that Isert was dead, “after having made the brightest beginnings for the new republic”. She said of her husband, “Ernst was deeply affected when he heard this news and exclaimed: No, I have no luck at all, I should abandon all my affairs”.81 In March, 1789, Governor Kipnasse notified Schimmelmann and Brandt that he had appointed Over-assistant Jens Nielsen Flindt, in the Guinea Entrepreneurs’ service on the coast, to take temporary charge at Frederiksnopel and to continue the work of clearing for plantations of sugar cane or cotton.82 Kipnasse was not sanguine about the colony’s prospects, however, fearing that, if only because the colony lay two days’ journey overland from the sea, making the transportation of goods and supplies exceedingly expensive, its aims could not be achieved without the investment of considerable capital: years would doubtless pass before the colony showed a profit. A few months later Kipnasse wrote that he had sent ten slaves up to Flindt. He referred to them as colonists and “citizens” of the colony. He had therefore ordered Flindt to give them a small monthly

80 Schimmelmann, July 7, 1789, to Duke Frederik Christian of Schlesvig-Holstein, in Efterladte papirer fra den Reventlowske Familiekreds i tidsrummet 1770–1827, Louis Bobé, ed. (Copenhagen: Lehmann & Stage, 1895–1931), Vol. 7, pp. 6–7. 81 Countess Charlotte Schimmelmann, Copenhagen, January 9, 1790, to Countess Louise Stolberg, in Efterladte papirer fra den Reventlowske Familiekreds, Vol. 4, pp. 120–121. 82 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, No. 2, Iserts Fredriksnopel. Aquapim, Kipnasse, Christiansborg, March 11, 1789, to Schimmelmann and Brandt (Designation II, No. 8) (reading here from a copy in the same bundle), and Flindt, Copenhagen, March 19, 1791, to Schimmelmann (Designation II, No. 9); on Flindt’s career, see Kea, “Plantations and labour”, pp. 127–128. the guinea commission commences its investigation 41 stipend, to allow them to build huts for themselves, and to “allot to each a piece of land for cultivation, for which they may have Saturday and Sunday free, but other days work for the colony”.83 On July 14, 1789, Schimmelmann and Brandt, acting in their ministerial capacities, conveyed a new set of orders regarding Isert’s colony to Andreas Bjørn, whom the Guinea Entrepreneurs were now sending down to the coast to serve as governor.84 (The Entrepreneurs’ own orders to Bjørn, which Schimmelmann and Brandt also signed as members of the board of directors, appear not to have made any mention of the project.85) Expressing himself encouraged by the modest beginning Isert had made, Schimmelmann wrote that he had it directly from the crown that Bjørn was to maintain Isert’s colony in the hills and cleave as strictly as possible to the provisions of the treaty signed with the Akuapem. Schimmelmann had been instructed to inform Bjørn that a number of skilled agriculturalists and craftsmen would be sent down to the coast from Copenhagen with the next ship fitted out by the Guinea Entrepreneurs and that arrangements should be made in advance to house thirty or forty people. (This number would include wives and children, whom Schimmelmann planned to send down after their men unless developments advised against it; he emphasized again that the undertaking was only an experiment.) Schimmelmann found it regrettable that the colony was so far from the sea and the Volta, but he was unwilling to give up the territorial prerogatives secured by Isert’s treaty with Obuobi Atiemo. He asked Bjørn to investigate the feasibility of Isert’s plan to plant cotton between the colony and the sea. If, when Bjørn arrived on the coast, he found that any of the plants Isert had had with him on the voyage out had survived, they were to

83 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, Kipnasse, Christiansborg, July 16, 1789, to Schimmelmann and Brandt, copy. 84 Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 153; Finanskollegiet, Diverse sager, Colonien Friderichs Nopels regnskab fra 1mo November 1789 til Ultimo December 1792, last section of protocol-book numbered 1149, consisting of copies of correspondence under the heading “Prottocol for Collonien Friderichsnopels i Guinea”, Schimmelmann and Brandt, Pro Memoria, Copenhagen, July 14, 1789. (Governor Bjørn prepared this record and sent it and associated papers to Schimmelmann some years after the fact: see Finanskollegiet, Diverse Sager, bundle 1144, Papirer og Dokumenter vedr. Kolonien Friderichsnopel, 1792, 1794, two cover letters from Bjørn, Copenhagen, April 30, 1794, to Schimmelmann.) I am grateful to Ulla Mark Svensson for her help with this document. 85 Finanskollegiet, Nr. 1142, Schimmelmannske papirer vedr. det Østersøiske og Guineiske Handelskompagni og de danske besiddelser på Guinea’s Kyst, 1765–1802, copy of orders from the Guinea Entrepreneurs, Copenhagen, April 30, 1789, to Bjørn. 42 chapter one be tended with the greatest care, if only in a garden plot near Fort Christiansborg. Schimmelmann was pleased that Isert had made use of hired laborers, but he authorized the purchase of slaves if necessary for the maintenance of the colony. The colony was now placed entirely in Bjørn’s hands: Schimmelmann was at pains to say that he regarded the governor as Isert’s successor. Bjørn acknowledged Schimmelmann’s orders for the colony’s “preservation and advancement” from Honfleur, at the mouth of the Seine, where his ship had called on its way to the Guinea Coast.86 He was of the view that tobacco and the cotton that grew wild on the coast would provide the quickest yields; he promised to buy tobacco seed in Honfleur and to try to engage a tobacco planter to go out with him to the coast. The best varieties of sugar cane could also be obtained in Honfleur, he wrote, and he hoped it would be possible to get “some skilled planters, either from St. Croix, St. Domingo or Carolina, engaged in our service”. As soon as he arrived, he would reconnoitre the entire territory: he could not fathom why Isert had preferred the marches of Crobbo, rather than the area of His Majesty’s exclusive and fertile property by the Rio Volta, where the river has fresh water, and like the Nile river its annual flood, and where there are islands, which in the event of war would have been secure places of refuge, besides the relief that everything could have been transported by water. Bjørn took up his post on November 1, 1789, and Kipnasse passed on to him a brief inventory of Frederiksnopel at the time of Isert’s death:87 there were two houses built of clay and thatched with grass, each forty feet long and thirteen wide, divided into two rooms, one of the structures for Isert’s and his wife’s use, the other for the craftsmen; a smithy and a bread oven; a small garden plot; and a piece of cleared ground about six hundred feet around, amidst woods and bush. Isert had begun laying the stone foundation for a more substantial building, and Flindt continued this work after he arrived at the colony in February 1789. Flindt later reported to Schimmelmann that the land was highly suitable for sugar cane and cotton, both of which grew wild there, and also, he was sure, for tobacco.88

86 Finanskollegiet, Colonien Friderichs Nopels regnskab, Prottocol for Collonien Friderichsnopels i Guinea, Bjørn, Honfleur, August 22, 1789. 87 Finanskollegiet, Colonien Friderichs Nopels regnskab, in protocol-book numbered 1149, Journal for Colonien Friderichsnopel i Aquapim fra primo November 1789 til Ultimo December 1792: Bjørn cited an inventory taken on January 23, 1789. 88 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, No. 2, Iserts Fredriksnopel. Aquapim, Flindt, Copenhagen, March 19, 1791, the guinea commission commences its investigation 43

There was heavy timber and building stone everywhere in Akuapem— marble, even—and brick-clay. Flindt erected a sawmill and cleared more ground but complained that he was given no support for his efforts. A number of Isert’s craftsmen had died, and Kipnasse had drafted most of the others into the Government’s service at Christiansborg. Flindt fared no better with Governor Bjørn, whom he accused of taking a greater interest in a plantation started near the Volta by a man named Peder Meyer. Meyer had told Flindt, the latter related, that Bjørn had promised him a salary of six hundred rigsdaler a year to work his own plantation, “(why, he almost did not know himself)”. Flindt had been offered no more than fifteen rigsdaler a month for his work at Frederichsnopel, and he had refused it, as I could clearly see that it was Bjørn’s intention in time, with entirely unreasonable objections, to have the whole plan upset, and I would rather support myself in a wretched manner than receive a wage from the king without doing him service for it. Flindt resigned his position at the end of January, 1790, and returned to Denmark. In a report to Schimmelmann and Brandt in September, 1790, Bjørn described Akuapem as practically a thicket of woods and scrub,89 and urged again the advantages of the Volta region. However, he was continuing his efforts at Frederiksnopel, where he had kept three Europeans, a black Quaker from the great sugar island St. Croix, in the Danish West Indies, and a number of slaves. He reported that he had also “established a colony” at a place he called Tubrekue [the modern Togbloku], not far from Fort Kongenssteen on the Volta and had put Peder Meyer in charge of it.90 Meyer, he said, was particularly interested in agriculture, was accustomed to the climate after ten or twelve years on the coast, and owned forty or to Schimmelmann; GK, Green Books, Designation II, No. 9; see also Finanskollegiet, Colonien Friderichs Nopels regnskab, protocol-book numbered 1149, Journal for Colonien Friderichsnopel i Aquapim. 89 “[A] robbers’ nest”, Bjørn called it: Finanskollegiet, Colonien Friderichs Nopels regnskab, Prottocol for Collonien Friderichsnopels i Guinea, Bjørn, Christiansborg, September 20, 1790, to Schimmelmann and Brandt. Ray A. Kea cautions against naive reliance on such an aspersion in “ ‘I am here to plunder on the general road’: bandits and banditry in the pre-nineteenth-century Gold Coast”, in Banditry, rebellion and social protest in Africa, Donald Crummey, ed. (London: James Curry, 1986), pp. 109–132, on pp. 109 and 127, and see Bjørn’s own rather glowing characterization a few years earlier, in Thaarup, Archiv for statistik, p. 204. 90 See Grove and Johansen, p. 1381, note 1, suggesting that this name may be derived from the Portuguese word for barracoon. 44 chapter one

Fig. 2. Peter Thonning's map, detail, showing the area around Tubrekue [Togbloku], not far from Fort Kongenssteen on the Volta River. RAKTS, U-samling, DfuA U 1. (By courtesy of the Danish National Archives.) fifty slaves. Bjørn proposed to pay him a modest salary for a couple of years, until the plantation was on its feet and could pay for itself. Bjørn had had some houses built for the settlers that were expected from Europe at Togbloku, where the air was healthy and the necessaries of life were inexpensive. In his own letter to Schimmelmann and Brandt from his plantation at Togbloku, which he called Frydenlund (meaning ‘Grove of Delight’, in Danish), Peder Meyer stated that after eleven years’ service with the Baltic and Guinea Company, most recently as commandant at Fort Kongenssteen, he had resigned when the slave trade had been compacted to the Guinea Entrepreneurs.91 He did not wish to leave the coast, in part because Governor Bjørn had informed him “that it is His Royal Majesty’s will that subjects establish themselves and cultivate the soil”. He had moved with his family and slaves to a plot of land at Togbloku, apparently

91 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, Peder Meyer, Frydenlund paa Tubrekue i Guinea, September 18, 1790, to Schimmelmann and Brandt (No. 33); Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 175. the guinea commission commences its investigation 45 on a tidal channel of the Volta a few miles from Kongenssteen, and had cleared something approaching fifteen acres of land. He had planted 12,600 cotton shrubs, which had been in bloom since May of that year. Besides local food crops like yams and cassava, he had also planted a little rice, which he predicted would do well in “a number of low places which are flooded by the Rio Volta in the months of Novbr. and Decembr.” He had begun to clear another, larger piece of land, but was not prepared to go much further without help from the state: he needed more slaves, a couple of plows and a harrow, a cotton gin, and mules from the West Indies. The land along the Volta, he said, where there is the very best and most serviceable soil to cultivate, … would be far better for colonists than the Aqvapim country, which is overgrown with so much great woods, is stone cliffed, and moreover a very difficult path for transport. If a royal colony were to be established here by the Volta, he offered to manage it and provide “all the necessary instruction”. A number of other Danes in the enclave had also expressed the desire to farm the land, Bjørn reported, but he had not wished to subsidize them without approval from Copenhagen. All of them favored the banks of the Volta, where cotton and tobacco would do well.92 Bjørn did not write off the possibility of cultivating coffee and indigo in Akuapem if a road into the hills could be cut, if mules could be obtained from the Cape Verde Islands, and if plant stock and experienced hands to teach the craft of cultivating these crops could be brought over from the West Indies. Niels Lather, the commandant of Fort Kongenssteen, was among those who wished to establish plantations by the Volta. In a letter addressed directly to the king but which is unlikely to have got any farther than to Schimmelmann’s desk,93 he applied for state support: “The desire I have to encourage my fatherland’s flourishing and prosperity has moved me to establish, on my own account, a plantation, namely Jægerlyst [Hunter’s Delight]”, near the Volta. Having invested the greatest part of what he had earned in seven years’ service here, he asked for a royal loan of twenty thousand rigsdaler, with which he proposed to purchase slaves, machinery, and plants and livestock and to fortify his plantation against “attacks

92 Finanskollegiet, Colonien Friderichs Nopels regnskab, Prottocol for Collonien Friderichsnopels, Bjørn, Christiansborg, September 20, 1790, to Schimmelmann and Brandt. 93 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, Niels Lather, Christiansborg, September 16, 1790, to the king. 46 chapter one by roaming negroes”. He undertook to pay back this advance from his plantation’s production within six years and offered as collateral the plantation itself and everything on it. He asked permission to bring the necessary craftsmen down from Europe, to “keep vessels to fetch the necessary machines, plants, and animals from the West Indies”, and to buy slaves “either above Cap Trois pointes or also below Porto Nowo, where they are to be had for the cheapest prices”. He also promised to send his agricultural products directly to Copenhagen. He asked for a military title, so as to be “respected among the natives here in Africa, of the same rank as the head of the establishments”. In his cover letter, addressed the same day to Schimmelmann and Brandt,94 in which he urged them to lay his proposal before the king, Lather committed himself to shipping coffee, sugar, cotton, and indigo within three years. Governor Bjørn, for his part, sketched out a rather more elaborate colonial plan.95 The colony he envisaged would be populated by a hundred European men—administrators, doctors, missionaries, nurserymen, tan- ners, cobblers, tailors, masons, carpenters, and smiths—besides their families and perhaps six hundred “negro colonists”. For all this, and for mules, wagons, gins, mills, and a variety of materiel and supplies, Bjørn projected expenditures of almost 165,000 rigsdaler over two years. He recommended the purchase of a couple of small ships such as were often available for sale on the coast; there would also be the cost of these ships’ captains and crews. He then cut this plan down to a more modest list, including “2 skilled master planters from the West Indies who understand the cultivation of the soil in hot lands”, a hundred slaves, and fifty mules. He thus presented to their excellencies Schimmelmann and Brandt two colonial plans, “by the one of which forcefully to make quick progress, and the other peu à peu to cultivate” the land. Jens Flindt had arrived in Copenhagen by the middle of March, 1791, when he reported to Schimmelmann on the status of Isert’s colony.96 His idea, rather than to bring free craftsmen to Africa, was to select thirty skilled felons sentenced to life at hard labor in Danish prisons, who, in

94 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, Lather, Christiansborg, September 16, 1790, to Schimmelmann and Brandt. 95 Finanskollegiet, Colonien Friderichs Nopels regnskab, Prottocol for Collonien Friderichsnopels, Bjørn, Christiansborg, September 20, 1790, to Schimmelmann and Brandt. 96 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, No. 2, Iserts Fredriksnopel. Aquapim, Flindt, Copenhagen, March 19, 1791, to Schimmelmann. the guinea commission commences its investigation 47

Fig. 3. Peter Thonning's map, detail, showing the area favored by Jens Flindt for cultivation, around the plantation Friderichstæd, on the upper reaches of the Laloe, the stream reaching the sea near Ponny. RAKTS, U-samling, DfuA U 1. (By courtesy of the Danish National Archives.) exchange for their freedom, would be transported to the Guinea Coast to practice their trades for a term of years; he thought it might also be possible to recruit twenty or thirty young farm women whose domestic skills included the cleaning of flax and hemp. Flindt’s notion of the economic structure of a little colonial society was essentially the same as Bjørn’s, but he thought the workers should also include a turner, sawyers, boat- builders, wheelwrights, brickmakers, stonecutters, and miners. “There is 48 chapter one without question both gold and silver in the country”, Flindt wrote, which he had tried to get at by setting off charges in the rock near Frederiksnopel. He had taken ore samples with him when he traveled home to Denmark, but these had been lost with the rest of his effects when his ship was wrecked. Like Isert, Flindt recommended establishing cotton plantations down out of the hills but still within the territory of the Akuapem. The area he had in mind was overgrown with bush but without “heavy woods”; what he called the Ponny River, not far from there (which Thonning labeled the Laloe: modern maps show the Laloi Lagoon at its mouth), would allow water transport to the sea. In another letter a month later, Flindt recommended that the Danish slave trade should be taken over by the state. If then a plantation colony succeeded in establishing itself, slaves purchased for transport to the Americas, instead of being held in the forts on the coast until ships were available, should be put to work at the new colony, under the supervision of a few experienced slaves brought over from the West Indies. This would not only spare some of the expense of their keep, for they could grow their own food, but would advance the development of the colony. The work would prepare them for the hard West Indian labor regime, and would also teach them, through “association with the others brought out from the West Indies … that they had nothing to fear when they were sent off with the Danish ships from the coast to the West Indies”.97 In all these colonial schemes, the transplantation of West Indian crops, of West Indian expertise—even of West Indian slaves, to teach African captives how to be plantation slaves— was the central element. West Indian plantation society was to be brought back across the Atlantic to Africa.

97 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, Flindt, Copenhagen, April 12, 1791 (No. 34). CHAPTER TWO

DENMARK’S ABOLITION OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE, 1792: THE AFRICAN COLONIAL ALTERNATIVE

In the summer of 1791, the fate of a bill in the English parliament that, had it been enacted, would have banned the Atlantic slave trade outright— and with immediate effect—was being watched in Copenhagen. Count Schimmelmann found the British measure to have been too abrupt to be feasible, but he appears to have seen the writing on the wall (for it would have been impossible for Denmark to carry on the trade in the teeth of an English prohibition) and began making his own views about the slave trade known in the halls of the central administration.1 In August, 1791, Crown Prince Frederik seated a Commission for the Better Organization of the Trade in Negroes in Our West Indian Islands and on the coast of Guinea—the Slave-trade Commission, as it has commonly been referred to.2 Besides Schimmelmann himself, its members were Brandt, of the Chancellery; Carl Wendt, of the Finance Department; and three senior representatives of the Chamber of Customs. Ernst Kirstein, who had worked on Isert’s project for Schimmelmann, was the commission’s secretary.3 It was by now presumably apparent to Schimmelmann that the Guinea Entrepreneurs, whose only interest in Africa lay in the slave trade to the Americas, would be of little further use as agents of Denmark’s African colonial policy. In September, 1791,4 he wrote in response to Governor Bjørn’s ambitious colonial scheme that although the promotion of plantation agriculture in Africa remained a matter of great significance to the state, and although he would not hesitate to approach the crown to recommend Bjørn’s plan, the necessary funds, in those troubled times, when

1 Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 175–176; C.A. Trier, “Det dansk-vestindiske Negerindførselsforbud af 1792”, Historisk Tidsskrift, 7th series Vol. 5, 1904–05, pp. 405–508, on pp. 416, 420–421; Loftin, pp. 72, 74–76; Knap, p. 154. 2 Dokumenter vedrørende Kommissionen for Negerhandelens bedre Indretning & Ophævelse m. m., II, Christian Rex, August 5, 1791, constituting the commission. 3 Loftin, pp. 86–87; Trier, pp. 423–424. 4 Finanskollegiet, Colonien Friderichs Nopels regnskab, Prottocol for Collonien Friderichsnopels, Schimmelmann, Copenhagen, September 15, 1791, to Bjørn, copy, in German. I am grateful to Ulla Mark Svensson for her reading of this document. 50 chapter two

Denmark found itself obliged to rearm, would be very difficult to find. Nevertheless, the colonial undertaking was too important to be abandoned altogether, and the regent had on Schimmelmann’s advice ruled that the matter should only for the time being be laid aside. In the meantime, however, no more funds were to be expended than were necessary to secure the Danish crown’s rights to the land Isert had obtained from the Africans. Only the smallest sums could be spent on Meyer’s plantation by the Volta, Schimmelmann wrote, and he had not dared suggest to the crown prince that Meyer should be paid a wage for his efforts there. Schimmelmann was perhaps not entirely forthcoming with Bjørn, or it may be that new attitudes toward the slave trade and thus toward the African colonial project rather quickly became current in the uppermost levels of the Danish government as the Slave-trade Commission wrestled with the matter. Schimmelmann had already, three years before, pointed out to Governor Kiøge the advantages of African plantations in the event of the abolition of the slave trade, and it can be thought that he was convinced that a ban on the trade would sooner or later choke the West Indies, although the Slave-trade Commission indulged itself in elaborate demographic projections of the stability of the slave populations of the Danish West Indies if imports ceased.5 The African alternative appears to have loomed quite large in Schimmelmann’s imagination. Within a few weeks of the date of his rather discouraging letter to Bjørn, Schimmelmann had obtained a royal order requiring Julius von Rohr, a distinguished Danish West Indian botanist and plantation agronomist, to travel across the Atlantic to the Danish possessions on the Guinea Coast to investigate the feasibility of an African plantation colony.6 Von Rohr is known to have sent herbarium specimens to his scientific correspondent Niels Tønder Lund, of the Slave-trade Commission, who made the plants available to his friend Martin Vahl, the central scientific figure of the Danish Natural History Society,7 in its day an enormously

5 Loftin, pp. 82–84, 102–125; Gøbel, Det danske slavehandelsforbud 1792, pp. 75–83. 6 Vestindiske lokalarkiver, Vestindiske Regiering, Referatprotokol, 498/1792, von Rohr, May 15, 1792. The entry refers to a royal resolution of November 2, 1791, communicated to the Danish West Indian administration by Schimmelmann personally on November 30, 1791; ad FJS 1345/1792, a draft, dated October 26, 1792, of a subsequent representation from the Finance Collegium to the crown, in which Schimmelmann identifies himself as the immediate agent of royal policy in this affair in late 1791; FaUP, Kongelige Resolutioner 1792 og 1793, No. 7, representation of June14, resolution of July 6, 1792. 7 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Neg erhandelen, Martin Vahl, Copenhagen, March 29, 1791, addressed to von Rohr on the Guinea Coast; N. Tønder Lund, “Om den rette Qvassia amara, og om den falske, efter denmark’s abolition of the atlantic slave trade 51 prestigious and intellectually influential institution.8 The Natural History Society was founded in 17899 by P. C. Abildgaard, the secretary of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, president of the Agricultural Society, and founder of the royal veterinary school10 —in all, one of the most significant figures of late-eighteenth-century Danish natural history, a much broader field of study than is implied by the term today, and decidedly economic and geographical in scope. Abildgaard’s “Invitation” to form the Society was a very expansive appeal, invoking a whole world of science, progress, economic development, and enlightened public administration, all of it based ultimately on knowledge of the natural world. In his Invitation, Abildgaard passed from the moral lessons of nature— Where else than in nature, and its wise, glorious organization, can humanity find models and strongly eloquent examples of order, beauty, industry without bondage, frugality in the midst of plenty, and the most perfect unity in untold multiplicity? —to the practical benefits of the study of natural history: From the three kingdoms of nature we have our food, our clothing, our domestic conveniences, our remedies in sickness, and all the things that in the arts and trades are employed to such great advantage to the society, and whereby human capabilities are set in so much greater activity than otherwise could occur. There would scarcely be room in his Invitation to list all the progress that had been made, he said, especially in that enlightened century.11

Herr von Rohr”, Skrivter af Naturhistorie-Selskabet, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1791, pp. 68–72, on p. 69. See Hopkins, “Danish natural history and African colonialism”, p. 378. 8 Most of the Natural History Society’s archives are lost. There survives the Deliberations Protocol for Directionen for Naturhistorie Sælskabet, in the Zoologisk Museum Bibliotek archives, Copenhagen, No. A 38. A transcription of all the entries from the gothic into a modern italic hand is tucked into this protocol-book. Only a few items of the correspondence to which the entries refer are preserved; Axel Garboe, Geologiens historie i Danmark (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag, 1959–61), Vol. I, p. 162, n. 232, pp. 162–172; C.C.A. Gosch, Jørgen Christian Schiødte (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag (F. Hegel & Søn), 1898–1905), Part 1, pp. 9–10, 20–24, 64–67; Henriksen, pp. 98–119; Carl F. Christensen, Den danske botaniks historie (Copenhagen: H. Hagerups Forlag, 1924–26), Vol. 1, pp. 90–92. 9 Indbydelse til et selskabs og en national stiftelses oprettelse for naturhistorien, især fædrenelandets (Copenhagen: Printed by Johan Frederik Schultz, 1789). Abildgaard’s proposal, dated September 10, 1789, is on pp. 2–13, and the formal invitation to the public to subscribe, signed by the seven members of the board he recruited and dated October 12, is on pp. 13–24. See Hopkins, “Danish natural history and African colonialism”, pp. 374–378. 10 “Abildgaard, Peter Christian”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 3rd ed. 11 Indbydelse, pp. 5–6. 52 chapter two

Part of the subscription money gathered from the membership would go for the purchase of books and specimens, and the rest would be committed to travel stipends. Three students, or more, if possible, their competence having been duly certified in public examinations, were to be sent out into the various provinces of the kingdom every third year, to discover, collect, and describe these places’ natural products and in general to become familiar with “something more of their fatherland than the town in which they were born”. Furthermore, Abildgaard suggested, If the Society’s number were large enough and thus its fund sufficient, it would be in more than one respect desirable if naturalists could be sent out of the realm, especially to our possessions in both Indies, as these have not yet been visited by our own naturalists.12 (Here Abildgaard overlooked Julius von Rohr’s work in the West Indies). The founding directors Abildgaard recruited were men of rank and scientific prestige.13 Among them, besides Tønder Lund, of the Chamber of Customs, was Ove Sehested, a protégé of Ernst Schimmelmann and one of the top men at the Commerce Collegium, which had jurisdiction over the Danish enclaves in India; after 1816, he was head of the combined offices of the Chamber of Customs and the Commerce Collegium.14 A short manuscript abstract of Abildgaard’s proposal—dated two weeks before the Invitation was printed—circulated through the halls of the civil administration; it bears a score of signatures or more.15 Those traveling at the Society’s expense [this abstract pointed out] will be instructed to not only concern themselves with natural history proper, but also with the natural and economic constitution of the land through which they travel. They are to keep their journals after the model provided by [Linnaeus], and which his disciples, to such benefit to Sweden, have followed. The government could hope that these “young students, in these journeys about the fatherland, can obtain the knowledge of the country so necessary for civil servants”.16

12 Indbydelse, p. 9. 13 Indbydelse, pp. 12, 17. 14 “Sehested, Ove Ramel”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 3rd ed. 15 Rtk. 2214.39, Breve fra Overhofmarskalatet, Departementet for de udenlandske Sager, Finanscollegiet, J.H.E. Bernstorff og Møsting, samt fra diverse Kollegier, Direktioner og Kommissioner, Tildels med Indlæg, I–IV, [1680–1848], ad IV, 12, “Directionen for Selskabet til Naturlærens Udbredelse. Hertil vedlagt: Subskriptionsindbydelse med Program for et Selskab til Naturhistoriens Udbredelse 1789 25. Septbr.” 16 These were not new intellectual strains in Denmark. A generation before, in 1759, the royal order establishing a Natural Cabinet in Copenhagen contains the same denmark’s abolition of the atlantic slave trade 53

By the time the by-laws of the Natural History Society were adopted at a general assembly in June, 1790, there were more than two hundred and fifty members,17 whose names were published with the bylaws. The list is a glittering roster of the upper ranks of Danish society, an extraordinary record of the appeal of natural history and of the prestige that attached to this public endorsement of the broad scientific and social ideals that the new Society embraced. Princes, counts, ministers of state, miscellaneous chamberlains and courtiers, judges, bishops, generals, academics, physi- cians, manufacturers, and merchants subscribed, and so did their wives. Crown Prince Frederik placed palatial premises at the Society’s disposition, and subscription money flowed in from all over the kingdom.18 Every young man of scientific interests gravitated to the Natural History Society’s lectures,19 and the Society’s natural history excursions around Copenhagen were popular “beyond expectation”.20 Six volumes of the Society’s Skrivter, Denmark’s first “purely scientific” journal, were published between 1790 and 1810.21 The directors wrote in 1804 that the Society could “venture to claim to have had a large part in the introduction of this science as an important element in … the education system…. The object of its existence thus appears to have been attained”.22 Professorates in botany and zoology were established at the university in 1797.23 Many of the major figures of Danish natural history in the first decades of the nineteenth century took some of their training through the Natural History Society.24 Jens Wilken Hornemann, who won the Society’s prize elements—instruction, collections, excursions, travel, economic improvement, and enlightened administration: Fundation for den Kongelige Danske Charlottenborgske Natural-Huusholdnings-Samling i Kiøbenhavn, signed Frederik R. (Christansborg Slot [Copenhagen], March 31, 1759). Peter Wagner traces the intellectual roots of earlier Danish manifestations of the same spirit widely across Europe, but especially to Uppsala, in “The Royal Botanical Institution at Amalienborg. Sources of inspiration”, Botanical Journal of Scotland, Vol. 46, No. 4, 1994, pp. 599–604, and in “Fra kunstkammer til moderne museum”, Nordisk Museologi, 1994, No. 2, pp. 21–30. 17 Love for Naturhistorie-Selskabet, vedtagne i general-forsamlingen den 7. Junii 1790 (Trykt hos Hofbogtrykkerne N. Møller og Søn, 1790), n. p., following the text of the by-laws. 18 Henriksen, p. 98; P. F. Suhm, introduction to the Natural History Society’s Skrivter, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1790, n. p. 19 Carl Christensen, Vol. 1, p. 91. 20 Om regnskabsvæsenet og bestyrelsen i Naturhistorie-Selskabet for aarene 1793, 1794, 1795, 1796, 1797, 1798 (Copenhagen: Trykt hos Hofbogtrykkerne N. Møller og Søn, 1799), p. 16. 21 Carl Christensen, Vol. 1, p. 91. 22 Kommissionen for Museet for Naturvidenskaberne, I, Directors of the Natural History Society, Pro Memoria, June 26, 1804. 23 Carl Christensen, Vol. 1, p. 91. 24 Spärck, R. “Dansk naturhistorisk forening i København 1833–1933”, Videnskabelige Meddelelser fra Dansk naturhistorisk Forening i København, Vol. 95, 1933, pp. 1–148, on p. 2. 54 chapter two for a new Danish work on economic plant science, became professor of botany, director of the Botanical Garden, and editor of Flora Danica.25 Gregers Wad was appointed professor of mineralogy and zoology and curator of the collections of the University of Copenhagen and the Royal Natural History Museum;26 Johannes Reinhardt became professor of zoology at the university.27 Henrik Steffens traveled for the Society in Norway before he abandoned science for philosophy.28 It has been suggested that J. F. Schouw, the plant geographer, may have accompanied an older relative to some of Vahl’s lectures.29 It appears that the only scientific research in any of the Danish tropical colonies directly underwritten by the Natural History Society was the entomological work of D.K. Daldorff, who was sent by the Society to Tranquebar, the Danish colony on the Coromandel Coast of India, in 1790.30 However, the Society took a lively interest in the tropics.31 The first article published in the Society’s Skrivter was a treatise by Martin Vahl on cinchona.32 One of Vahl’s major works, Eclogae americanae, dealt with South American and Caribbean plants.33 The second number of the Skrivter included an article by Tønder Lund based on Caribbean material sent from St. Croix by Julius von Rohr, and Vahl published a report on more of von Rohr’s plants in the third issue. Von Rohr’s work is again acknowledged in an article on harmful insects in cotton and sugar cane by J.C. Fabricius. Hans West records in his important book on St. Croix that he sent his collections directly to the Natural History Society for

25 Obituary in Genealogisk og Biographisk Archiv, Nos. 1–8, 1840–49, on pp. 318–24. 26 Henriksen, pp. 148–50; Garboe, Vol. 1, pp. 172–77, 183–84. 27 “Reinhardt, Johan(nes) Christopher Hagemann”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 3rd ed.; Ragnar Spärck, Zoologisk Museum i København gennem tre aarhundreder (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1945), pp. 39, 48. 28 Garboe, Vol. 1, 169–170. 29 Carl Christensen, Vol. 1, p. 254. 30 Om Regnskabsvæsenet, accounts for 1794 and 1795; Henriksen, pp. 121–123. 31 See Anne Fox Maule, “Danish botanical expeditions and collections in foreign continents”, Botanisk Tidsskrift, Vol. 69, 1974, pp. 167–205, pp. 191–92. 32 See Aylmer Bourke Lambert, A description of the genus Cinchona comprehending the various species of vegetables from which the Peruvian and other barks of a similar quality are taken, illustrated by figures of all the species hitherto discovered, to which is prefixed Professor Vahl’s dissertation on this genus, read before the Society of natural history at Copenhagen. Also a description, accompanied by figures, of a new genus named Hyaenanche, or hyaena poison (London: Printed for B. and J. White, 1797); Jens Wilken Hornemann, “Om Martin Vahls fortjenester af naturkyndigheden som videnskabsmand og lærer”, Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Naturvidenskabelige og Mathematiske Afhandlinger, First Part, 1824, pp. 1–22, on p. 15. 33 Martin Vahl, Eclogae americanae (Copenhagen: first two fascicles published by the author, 1797–1798, 3rd. fascicle by N. Tønder Lund and P. Thonning, 1807). denmark’s abolition of the atlantic slave trade 55 incorporation in its museum, and Vahl wrote up some of West’s plants in the fifth volume of the Skrivter.34 The connection between the patriotic scientific society and Denmark’s possessions in Africa is less direct. Paul Isert had taken an enthusiastic amateur interest in the botany of the Guinea Coast, but he died in the same year that the Society was founded. A contemporary notice regarding an important royal gift to the Natural History Society’s library mentions that the African Association, in London, had sent the Society the first part of its proceedings.35 (An entry in the “deliberations-protocol” of the Society’s board records that certificates for foreign members had been printed, and that one of these was to be sent to Sir Joseph Banks.)36 There is no indication that the Natural History Society ever formally concerned itself with the Danish establishments on the Guinea Coast, but Ove Sehested, of the Commerce Collegium, which had been involved in some of von Rohr’s research into the cultivation of cotton in the Lesser Antilles;37 Tønder Lund, of the Chamber of Customs; and Count Schimmelmann, who was also among the members of the Society, all took an official interest in the natural history and agricultural possibilities of the enclave on the coast. Peter Thonning, although he nowhere directly states that he attended the Natural History Society’s lectures, identifies Vahl and C.F. Schumacher, who lectured for the Natural History Society for many years, as his teachers.38 Julius von Rohr, away in the Antilles, was thus actually quite a major figure of Danish botany. It was not simply that he was in a position to supply exotic specimens: substantial metropolitan fortunes were built on the agricultural products of the West Indies, and the science of tropical plants was not at all peripheral to the economy and culture of Denmark and the rest of Atlantic Europe.39 A person of his experience, interests, and expertise, was just the man Schimmelmann needed to investigate the situation in Africa. Climatology and plant geography had not advanced very far at this period, and no one could be sure of the suitability of the West African

34 Hans West, Bidrag til Beskrivelse over Ste Croix med en kort Udsigt over St. Thomas, St. Jean, Tortola, Spanishtown og Crabeneiland (Copenhagen: trykt hos Friderik Wilhelm Thiele, 1793), pp. 262–264. 35 Kjøbenhavnske lærde Efterretninger, No. 2., 1792, p. 23. 36 Zoologisk Museum Bibliotek archives, Deliberations Protocol, entry for May 22, 1792. 37 Kommercekollegiet, Diverse, 1773–97, No. 915, Varia, 1774–92 og udat., Korrespondance vedrørende v. Rohrs undersøgelser angaaende bomuldskulturen i Vestindien, 1786–87. 38 Rtk., 2214.86, Breve, Dokumenter og Akter vedk. partikulære Personer, T. [1679–1848], Pakke 31, P. Thonning, 1809, Copenhagen, December 20, 1809. 39 See Drayton, pp. 63–67. 56 chapter two climate and soils for the cultivation of sugar cane, cotton, and coffee: the formulation of colonial policy and the study of natural history were closely related matters, and the same individuals might reasonably be involved in both. The government’s reliance on von Rohr, rather than on some representative of the metropolis’s scientific institutions, was not just a matter of von Rohr’s technical background and geographical experience, but is an indication of how heavily the West Indian precedent—one could safely say, the whole of American colonial history—weighed on the imagination of European princes and ministers speculating on the colonization of the African tropics. The West Indies were the measure of colonial success: they were clear evidence of the extraordinary fecundity of the tropics, from which a huge traffic, crisscrossing the Atlantic, had sprung. The influence of such an example is not to be discounted, particularly when colonial policy, as in this case, was largely in the hands of educated men at the metropolitan centers of extensive webs of information but without direct experience of the territories into which they were projecting their ideas and ambitions. A West Indian expert was precisely what was called for, because a wholesale transplantation of the Caribbean’s lucrative system of agricultural production to fertile new ground in Africa was in effect what Schimmelmann contemplated. Isert’s African scheme may have been conceived on the banks of the Volta and in the wooded hills of Akuapem, but it had been incubated among the cane fields of St. Croix on his way back to Europe from the Guinea Coast. The colonial society he had left behind on the coast was extremely isolated and circumscribed: Accra was a deadly trading post on the edge of the vast obscurity of Africa. There were seldom more than a couple of dozen Danes in the forts, if indeed so many. Few Danish ships visited, even at the best of times.40 There were almost no European women in the colony. Disease and drink, which few escaped, made terrible inroads on the Europeans in these posts. This is in the most extreme contrast to the thriving, wealthy, extravagantly self-indulgent society of the Danish West Indian sugar islands: St. Thomas and St. Croix lay at the heart of the opulent plantation economy of the New World tropics, at the hub of many of the circuits of Atlantic commerce. In von Rohr, Count Schimmelmann had chosen an eminent and experienced representative of West Indian plantation society to assess the future of the Danish possessions on the coast of Africa.

40 Erik Gøbel, “Den danske besejling af Vestindien og Guinea 1671–1838”, Handels- og Søfartsmuseets Årbog, 1991, pp. 37–72, on pp. 42–45. denmark’s abolition of the atlantic slave trade 57

Schimmelmann obtained a royal order dispatching Julius von Rohr to the Guinea Coast in November, 1791. He sent it personally and thus, it appears, outside regular administrative channels, which would have required the involvement of the Chamber of Customs’s colonial office, to the Danish West Indian Government,41 which was requested to advance the necessary funds. At the same time, the royal will in this matter was communicated to Governor Bjørn, on the coast: Before We decide anything in regard to the continuation and expansion of the new establishments begun on the African Coast, We have most graciously seen fit to send thither Our well-beloved Julius Philip von Rohr, … to investigate there on the spot all that could provide more definite information in regard to the area’s condition and suitability for the aim of such plantations.42 Bjørn was to support von Rohr’s investigation in every way. The scientist was to be provided with all available information and anything he might require to travel “both to the existing establishments and to other places he might see fit to visit”. (Bjørn, who was after all the Guinea Entrepreneurs’ man, was assured that the expense of all this would be covered by the royal treasury when the appropriate accounts were submitted.) Jens Flindt, who during his sojourn in Copenhagen appears to have been supported by Schimmelmann from both public and private monies, was now dispatched to the West Indies. He was to familiarize himself with plantation agriculture there and then accompany von Rohr to Africa. It appears that Flindt was accompanied by a party of carpenters drafted into this service from the royal naval yards in Copenhagen.43 Schimmelmann

41 Fonden ad Usus Publicos, Aktmæssig Bidrag til belysning af dens Virksomhed, Vol. 1, 1765–1800 (Copenhagen: Rigsarkivet, C.A. Reitzel, 1897), p. 141; Vestindiske Lokalarkiver, Vestindiske Regiering, Referatprotokol 498/1792, von Rohr, May 15, 1792; the annotation refers to the royal resolution of November 2, 1791, communicated to the West Indian administration by Schimmelmann November 30, 1791; VJ 531/1792, the West Indian administration, July 19, 1792. See FJS 1345/1792, draft of Schimmelmann’s representation and the royal resolution. 42 GTK, Vestindiske forestillinger og resolutioner, 1791 and 1792, rescript to Governor Bjørn, October 28, 1791, signed a few days before the order to von Rohr himself. Thaarup, in his Udførlig Vejledning til det danske Monarkies Statistik saaledes som samme var i Slutningen af Aar 1813, Vol. 6 (Copenhagen: Fr. Brummer, 1819), p. 620, cited only the October 28 Rescript to Bjørn. 43 FaUP, Kongelige Resolutioner 1792 og 1793, No. 7, June 14, 1792, resolution of July 6, 1792 (quite a long time after the fact: it had perhaps been urgent to get Flindt on his way, lest von Rohr depart for Africa before Flindt arrived in the West Indies, but Schimmelmann clearly appears to have been operating rather independently); Fonden ad Usus Publicos, Vol. 1, pp. 140, 141; GJ(S) 90/1799, Flindt, [Copenhagen], October 28, 1799. 58 chapter two channeled additional funds to Flindt “for the purchase of various things that are to be sent off to Oberst Lieutenant von Rohr in Guinea” through the Fonden ad Usus Publicos,44 which had paid a substantial portion of the cost of von Rohr’s study of cotton in the Caribbean in the 1780s.45 (Schimmelmann was the director of this agency, too.) Von Rohr’s and Flindt’s colonial expedition needed no more impetus than Schimmelmann was in a position to impart to it, but Schimmelmann was not the only person in Copenhagen taking an interest in new African colonial schemes. Early in December, 1791, former governor Kipnasse, now home in Copenhagen, gave Schimmelmann some encouraging advice on Isert’s colony Frederiksnopel.46 On the basis of his twenty-five years’ experience on the coast, he thought it would be very expensive but not impossible to plant a colony there. Above all, he said, it would be vital to persuade the Africans from the start that the colony would also convey tangible advantages to their own societies. He pointed out that Isert had not recognized that in entering into a treaty with the head of the Akuapem, he had not gone to a sufficiently high authority, namely the king of Asante.47 (Here Peter Thonning wrote in a margin that since the Asante treaty of 1830 [sic], which ended the Asantes’ “suprematie” in the region, Kipnasse’s admonition was no longer germane.48) Otherwise, Kipnasse felt that Akuapem was indeed a suitable location for a colony and that the distance to the sea would not be such a handicap if a road was constructed from the colony to Ponny [or Kpone], where a small defensive works could protect the colony’s stores. Besides Frederiksnopel, he said, several other places were also suited to the establishment of plantations, including

44 Fonden ad Usus Publicos [FaUP], forestillinger & resolutioner, kongelige resolutioner 1792 og 1793, No. 7, 14 June, 1792, resolution of July 6, 1792; FaUP, Missive-Protokol, five letters, November 7, November 11, November 18, November 25, and December 6, 1791, all to Cashier Falbe, ordering funds released to Flindt; “Schimmelmann, Heinrich Ernst”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 2nd. ed. 45 FaUP, Kongelige Resolutioner 1790 og 1791, No. 7, April 14, 1791, resolution of April 29, 1791, and various enclosures; FaUP, Missive-Protokol April 1781–June 1796, May 20, 1791, to the Commerce Collegium. 46 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, No. 2, Iserts Fredriksnopel. Aquapim, Kipnasse, Copenhagen, December 7, 1791; GK, Green Books, Designation II, No. 10. 47 On Akuapem’s subordinate position, see, for example, Wilks, Asante in the nineteenth century, pp. 130–131, and Kwamena-Poh, pp. 72–94. 48 For modern assessments of this question, see Ole Justesen, “The negotiations for peace on the Gold Coast 1826 to 1831”, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, New Series, Nos. 4–5, 2000–2001, pp. 1–54; Kwamena-Poh, p. 94; and Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 465–476, 553–555. denmark’s abolition of the atlantic slave trade 59

Ningo (also Nungo), farther along the coast under the protection of Fort Fredensborg, and Togbloku. In that same month, Minerva, a highly regarded and well-informed Copenhagen review, reported that a Sierra Leone Company had been organized in London earlier that year, with a projected capitalization of half a million pounds sterling, and had quickly obtained subscription for four fifths of that amount.49 The intent was to plant sugar there in the negroes’ fatherland; experiments had been made, and it had been found that this cultivation could be carried on there, more easily even than in the West Indian islands. But those who in the previous parliament had driven back the abolition of the slave trade also drove back allowing sugar to be cultivated in Africa. At the end of the month, on December 28, 1791, the Slave-trade Commission, in a hundred-page opinion, advised the crown to abolish both the importation of slaves into the Danish West Indies and their export from the Danish possessions on the Guinea Coast.50 To soften the blow to the planters of the Danish West Indies and to secure the continued production of sugar, the law was not to take effect for ten years, and, in the meantime, imports of slaves, and of women especially, would actually be encouraged by state loans and favorable tariffs, so as, it was hoped, to render the slave population capable of sustaining itself naturally thereafter.51 On the last page but one of its opinion, the commission deferred any recommendation regarding the fate of the Guinea establishments in these new circumstances: The maintenance of the forts will probably depend entirely on the possibility of establishing colonies in that region for the cultivation of precisely the commodities that are now cultivated in the West Indies. As we are aware

49 Minerva, No. 4 (December), 1791, p. 322, under the rubric “Historien”. See Jette D. Søllinge and Niels Thomsen, De danske aviser 1634–1991 (Odense: Dagspressens Fond i Kommission hos Odense Universitetsforlag, [1988]–1991), Vol. 1, p. 121. It has been said of Minerva, “Nowhere can a more comprehensive impression be obtained of what the Enlightenment in Denmark-Norway thought and felt”: “Pram, Christen Henriksen”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 2nd. ed.; see Fyfe, pp. 26–27. 50 Dokumenter vedrørende Kommissionen for Negerhandelens bedre Indretning og Ophævelse m. m., II, the commission’s “Allerunterthänigste Vorstellung”, December 28, 1791. 51 Loftin, pp. 88–130, in particular p. 115; Nørregård, Danish settlements, pp. 175–176. The long grace period was defended in the soberest terms by no less a jurist than A.S. Ørsted, in Af mit livs og min Tids Historie (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandling, 1851–57), Vol. 2, p. 94–97. 60 chapter two

that Your Majesty is just at present having this possibility investigated further, they wrote, in what appears to have been a deliberately oblique reference to Julius von Rohr’s expedition, “we believe we must postpone any suggestion regarding the forts, until the result of this investigation is known”.52 The commission particularly drew the regent’s attention in this connection to the latest news of colonial progress at the English establishment at Sierra Leone.53 The king’s signature (under Crown Prince Frederik’s watchful eye) was affixed to the famous Danish edict banning the slave trade on March 16, 1792.54 Minerva immediately published the text of the law for its readers.55 The decree itself made no mention of African colonies, perhaps to avoid further arousing the opposition of the West Indian interests, and neither did a long and judiciously constructed abstract of the Slave-trade Commission’s long recommendation published in Minerva by Ernst Kirstein the following month.56

52 Loftin, pp. 128–129. I am grateful to Ulla Mark Svensson and Erik Gøbel for their kind help with this passage. The Danish historian of the slave trade, Svend Erik Green-Pedersen, played down the significance of the colonial potential of the African establishments in the Slave-trade Commission’s formulation of the ban on the slave trade: Svend E. Green- Pedersen, “The economic considerations behind the Danish abolition of the negro slave trade”, in The uncommon market, essays in the economic history of the Atlantic slave trade, Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn, eds. (New York: Academic Press, 1979), pp. 399–418; Svend Erik Green-Pedersen, “The history of the Danish negro slave trade”, Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, Vol. 62, 1975, pp. 196–220; Green-Pedersen, “Dansk- vestindisk slavehandel og dens ophævelse. Konklusioner efter udenlandske arkiv- og biblioteksstudier”, in Festskrift til Kristof Glamann, Ole Feldbæk and Niels Thomsen, eds. (Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag, 1983), pp. 51–70; Sv. E. Green-Pedersen, “Danmarks ophævelse af negerslavehandelen. Omkring tilblivelsen af forordningen af 16. marts 1792”, Arkiv, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1969, pp. 19–37. See Hopkins, “The Danish ban on the Atlantic slave trade and Denmark’s African colonial ambitions”, pp. 154–156. 53 Schimmelmann apparently followed developments in Sierra Leone closely. Among his private papers is a file of perhaps a hundred manuscript copies of letters from London to “Our Superintendant and Council at Sierra Leone”; the first of these was dated January 10, 1792. The letters were doubtless sent to Copenhagen by George Wolff, the Danish consul in London, who sat on the board of directors of the Sierra Leone Company: Private Arkiv No. 6285 [1751–1848], Heinrich Ernst Schimmelmann, bundle 11, Koncepter ang. Slavehandelen og Negervæsenet i Vestindien og Kopier vedr. Sierra Leone Kolonien. 54 Erik Gøbel, “The Danish edict of 16th March 1792 to abolish the slave trade”, in Orbis et orbem: Liber amicorum Jan Everaert, Jan Parmentier and Sander Spanoghe, eds. (Ghent: Academia Press, 2001), pp. 251–264, and Gøbel, Det danske slavehandelsforbud 1792. 55 Christian R., Forordning om neger-handelen, Christiansborg Slot [Copenhagen], March 16, 1792, printed by P. M. Høpffner; Minerva, No. I (March), 1792, p. 435. 56 [Kirstein,] “Udtog af Forestilling til Kongen, angaaende Negerhandelens Afskaf felse, meddeelt af den til denne Sags Undersøgelse nedsatte Commissions-Medlem, Hr. Secretaire Kirstein”, Minerva, No. 2 (April), 1792, pp. 43–86. denmark’s abolition of the atlantic slave trade 61

Contact with Europe had not been beneficial to the peoples of the coast of Africa, Kirstein wrote. Articles that had hitherto been unknown to them had now become necessities. Weapons had been supplied them to allow them to obtain more and more prisoners to sell to satisfy these needs. Europe had given them nothing useful, however, nothing civilizing. They had not been taught, in regions that have the fairest and most fertile soil, to undertake the cultivation of products with which they could conduct a trade that might be incomparably more important to them than this trade in human beings that tears their social bonds apart.57 This was as close as Kirstein came to the question of Danish plantations in Africa. In the same number, Minerva carried another report on the English parliamentary debates on the slave trade,58 and in May, the paper published a translation of the whole of the “Substance of the Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company to the general court, held at London on Wednesday the 19th of Octob. 1791”, with this introduction:59 To the publisher of Minerva: The enclosed report without doubt deserves space in your Minerva. It will be worthy of this monthly to contribute to making a plan written with such a noble object as well-known as possible…. So little good happens in this sinful world, that it is a duty to give those intentions that aim at the good of humanity as much weight and dissemination as possible, especially so that noble actions can inspire imitation. To see that European people that hitherto has had the greatest profit of the ignorant Africans’ subjugation and enslavement … conceive the bold charitable idea of pitching in almost three million [Danish rigsdaler], with which to lay the foundation of a trade with those hitherto oppressed, of a colony that in time could bring humane rights and enlightenment to the murdered Coast—such an elevated thought is worthy of the proud and wealthy Briton. That Nation in Europe that first nobly renounced its part in the barbaric mistreatment of the Africans will also without doubt be gladdened by this report of this the Britons’ further step for the good of the Africans. The main goal of the Sierra Leone Company, according to Minerva’s rendering of the Report of the Court of Directors, was “to introduce a just and

57 Kirstein, p. 48. 58 Minerva, No. 2 (April), 1792, pp. 158–163. 59 “Substance of the Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company to the general court, held at London on Wednesday the 19th of Octob. 1791”, in Danish, Minerva, No. 2 (May), 1792, p. 214 ff.; unattributed introduction on pp. 214–215. 62 chapter two honorable trade with the great African continent” and thus drive out “the savage and shameful trade that for altogether too long has gone on”. Africa could supply raw materials for Britain’s industries and provide markets of incalculable extent for its manufactures. The advantages to Africa of this new commercial connection were even more important: “the light of religious and moral truth, and all the benefits of civilized society”.60 The Company was sure that the climate and soils of Africa were exceptionally suitable for the cultivation of all the important tropical crops. Its intent was to teach the Africans the art of these plants’ cultivation, and “to set them an example by the vigorous cultivation thereof”.61 The Company’s agent, Alexander Falconbridge, had been sent down to establish a preliminary trade in the land’s native products. (Minerva noted in an editorial aside that Falconbridge’s Account of the Slave Trade [published in London in 1788] had been mentioned by Kirstein in his abstract of the Slave-trade Commission’s report; Falconbridge had served as ship’s doctor on a slaver, and his eyewitness reports “show this trade in all its loathsomeness”. Minerva hoped in future to publish excerpts from Falconbridge’s work, which was not yet available in Danish, for his account “ought to be generally known to the nation which, after having been infected with this loathsomeness, has the honor among the nations of Europe to be the first to be cleansed of it”.62 Small plots of “the most profitable tropical products” were to be cultivated in Sierra Leone at the Company’s expense; in particular, a man with long experience with sugar in the West Indies had been ordered to establish a large planting of cane. At least a thousand freed slaves, whom the storm of the American Revolution had washed up on the shores of Nova Scotia and who “deserved in many regards priority over Europeans to this the Company’s first colony in Africa”, were to be transported “to their original fatherland”, where they would join the ragged remnants of several hundred black residents of London who had been deported to Sierra Leone by the British government in 1786.63

60 “Substance of the Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, pp. 215–216. 61 “Substance of the Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, pp. 216–217. 62 “Substance of the Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, pp. 217, 222. 63 “Substance of the Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, pp. 217–219. denmark’s abolition of the atlantic slave trade 63

The Report of the Court of Directors reproduced a letter to Granville Sharp, the abolitionist, from the king of Sierra Leone, who welcomed the new colony in his land, for he was sure it would be useful for all of us here in this land, by teaching us things that we did not comprehend; and common sense must say that even the most ignorant people in the world must be glad to see their country improved, if they had any idea of how this could happen. In a footnote, Minerva reproduced this last passage, on common sense, in the original English (a trifle garbled), remarking, These golden words of the Guinean King Naimbanna are quoted here both in English and Danish, as they are remarkable enough not only to be used— and not just once—as a motto, wherever they might be fitting, but to be taken to heart by many—in Europe, to whom it would never occur that they could learn anything from a Negro-king.64 Sierra Leone was rich in timber, although the trees differed from those of the European woods. Cattle, sheep, goats, and poultry were the domestic animals, and the country abounded in game birds. Indigo grew wild here, and the ruins of Portuguese dye-works were still to be found. Cotton was grown and woven for the local market, and sugar cane grew wild to a size it did not attain in the West Indies. Tobacco grew here but was disregarded by the Africans in favor of the imported product. Rice was the most important crop, and it was the equal of that grown in Carolina; three harvests could be taken each year. A number of aromatic spices were grown and could perhaps displace some of the costly East Indian spices on European markets. Most of the tropical fruits known in the West Indies throve here, and ripened year-round. The local wild grapes were sour, but if they were brought under cultivation they would doubtless be as delicious as the European grape.65 The colonists would be provided with plots of land, a civil administration was to be put in place, schools were to be built. The slave trade would not be tolerated, and the persons and property of both blacks and whites would be protected according to the laws of England. Revenues would

64 “Substance of the Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, pp. 227, 228 (note). 65 “Substance of the Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, pp. 229–232. According to a note on p. 232, this information was from Lieutenant J.R. Matthews’s Voyage to the River Sierra Leone, on the coast of Africa (London: B. White and son, 1791), whose report, the directors pointed out, was completely in agreement with information from their own servants on the coast. 64 chapter two eventually be generated from taxes on land, from the produce of the Company’s own plantations, and from a widespread commerce, but the Directors insisted that the Company’s profits were of secondary importance.66 In the same number, Minerva ran a sort of abstract of this report under the running head “Letters from a Danish traveler”.67 This was Frederik Sneedorff, a young darling of Danish intellectual circles, who was making a tour of England before taking up a professorship of history at the University of Copenhagen.68 When some years before it had become apparent that it would be politically difficult to ban the slave trade, he wrote, English abolitionists had determined to attempt “to undermine it like a stronghold it is not advisable to storm; a colony in Africa, where by free hands there could be planted and produced the greatest part of the necessaries for which slaves are used in the West Indies”, would “little by little cut the slave trade off at the root”.69 To this was linked the philanthropic idea of spreading from such a colony knowledge, religion, and better morals among the blacks and showing them the loathsomeness of the slave trade, as well as of their mutual enmity, two calamities that stand in relation to one another as cause and effect. When four hundred London blacks had been sent down to Sierra Leone in 1786, Sneedorff related, “the planters in the West Indies began to be afraid”, and “sounded the alarm in Parliament”. The abolitionists in return began to raise petitions against the slave trade all over England; Sneedorff mentioned the names of William Wilberforce and the brewer Samuel Whitbread in this connection. Apart from some legislation to ameliorate the condition of the slaves in the West Indies, the matter had been stopped in Parliament by voices representing Jamaica, Liverpool, and Bristol.70 Sneedorff referred his Danish readers to J.R. Matthews’s Voyage to the River Sierra-Leone and to Lord Muncaster’s Historical sketches of the slave trade and its effects in Africa, published just that year,71 in which, Sneedorff

66 “Substance of the Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, pp. 238–241. 67 “Breve fra en dansk reisende” No. XXIX, London, May 4, 1792, Minerva, No. II (May), 1792, pp. 257–272. 68 “Sneedorff, Frederik”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 2nd. ed.; the letter was reproduced in Frederick Sneedorff, Frederik Sneedorffs samlede skrifter, Part 1 (Copenhagen: Gyldendals Forlag, 1794), pp. 482–496; see the subscription list on pp. [XLIII]–LIV. 69 Also quoted in Trier, p. 409. 70 “Breve fra en dansk reisende”, XXIX, pp. 257–259. 71 John Pennington Muncaster, Historical sketches of the slave trade and of its effects in Africa, addressed to the people of Great-Britain (London: J. Stockdale, 1792). denmark’s abolition of the atlantic slave trade 65 related, Sierra Leone was described as a country of great fertility, which “will, when the soil is cultivated, equal, if not surpass, the best West Indian islands in fertility”. The country was drained by more rivers than any other part of Africa, “which will much ease the Company’s plan to establish trade with the peoples that lie farther in”. Augustus Nordenskiold, a mineralogist (one of the Swedish colonial speculator C.B. Wadström’s associates in London),72 had assured Sneedorff that there must be gold in the mountains of Sierra Leone, for they lay at the same latitude as gold-bearing mountains in America. “Nordenschiold is down there now, together with a Swedish botanist Afzelius; both are in the Company’s service to discover and develop the land’s natural resources to the benefit of commerce”.73 It was Sneedorff’s understanding that five million Africans had been enslaved and exported, passed along chains of factories extending deep into the continent, in return for gunpowder and spirits. It was “the most moving example of how much, for how long, and how generally profit can blind and harden the human being”: no one in the future would be able to credit it.74 Sneedorff reported that he had received a copy of the Danish ordinance of March 16 from Copenhagen and had then, a few days later, seen an abstract of it in the Morning Post for April 19, 1792. The English abstract had not been entirely faithful to the original, and within two days The Times had published the ordinance word for word, with some bitter remarks on the

laudable zeal of our pious reformers to impose forgeries of the grossest kind on the Public …. The Ordonnance which the King of Denmark has issued for the internal regulation of his West Indian Colonies, has been pompously set forth as an Edict for the immediate Abolition of the Slave Trade. How far they are warranted in putting such a construction on this Edict, we leave our Readers to judge.75 In June, Minerva published a long article on the history of the slave trade, addressed “To Herr Secretair Kirstein”. The article was not signed but has

72 Curtin, The image of Africa, p. 209. 73 “Breve fra en dansk reisende”, XXIX, pp. 261–262. This was Adam Afzelius, the last of Linnaeus’s ‘disciples’: Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: nature and nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 163, 202. 74 “Breve fra en dansk reisende”, XXIX, p. 264. 75 “Edict of the King of Denmark respecting the slave trade”, The Times, April 21, 1792. The Times’s readers will doubtless also have taken note that the Times, in its own eagerness to support the position of the West Indian planters, rather overstepped the bounds of truthfulness in presenting the edict as an ordinance merely for the “internal regulation” of the affairs of the Danish West Indies. The text of the Times’s translation can also be found in Gøbel, “The Danish edict of 16th March 1792”, pp. 259–261. 66 chapter two been attributed to the editor, Christen Pram, who was also an official in the Commerce Collegium and thus a subordinate of Schimmelmann’s; it can be taken as an oblique public expression of the government’s policy.76 Kirstein had written in his abstract of the Slave-trade Commission’s report that he would not dwell on the horrors of the slave trade, and the writer agreed that it had not been necessary to do so in the report: the regent would not have formed the commission if he had not been aware of the prevailing state of affairs. Here an editorial note referred to a passage in Bartolomé de Las Casas, who had written to the emperor Charles V (Charles I of Spain) that although he had personally witnessed the greatest barbarisms, “the depiction thereof would be too horrible to place before Your Majesty’s eyes”.77 Kirstein had cited several good accounts of the slave trade, Pram went on, but the literature had not yet been properly brought together for Danish readers. He therefore wished to present an overview, to drive home the degree to which the whole country owed its thanks to Kirstein and the Slave-trade Commission. Pram’s recapitulation of the history of European discoveries down the African coast beginning in the 1430s and of the explosion of the trade after the discovery and the ensuing gruesome depopulation of the Americas drew, among other sources, on Some historical account of Guinea: its situation, produce, and the general disposition of its inhabitants with an inquiry into the rise and progress of the slave trade, its nature, and lamentable effects, published in Philadelphia by Anthony Benezet, a Quaker (to whose book Peter Thonning also referred forty years later in notes to be found among the Guinea Commission’s papers).78 Although Kirstein had avoided all mention of African colonies, Pram permitted himself to point out that Africa was a continent of mild peoples, legitimate regimes, agriculture, and economic activity, a rich land whose people were stolen into slavery in the New World.

76 “Om Negerhandelen. Til Herr Secretair Kirstein”, Minerva, No. 2 (June), 1792, pp. 311– 378. The attribution is by N. Nyerup, in Almindeligt register over maanedskriftet Minerva fra dets begyndelse med juliie maaned 1785 til det 18de aarhundredes udgang (Copenhagen: Johan Frederik Schultz, 1801); “Pram, Christen Henriksen”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 2nd. ed. 77 Minerva cited Benjamin Sigismond Frossard’s La cause des esclaves nègres et des habitans de la Guinée (Lyon: Aimé de la Roche, 1789) for the passage from Las Casas. 78 Anthony Benezet, Some historical account of Guinea: its situation, produce, and the general disposition of its inhabitants with an inquiry into the rise and progress of the slave trade, its nature, and lamentable effects (Philadelphia: J. Crukshank, 1771); GK III, Uddrag af adskillige Autorer, Thonning’s notes, headed “Slavehandelen”. denmark’s abolition of the atlantic slave trade 67

The Europeans could, instead of the shameful trade they conduct there, turn the contact with the inhabitants of these lands into a veritable spring of wealth, [and,] by a humane trade, by establishing colonies there, spread European culture.79 In another such indirect word to the educated citizenry from the government the following month, Borger-Vennen [Citizen Friend], which was published in a weekly run of two thousand copies by a charitable society that enjoyed the patronage of the royal family,80 published a “Letter from the country” signed “R-d G-e”,81 i.e., Philip Rosenstand-Goiske, of the Chamber of Customs’s colonial office.82 Rosenstand-Goiske praised Minerva for having published the royal edict banning the slave-trade and Kirstein’s abstract of the Slave-trade Commission’s report. But—I ask—can anything be more unnatural, both politically and economically regarded, than fetching laborers at great cost from other continents to cultivate the soil, can this arrangement endure in an age of enlightenment? Is it not more natural that the land produce its own laborers, that the agriculture be brought into the land where the inhabitants are? Is it not more reasonable that plantations should be worked in Africa by the natives of the country, than that these, enchained, should labor in such distant places for some few individuals’ profit? Some will doubtless call this thought a political dream, but—what great and important undertakings have not beforehand had to hear that appellation? That beginnings have already been made on such establishments, this everyone knows; that they encounter resistance in the beginning, is always to be presumed, but experience shows nonetheless that they succeed. When Oeder wrote of the peasantry, Martfeldt of the grain trade, the populace regarded it as dreams, but the peasantry became free nonetheless, the grain trade was liberalized.83 I have

79 “Om Negerhandelen. Til Herr Secretair Kirstein”, pp. 311–312, 319–321, 331, 371, quotation from p. 320. 80 Borger-Vennen, No. 1, September 2, 1791, p. [1]. 81 R-d G-e, “Brev fra Landet’, Borger-Vennen, No. 42, June 15, 1792, pp. [331]–337. Rosenstand-Goiske was one of the editors of Borger-Vennen, with Frederik Thaarup, from 1792 to 1795: Søllinge and Thomsen, Vol. 1, p. 125. 82 “Rosenstand-Goiske, Johan Philip Kneyln”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 2nd. ed.; Kringelbach, Den civile centraladministrations embedsetat, p. 196. See the obituary of Rosenstand-Goiske by Knud Rahbek in Dansk Minerva, July, 1815, pp. 64–84, on pp. 77–78. I am grateful to Erik Gøbel for providing me with information regarding Rosenstand- Goiske. 83 Georg Christian Oeder had written on the legal status of the Danish peasantry in the 1760s and 1770s, and the feudal adscription of agricultural laborers to the land had been abolished in 1788; Christian Martfeldt’s influential essay on the grain trade had been published in 1785: “Oeder, Georg Christian” and “Martfeldt, Christian”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 2nd. ed.; “Stavnsbaand”, Salmonsens Konversationsleksikon (Copenhagen: J.H. Schultz Forlagsboghandel, 1915–1930). 68 chapter two

heard similar judgments of Isert’s proposal for a colony on the coast of Guinea, but I hope that our descendants shall see the untruth of the latter judgment.84 Borger-Vennen also published a translation of a substantial article from an unspecified foreign source on “The negro slaves in Guinea, and on their condition in the Europeans’ American colonies”, spread over three numbers in March.85 It was, in all, a substantial volume of sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and highly fashionable news of the slave trade and new African colonial efforts designed to combat it that was thus laid on the breakfast tables of a cultured and influential core of the Danish populace early in 1792.86 In 1793, Kjøbenhavnske lærde Efterretninger (Copenhagen Learned News) also published a notice of Kirstein’s abstract of the ordinance of March 16, 1792, and of Minerva’s long articles on the Sierra Leone Company, of which it said: “The whole institution deserves attention in the highest degree, being, contrary to all expectation, one of the great phenomena with which the eighteenth century ends”.87 Nowhere in the press, however, was the Danish government’s new investment in Julius von Rohr’s and Jens Flindt’s expedition to Africa directly alluded to.

84 R-d G-e, “Brev fra Landet”, p. 335. 85 M. f. L-G, “Negerslaverne paa Guinea, og om deres Tilstand paa Europæernes amerikanske Colonier” Borger-Vennen, No. 27, March 2, 1792, pp. [207]–212; No. 28, March 9, pp. 215–220; and No. 29, March 16, pp. 225–228; Knap, p. 172, attributes this translation to Michael Frederik Liebenberg, a member of the Rahbek circle: “Liebenberg, Michael Frederik”, Dansk biografisk lexikon, C.F. Bricka, ed. (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag, 1887–1905) [at runeberg.org/dbl]. 86 Knap, p. 170, concluded, to the contrary, that the discussion of the issues in the Danish press was rather shallow, especially if compared with that in France and England; Trier, p. 447, also appears to have found the play in the press upon the publication of the Danish ban rather disappointing. 87 Kjøbenhavnske lærde Efterretninger, No. 44, 1793 p. 690–91, 692. For quite another view, see Jens Vibæk, Dansk Vestindien 1755–1848, Vol. 2 of Vore gamle tropekolonier, 2nd. ed., pp. 180–181. CHAPTER THREE

AFRICA IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD: GUINEA PLANTATIONS ON THE WEST INDIAN MODEL

In the fall of 1792, the Guinea entrepreneurs, having been deprived of their monopoly on the slave trade, asked to be released from their contract,1 and the Danish crown took over the administration of the African establishments.2 Bendt Olrick, a man with colonial experience, to be sure, but in Greenland, was appointed governor.3 Among much else, Olrick was instructed by the Finance Collegium that since “von Rohr has been sent over to the coast to investigate whether this region’s climate and soil could make the establishment of colonies there advisable, the Governor is to assist him herein in every possible way”. At the same time, there was talk of closing some of the forts to cut costs, and the crown asked Olrick to report on the extent of the territory controlled by each, and which of them, with “bringing the land under cultivation” in view, were likely to be the most important. Olrick was ordered to produce maps and drawings of the forts, “together with thorough descriptions of the country, in which it is to be noted whether the new establishment of lodges or plantations could advantageously be undertaken”; these were to be sent to the Chamber of Customs, upon which jurisdiction over the Guinea possessions was now devolving.4 Jens Flindt, in the meantime, had arrived in St. Croix in the Danish West Indies at the end of March, 1792.5 In September, 1792, von Rohr informed the West Indian administration that he expected to depart soon with the

1 Gøbel, “The Danish edict of 16th March 1792”, p. 257; FJ 1027/1792, the Guinea Entrepreneurs, August 13, 1792. 2 Finansarkiverne, Finantscollegiet, Forestillinger og Resolutioner, photoduplicated volume in Rigsarkivet’s Reading Room, No. 190, representation dated September 18, resolution September 26, 1792, and No. 201, representation of October 9, resolution of October 12. 1792; FJ 1531/1792, September 26, 1792. 3 FJ 1605/1792, royal rescript, October 19, 1792; “Olrik (Olrich), Bendt”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 3rd. ed.; FJ 651/1791, a pension and half-pay list, April 26, 1791. 4 FJS 1605/1792, draft of instructions for Olrick, apparently laid before the king on October 18, 1792, items 8, 15, and 19. 5 GTK, Uafgjort (GJ) Sager, No. 42, Hans Christophersen (one of Flindt’s party), Giersløv Bye under Gissegaards Gods i Sjælland, October 28, 1795, to Schimmelmann, asking to be paid for his service from the time he arrived in St. Croix, on March 31, 1792. 70 chapter three

“passengers for Guinea”; he was granted special permission to export seven barrels of sugar to pay for “provisions for the colony”.6 Von Rohr appears to have run up bills of well over ten thousand rigsdaler in connection with “the investigation laid on him of the colonial establishment commenced on the Guinea Coast”.7 Von Rohr and his party traveled first to North America to obtain passage to Africa, for few ships sailed directly against the prevailing winds to the Guinea Coast from the Antilles.8 Von Rohr fell ill in the United States and sent Flindt ahead of him to Africa. Flindt was accompanied by his sister, a St. Croix planter or plantation overseer named Gilbert Woodard, two carpenters, and two black West Indians.9 In a letter of December 20, 1792, written in New London, von Rohr passed the authority vested in him by Schimmelmann to Flindt and Woodard. He also wrote to Governor Bjørn (for von Rohr could not yet know that the state had taken over the administration of the African possessions): invoking the authority of a royal rescript and communications from Count Schimmelmann, von Rohr asked the governor to turn the colony in Akuapem, with its staff and labor force, over to Flindt and Woodard. Bjørn was asked to make room in the warehouse at Fort Christiansborg for the supplies purchased for the colony until such time as they could be transported to Akuapem.10 Von Rohr also wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, with whom he had been corresponding for some years:11 I am cou curious to see if in the Neighbourhood of the Danish Forts in Guinea growe the same Plants, as in Cayenne, both being under the 5th Degree N. Lat.—Some Times I suppose, my having been in Cayenne for 8 Months would perhaps be of great Utility?12

6 Vestindiske lokalarkiver, Vestindiske Regiering, Referatprotokol, 1086/1792, von Rohr, Sept 27, 1792. 7 Vestindiske lokalarkiver, Vestindiske Regiering, Referatprotokol, 498/1792, von Rohr, May 15, 1792; FJ 1189/1793, August 7, 1793, royal approval of the expenditure of 11,347 rigsdaler; see also VJ 531/1792; VJ 8/1793; FJ 1345/1792; FJ 664/1793, FJ 928/1793, FJ 1608/1793, FJ 1723/1793, FJ 976/1794, FJ 1722/1794. 8 See Erik Gøbel, “Danish Trade to the West Indies and Guinea, 1671–1754”, Scandinavian Economic History Review, Vol. 31, 1983, pp. 21–49, on pp. 23–24. 9 GJ 3/1794, interim governor Lieutenant von Hager, [Christiansborg,] March 14, 1793. 10 GJS 9/1800, two letters from von Rohr, New London, December 20, 1792, one to Jens N. Flindt and Gilbert Woodard, the other to Governor Bjørn. I am grateful to Ulla Mark Svensson for her reading of these letters. 11 British Library, Department of Manuscripts, Add. MS 8098, folios 280–281, von Rohr, New York, August 10, 1793, to Joseph Banks; see The Banks letters, p. 709. 12 On the presumed botanical significance of similar latitudes around the world, see Koerner, Linnaeus: nature and nation, pp. 119–120. africa in the atlantic world: guinea plantations 71

He hoped Banks would send him the Proceedings of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa. He thought this work “could perhaps be of greater Use in general, then I my self can guess at, for the Present”: von Rohr may here have been speculating about the sources of the Volta. It appears that he also inquired about the progress of the colony at Sierra Leone. Banks warned von Rohr that “an unaccountable Jealosy has spread itself among those who have concerns on the Coast who believe that you are Employd in Looking out for a Place to Form a settlement on account of the Danish Nation”, which it was thought “may prove detrimental to their interest”.13 The “concerns on the Coast” Banks referred to were presumably British slaving operations at Accra and elsewhere along the coast above and below the Danish establishments. He reported that the Sierra Leone colony was faring well enough, but more through trade than through agriculture, whose prospects he regarded with pessimism: my opinion has always been … that no cultivation can prove materialy beneficial to the Mother Country if carried on by Strangers where there are native inhabitants for as soon as Large Crops are on the Ground and large Buildings erected the negroes are sure to attack them & nothing but the Barbarous Policy of Extirpation used by the Spaniards in South America can render the Settlers safe. In July, 1793, Governor Olrick reported to the Chamber of Customs that Jens Flindt, who Olrick doubted knew much about colonial agriculture, had arrived on the coast.14 Acting on the broad authority laid on them by von Rohr, Flindt and the planter Woodard had rather quickly taken it upon themselves to re-establish Isert’s colony at a site much closer to the sea, on the plain just south of the Akuapem hills. This new plantation was given the name Frederikssted. At about this juncture, Woodard returned to the West Indies.15 The accounts of Isert’s colony, which former governor Bjørn later submitted to Schimmelmann, indicate that at the end of 179216 there had been several buildings at Frederiksnopel; grapevines, figs,

13 GTK, Schimmelmannske Papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, in a folder marked “Rohr vedk.”, Joseph Banks, Soho Square, July 1, 1794, to von Rohr at Christiansborg. 14 VJ 877/1793 (also GJ 5/1794), Olrick, [Christiansborg] July 25, 1793; also GJ 3/1794, interim governor Lieutenant von Hager, [Christiansborg,] March 14, 1793. 15 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, Woodard, Christiansborg, April 7, 1793, copy, in English. 16 Finanskollegiet, Colonien Friderichs Nopels regnskab, protocol-book numbered 1149, Journal for Colonien Friderichsnopel i Aquapim. 72 chapter three cabbages, various kinds of beans, onions, lemon trees, and orange trees had been planted in the colony’s fenced garden, which was 110 by 130 feet; and the cotton planting was said to be eight thousand feet long by six thousand broad (an improbably large area that can probably be ascribed to a slip of a pen) in which the trees had not only been cut down but their stumps grubbed up. Four other plantings for the colonists’ private use were each about a hundred paces square. All this Flindt now abandoned. In a report to Schimmelmann,17 Flindt complained that every possible obstacle had been put in his way. It appeared that only trade goods of the poorest quality could be spared the colonists from the forts’ inventories. The establishments’ sloop was to have transported four white settlers and a cargo of provisions and wares down the coast to Kpone, from which access to the new colony overland would be a little easier than from Christiansborg, but this arrangement had fallen through. Flindt had then asked for inventory slaves to transport his people up to the colony but was informed that none were available. He had himself traveled up into the country and engaged eighty carriers in Akuapem, but when they reached the fort, their wages had been refused them, and Flindt was now informed that Woodard, before he had departed, had “filed a protest: that no further advances were to be made to the colony (the said [Woodard]’s letter, a copy of which I have the honor of introducing herewith, shows the opposite)”. Woodard had written to Flindt on April 7, a little more than a month after the party had arrived from North America, that he would be traveling back to St. Croix in a few days in the same sloop that had brought them from North America: the state of his health would not permit him to remain any longer on the coast.18 “My advice to you is to folow the plan you and I agreed on when at the Collony. That is to plant the Land thats cleard, at the old Settlement, but not to Clear any more Ground, as the Distence is too far to make any advantage by it. But do advise you to have as much Ground cleard and planted with Cotton as possable at the place you and I Layd out for the Houses to be put up by the Negros against our Retarn. that Land is exseeding Good and with out Douth will Purduse well. its True the Carry from this place is Som Distence but the Ground being all Level will make its Carra [Carrag?] much

17 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, Flindt, Collonien Friderichstæd, July 22, 1793, to Schimmelmann, copy, forwarded by Olrick before his death. 18 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, Woodard, Christiansborg, April 7, 1793, copy, in English. africa in the atlantic world: guinea plantations 73

Easiere than the Mountains…. Without Doubt Gens will be wanting to Clean the Cotton with if so I shall have them made after the best manner and send them you. Woodard had indeed adopted quite a different tone in a letter he left for von Rohr at Christiansborg.19 I have remained in this place much longer than I Expected, the Capt. Being not able to procure Ships provesions before,—I remain still unwell, I expected to have got some Medsen from Mr. Flindt to use at See, but he would not Spare me any, and as to his Carrying on I fear it will not be agreeable to you. all that I can Say to him he will not remove to the Settlement, but keeps all the people, at this place where Nothing is to be Done, the perve- sions that Came out with us, I am fearful will be used up, before any thing is Done, Also what has been taken up for Improveing the Colleny, you will find things very Different from what Mr. Flindt Mentioned when in St. croix, I am sorry to say there is Little Faith to be put in what he says…. My opinion is that Mr. Flindt will not ansver to Direct a Collenny in particular Such as this Which Requires a Studdy Expeerensd person, … and I fear it will Never turn out to any advantage Let who will have the Directtion, as the people are a bad Set—Besides the Distance for Carrage will be very Expenceive—you will please to Exkuse me if I am Giveing Judgment freeer that I ort—when you take a vew of the place and find what kind of people you will have to Deal with I Beleave you will be of my way of Thinking——Your friend and Humble Sarvent—Gilbert Woodard. Flindt reported to Schimmelmann that he had been unable yet to have any brush cleared at the new site and that nothing “that is worth writing of” had been planted.20 However, six of the best slaves from the old colony and two carpenters were at work on doors and frames for the laborers’ quarters that had already been put up. He would not begin on a building for the craftsmen until von Rohr arrived, which he most fervently hoped would be soon. Better building wood was to be had up in the hills, Flindt said, but no lumber larger than a man could carry could be brought over the difficult paths down to the plain. He does not appear to have had it in mind to build anything further at Frederiksnopel. “It is regrettable that I must see my good intentions for the fatherland and my own honor crushed…. [N]owhere are better areas to be found for

19 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, Rohr vedk., Woodard, Christiansborg, April 21, 1793, in English. 20 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, Flindt, Collonien Friderichstæd, July 22, 1793, to Schimmelmann, copy. 74 chapter three planting whatever it might be than here below the mountains”. Flindt was painfully aware that he had nothing yet to show the minister of finance and wished only that von Rohr would soon arrive, “so that we finally could have the pleasure of demonstrating in the deed what I write with my pen”. His people were well, Flindt reported, but it was a good thing that they had had so many provisions with them from North America, “for there have never in my time been such tight times for the country’s products as last year, which has made it endlessly expensive this year”. Meyer’s and Lather’s projects near the Volta had been abandoned. Flindt regretted losing a man of Woodard’s “character and science”, for he had hoped that they could have accomplished something along the river. There had been no word of von Rohr. Flindt worried that the botanist, if he had been traveling in an English ship, might have been captured by the French. Von Rohr had not embarked until November, 1793, but he was in any case never heard from again. The ship in which he sailed from New York appears to have vanished with all hands in the Atlantic.21 Governor Olrick was dead within six weeks of his arrival on the coast;22 his successor, Christian Frederik von Hager, regarded African plantations as impracticable; he recommended transferring the establishments to another European power, reserving only the right to export a certain number of slaves to the Danish West Indies every year. He promised, however, to look for suitable locations in the vicinity of the Volta: “this river is undeniably the most magnificent possession” of the Danish crown.23 Von Hager also sent home copies of a couple of notes from Flindt, in which he reported that he had cleared two patches of ground at the new plantation, “where there are now growing circa 2,000 cotton trees as well as a respectable portion of millet”. A number of slaves, who had been accustomed to being left more or less to themselves at Frederiksnopel, had repeatedly decamped, most recently down to Christiansborg, where they had placed themselves under the protection of the governor, claiming to have been starved, beaten, and overworked. Flindt protested that the fort’s doctor could attest that the runaways were in as good health as when they had been delivered to him, but, nevertheless, since the slaves could not work in

21 Samuel L. Mitchill, “Discourse delivered on the 6th of December, 1813…. A concise and comprehensive account of the writings which illustrate the botanical history of North and South America”, Collections of the New-York Historical Society, Vol. 2, 1814, pp. [149]–215, on p. 212; VJ 442/1795, Lindemann, in the Danish West Indies, May 7, 1795, reporting that in March, 1795, there had still been no word from von Rohr. 22 Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 177. 23 GJ 18 and 86/1794, von Hager, [Christiansborg,] October 8 and December 30, 1793. africa in the atlantic world: guinea plantations 75 chains and he was unable to keep them on the plantation, he appears to have wanted them sold for the colony’s account.24 Flindt appears to have worked hard at Frederikssted, clearing ground, planting cotton, and putting up buildings,25 but in August, 1794, Count Schimmelmann, apparently having received word of von Rohr’s probable fate in the Atlantic,26 ordered the African plantation colonies closed down for the time being, unless the scientist, against all expectation, had finally arrived on the coast; Flindt was called home to justify his accounts. Peter Thonning, forty years later, made a note up the side of a copy of the order suspending the colonial operation, which was among the documents he laid before the Guinea Commission: the severe tone in this attachment appears to show that there were insinua- tions against Flindt, who was, to be sure, not a very bright or knowledgeable man, but probably, together with his sister, the most active Europeans that have ever been in Guinea.27 Flindt later reported that by the time he had relinquished the new plantation to the Government in February, 1795, he had established three plantings of cotton, containing altogether almost five thousand mature shrubs. He had planted thirty-one varieties of cotton (undoubtedly supplied him by von Rohr) in a nursery, and some of these plants were twelve or fourteen feet high, with stems six inches thick. He had planted them eight feet apart, in the West Indian manner, but thought that this would not be sufficient room here in Guinea. Most of his plants were of a low- growing variety he called African cotton. At the time of his departure, he had been counting on a harvest of perhaps five thousand pounds of cotton. He had also planted three fields of the local maize, from which he had harvested sufficient corn to feed the colony’s slaves and to supply Fort Christiansborg, for which the colony’s account had been credited. He had erected three dwellings, a grain magazine, and a barn, and had begun on a larger dwelling, seventy feet long and eighteen wide. He had erected what

24 ad GJS 101/1794, Flindt, December 11 and 12, 1793. 25 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, No. 2, Iserts Fredriksnopel. Aquapim, Flindt, Copenhagen, March 19, 1800, to the Finance Collegium (Designation II, No. 13). 26 GK IV, bound 202-page draft of the Guinea Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, with the now all but illegible words “Modtaget fra Capitain Findt den 22 Marts 1841” in pencil inside the front cover, p. 122e. 27 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhan delen, No. 2, Iserts Fredriksnopel. Aquapim, Schimmelmann and Scheel, August 23, 1794, to von Hager, copy (Designation II, No. 11), with Peter Thonning’s annotation. 76 chapter three he called a sawmill and was cutting all his own beams and planks. All this he had accomplished with very little help from the Government, with ten old and halt slave men and five women. One of the carpenters from Copenhagen had died and the other had left the colony within three months, and all the work had been done by the slaves, the smith Ole Fynberg (one of Isert’s original colonists), and Hans Christopherson, a farmer by trade, who had come out with Flindt and his sister. But of what use was all this to the Danish state, he inquired, when he had been obliged to abandon all his work, “and that at a time when it was just becoming possible to harvest the fruits of the diligence and expense invested in it?” Thonning annotated the letter in the 1830s: “I have no reason to doubt the truth of this letter, I was myself at the place in 1801 and saw the remains of this plantation, which was as good as abandoned—Th.”28 By June, 1795, Hans Moe, a jurist who had been sent to the coast with Governor Olrick with orders to report back personally to Copenhagen on the state of affairs there,29 was back in Denmark.30 In his preliminary report, he stated (according to the entry in the Chamber of Customs’s Guinea correspondence journal) that When the slave trade ends in 1802, the establishments will presumably not be of any other use than as plantation colonies, if they are not to be sold off. The first he thinks will be very beneficial to humanity, as it would contribute to the enlightenment of the negroes; but to sell them would probably be most advantageous to the state’s interests, for the many failed attempts show how almost impossible plantations are at such a remove and under such circumstances.31 He foresaw an altogether uncertain result, a multitude of difficulties, and the additional expenditure of large sums: thus place, time, remoteness, uncertainty, the failure of other nations’ experiments, and, I dare say, the futility and need- lessness seem more to advise against than in favor of this.32 Moe had traveled down the coast to the Volta and inland to Frederiksnopel and Flindt’s new plantation (which he found to be “very inconveniently”

28 Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen, No. 2, Iserts Fredriksnopel. Aquapim, Flindt, Copenhagen, March 19, 1800, to the Finance Collegium, with Peter Thonning’s penciled annotation (Designation II, No. 13). 29 FJ 1660, October 30, 1792, and 1662/1792, royal resolution of November 2, 1792. 30 Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 177. 31 GJ 126/1795, Moe, Copenhagen, July 20, 1795. 32 GJS 126/1795, Moe, Copenhagen, July 20, 1795. africa in the atlantic world: guinea plantations 77 located) and was of the opinion that islands in the river and stretches of land along its bank near Fort Kongenssteen would be the most suitable places for an agricultural undertaking if the colonial project was to be pursued: they were fertile, defensible, and accessible from the sea. If it should be found desirable to dispose of some of the forts, he said, Kongenssteen, at any rate, should be retained.33 Both Moe and Bjørn stopped in London on their way home to Copenhagen and were in touch with C. B. Wadström there. In 1795, in his Essay on colonization, particularly applied to the Western Coast of Africa, Wadström reported, for an English-speaking audience, on the progress of the Danish colonial effort.34 Isert, “the author of the first colony”, who could be counted among the prominent men of medicine who had “contributed much to remove the prejudices which have so long obstructed the civilization of Africa”, had chosen rather an inaccessible site, but this was “more than compensated by the salubrity of the air” and the fertility of the soil. The “quit rent” had also been very low. Among the people the Danish government had sent out, “who continue very healthy at Aquapim” (there was no mention of those who had died), was “a skilful farmer who has gone there to introduce the plough”.35 Wadström regretted that the “mercenary cultivation which prevails in the West Indian islands” had not been excluded here: the African colony was relying on slaves, but he looked forward to the end of 1802, when the Danish slave trade was to end. He was afraid, however, that this evil social practice might already have taken root in the colony by that time and would only with difficulty be “eradicated”. Dr. Isert’s indefatigable exertions having unfortunately terminated in his death, Lieut. Colonel Roer [sic], who to great botanical knowledge, adds much experience in W. Indian cultivation, was appointed to succeed him; but I know not whether he has yet arrived at Aquapim.

33 Interim Governor von Hager rather undercut Moe’s authority, saying he was “too little experienced to be able to give the Chamber useful advice, and the sources from which he has everywhere drawn are very uncertain”: GJ 135/1795, von Hager, March 4, 1795. 34 C. B. Wadström, An essay on colonization, particularly applied to the western coast of Africa, with some free thoughts on cultivation and commerce; also brief descriptions of the colonies already formed, or attempted … in Africa, including those of Sierra Leona and Bulama (London: Printed for the Author by Darton and Harvey, 1794–1795), Vol. 2, pp. 175–178, 316–317. Peter Thonning’s notes on a German translation, which had appeared by 1796, are to be found in GK III, Uddrag af adskillige Autorer. See also Ray A. Kea, “Plantations and labour”, p. 123, on Wadström’s discussion of Danish colonial ambitions on the African coast, 35 Wadström, pp. 175–176. 78 chapter three

Governor Bjørn, with whom Wadström had spoken when he passed through London in 1793, had told him that the colony “was in as great for- wardness as could be expected” and likely to thrive. The governor had visited the place personally and found it “one of the most fertile in that part of Africa” and very healthy, which Wadström speculated could be attributed to its elevation. Referring to Isert’s Reise nach Guinea, Wadström wrote that Isert particularly admired the Akuapem natives’ “social harmony, which inspired him with the idea of paradisiacal happiness and simplicity”.36 In an appendix, Wadström published a letter from Moe, dated London, 25 March, 1795. Moe had visited Isert’s plantation, which he said was “situated on a high and mountainous tract of land; but so distant from navigation, that it appears to me very inconvenient for commerce” (which, Wadström remarked in a footnote, was actually “rather in favour of a new and innocent colony”). Moe mentioned to Wadström that Jens Flindt’s sister, with the same zeal for the civilization of Africa, by which Mrs. Dubois has done so much honour to the sex, … has accompanied her brother to Aquapim, with a view to instruct the negro women in needle-work, spinning cotton and other parts of female industry; and that she has already made very considerable progress in this laudable and benevolent undertaking.37 Moe reported that the commandants of the Danish forts on the Volta and at Keta “and a certain merchant have begun to plant cotton, sugar-canes, different kinds of garden stuffs, such as greens, sweet peas, &c.”; a venerable African from the interior had “established himself on a solitary spot, and has planted large fields” with cotton and maize, with which he supplied Christiansborg and neighboring villages.38 Interim governor von Hager died in August, 1795;39 he was succeeded by Johan P.D. Wrisberg, who proved quite an eager African agriculturalist. A few days after Isert’s death, in January, 1789, Wrisberg, who had then been sixteen or eighteen years old, had written to Schimmelmann asking to be given charge of the colony in Akuapem:40 “I am a born African”,

36 Wadström, pp. 176–178. 37 Moe may have been referring to Mrs. Isaac Dubois (formerly Mrs. Falconbridge), whose Narrative of two voyages to the River Sierra Leone during the years 1791–2–3, had been published in London in 1794; see Fyfe, pp. 631, 739. 38 Wadström, pp. 316–317. 39 Kay Larsen, De Danske i Guinea (Copenhagen: Nordiske Forfatteres Forlag, 1918), p. 137. 40 Guineiske Uafgjorte (Journal) Sager, No. 30, Jan. P. Wrisberg, Christiansborg, January 30, 1789, to Schimmelmann and Brandt; Albert Fabritius, “Indskrifter paa africa in the atlantic world: guinea plantations 79 he wrote. His father had been in Company service for seventeen years, and had served for a time as governor of the African establishments; he “later left the coast and went over to the West Indies as a planter”. Johan Wrisberg had thus been raised a planter’s son on St. Croix. He had not long since returned to the land of his birth to try his luck as a slaver, but not finding himself suited to the trade, he now hoped “to go over to the new trade or planting, with which, as mentioned above, I was brought up”. He pointed out that “as I was born in this climate (but of European parents)” and thus likely to be less subject to tropical disease, he could provide the continuity of leadership the new colony needed. I make so bold as to say, the planting of cotton and sugar are of altogether no difficulty, but can be produced in greatest abundance, when the necessary assistance of slaves, &c. thereto are to be had, as it will be altogether an impossibility for Europeans to work or undertake the cultivation of the earth in this extraordinary heat, which will only ruin many people’s lives. He had directed this application directly to Schimmelmann, being well aware, he said, that the Government on the coast would never entrust such a project to someone so young: “Had I been lucky enough that Captain Issert had not died so quickly, I would not have lacked the afore- said’s complete recommendation, as he so often proposed same for me”. Schimmelmann is not known to have paid any attention to young Wrisberg’s petition. When Governor Olrick had arrived on the coast, he had retained Wrisberg as Government secretary and translator. Wrisberg’s languages assuredly included English, which was the native tongue of most of the planter class in the Danish West Indies, and the Accra, or Gã language. It is at least as significant that Wrisberg was fluent not just in the vocabularies as in every nuance of Atlantic colonial discourse.41 It was rather an unusual figure who now ascended to the position of governor: he is quite a pivotal figure, a real Atlantic creole—a northern European colonialist born an African and raised a West Indian planter. Wrisberg had been horrified, upon going through Olrick’s papers after his death, to find that the late governor had written of him that he was “indispensable for his competence, but his honesty was not to be relied on”. He had immediately written to the Chamber of Customs to attempt to clear his name:

Kisteplader fra St. Petri Kirke”, Personalhistorisk Tidsskrift, Series 11, Vol. 1, 1940, pp. 244–268, on pp. 262–264. The name is sometimes spelled Wriesberg. 41 See Bernard Bailyn, “The idea of Atlantic history”, Itinerario, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1996, pp. 19–44, and Berlin, “From Creole to African”. 80 chapter three

Olrick, he suggested, had portrayed himself as surrounded with villains and incompetents to exaggerate his own worth.42 A week after taking charge upon von Hager’s death, Wrisberg sent samples of cotton he had harvested during his residence at Keta to the Chamber of Customs; for lack of a gin, the cotton had been cleaned by hand.43 This yellow cotton was of good quality, Wrisberg thought, but there was a finer red cotton, “which no European has yet been able to get the seed of, as it grows so far into the country and there is a sentence of death on any who export a grain thereof”. Nevertheless, with the help of a Frenchman living near Prindsenssteen, he hoped soon to obtain a few seeds of this variety from the king of Portonovo (in Dahomey), “who is sending them up in a boat belonging to Freetrader Meyer”. These he promised to plant as soon as he got them, and coffee, as well, in land cleared near Fort Christiansborg. Wrisberg’s letter was some time on its way from the coast to Copenhagen, and, only a couple of items below the entry for his letter in the Chamber of Customs’s Guinea correspondence journal, at the end of May, 1796, the arrival of a letter from the Slave-trade Commission is recorded, communicating to the Chamber a new royal resolution regarding the Guinea establishments.44 The administration had apparently been mulling over Moe’s and Hager’s reports early in 1796,45 and the crown prince had ordered the Slave-trade Commission to study the fate of the African forts when the ban on the slave trade took effect in 1803, “as their annual maintenance occasions Your Majesty’s treasury significant costs”. The commission’s representation reminded the regent that the forts had been built and maintained solely to serve the slave trade, “for the few other trade-articles, namely gold and elephant-teeth, are so insignificant, that they can scarcely be taken into consideration”. It appeared obvious that the forts should be abandoned after the cessation of the slave trade unless they came to serve some other function: the only two possible eventualities in which the forts could be of any use appeared to be the development of trade with the Africans and colonies based on the production of tropical agricultural commodities.

42 GJ(S) 9/1794, Wrisberg, Aug 21, 1793. 43 GJ(S) 216/1796, Wrisberg, Aug 24, 1795. 44 GJ 218/1796, the Slave-trade Commission, May 30, 1796; ad GJ 218/1796, the resolution of May 18, 1796 ( on the Slave-trade Commission’s representation of May 11, 1796), the cor- rectness of the copy attested to by Kirstein, is now filed among some the papers assembled by the Guinea Commission at GJS 226/1836 (Designation I, No. 2). 45 GJ 209/1796, Moe, January 18, 1796. africa in the atlantic world: guinea plantations 81

The negroes have hitherto by the slave trade alone obtained the means of supplying themselves with the European goods [they desire and require]. The Europeans have never found it consistent with their interest to give them occasion to produce other articles of trade, for their only goal also was to obtain sufficient slaves for the American colonies. When once there occurs a change in this, when the slave trade, as can dare be hoped, is abolished by all European nations, then the presumption seems not unfounded that the negroes’ whole way of thinking and conduct will on that account take on another Gestalt. It was the commission’s understanding that the climate of the Guinea Coast was as suitable for the cultivation of sugar cane, cotton, and indigo as in America or the East Indies. It was only the lack of knowledge and industry that hindered the negroes in making use of the riches nature offered them. If the Europeans would themselves go to their assistance with instruction and the occasion for it, then it is not improbable that there could one day be established a profitable commodities trade in these regions. The way in which this could happen would presumably be no other than this: to convince the negroes of the possibility and use of the thing by example. This matter is thus closely connected with the other the commission has previously mentioned, namely colonial plantations. The commission believes it can assume that a colony in Africa, even without regard to the previously discussed influence on the inhabitants of the land, would be possible and useful. It is well-known that the English have made several attempts thereat at Sierra Leona…. Although the first of these failed because of lack of the experience from which the necessary precau- tions could be drawn, so also the last were progressing very well and would at any rate have provided an instructive example, if they had unfortunately not some time since been destroyed by a French squadron.46 Although Danish efforts to establish plantations on the coast had been frustrated by the untimely death of Isert and the disappearance of von Rohr at sea, it had been demonstrated that “the cultivation both of the grains required to sustain the colonists and of products serviceable in the trade, in particular cotton, would not be difficult”. It was apparent, however, that large-scale plantations would demand a substantial investment of state funds, and, since the outcome could not be known with such certainty that such investments could be regarded as quite secure, the commission dares not recommend to Your Majesty a new attempt of any

46 The French attack had taken place in September, 1794: Fyfe, pp. 59–61. 82 chapter three

significance. If, on the other hand, there were private persons who on their own account wished to found an establishment whose purpose was the cultivation of the earth, then it seems to the commission that they would deserve Your Majesty’s protection, encouragement, and support, provided it did not demand altogether too much capital. The trade in slaves at the forts had been insignificant in recent years, the commission reported; only one ship was expected to sail from Copenhagen to the Guinea Coast in that errand that year, and there seemed to be little prospect that the trade would recover.47 The commission therefore recommended closing some of the forts. Christiansborg alone would suffice to serve the slave trade, but, on the other hand, it would not advance Denmark’s colonial prospects, as the whole area thereabout is sandy and infertile…. On that stretch of the coast of Guinea where the Danish establishments lie are two places that according to locally knowledgeable judgment are most suitable for the establishment of colonies. (Bjørn, Kiøge, Flindt, and Moe all appear to have been in Copenhagen at this time.) “The one is the land of Aquapim, situated 20 or 25 miles from the seacoast between Christiansborg and Fredensborg; the other is the islands in the River Volta, which lie not far from its mouth”. There existed no map that depicted in any detail or with any accuracy the territory the commission was trying to describe: it was altogether a rather nebulous verbal geography that the commission laid out for the regent. The only late-eighteenth-century Danish maps of the area known to exist were exceedingly schematic pen-and-ink sketches: the forts and towns are strung along a coastline, drawn in some cases with a straight- edge, like beads on a wire.48 (Figure 4) There were also, of course, naviga- tional charts, of oceanic scope but small local utility, on which the domains of African peoples tend to be drawn as great speculative arcs into the

47 See Marcus Rubin, 1807–14. Studier til Københavns og Danmarks historie (Copenhagen: Selskabet for Udgivelse af Kilder til Dansk Historie, 1970 [P.G. Philipsens Forlag, 1892]), pp. 57–58. 48 DfuA, Gruppeordnedesager, litra G, Guinea, 1775–1847, (hereinafter GG), Box 870, Bielagerne til Aarestrups Erklæring over General Nationernes Svar af July Maaned 1781 angaaende Guinea, a map annotated: “Delivered July 17, 1782, to Privy Councilor Rosencrone”. There is another such drawing, undated, among other papers from the early 1780s. In Box 871 of this same archival group, there is a similar map down one side of the front page of an undated and unsigned 44-page document, “Extract af stridighederne imellem de Danske og Hollandske Etablissemens paa Kysten af Guinea i Aaret 1775 & Seque….” africa in the atlantic world: guinea plantations 83

Fig. 4. Exceedingly schematic eighteenth-century pen-and-ink representation of the Guinea Coast from diplomatic archives, detail, in DfuA, Gruppeordnedesager, litra G, Guinea, 1775–1847, Box 870, Bielagerne til Aarestrups Erklæring over General Nationernes Svar af July Maaned 1781 angaaende Guinea. (By courtesy of the Danish National Archives.) 84 chapter three interior, overlapping like the scales of a monstrous fish. Such maps do not repay much topographical study.49 Both Akuapem and the Volta region “have their advantages and their inconveniences”. Aquapim, the place where Captain Isert established the colony Most Graciously approved by Your Majesty, has the great advantage that the climate, because of the country’s high situation, is the healthiest in the whole region. It has very fertile soil and an abundance of all the fruits of this land but, on the other hand, has the inconvenience that all communication between the place and the seacoast is exceedingly difficult because of its remoteness and the poor road, or, righter to say, lack of any road, and that it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a little establishment to defend itself if there should arise any quarrel with the negroes. The islands in the Rio Volta similarly have good fertile soil, nor do they lack fish, game, and other provisions, and since at the present time there are no inhabitants on them, there will be less occasion for disputes with the negroes, but it will also be easier to defend on these small islands than on the mainland. Here Peter Thonning, four decades later, wrote in the margin in pencil: “because they are flooded in Aug. and September”. To be sure, not very large ships can sail into the Rio Volta, but still vessels that draw 10 to 11 feet the greatest part of the year. Only from August to October is the river altogether unnavigable, except for canoes; but even at that time ships could be unloaded at a place called Guulablé [Gonable, on Thonning’s map], about 2 miles from the river’s mouth, from whence the goods could be transported to the islands in small vessels. The only objection to these islands is that the climate is not the healthiest, for they are partially subject to floods of the River Volta and thereby become marshy and damp. Christiansborg lay eighty miles west of the Volta and was somewhat farther from Akuapem than was Fort Fredensborg. Taking all this into consideration, the commission thought that Christiansborg and Fort Prindsenssteen, on its barrier island east of the Volta, should be closed, and that Fort Fredensborg and Fort Kongenssteen, which controlled the river, should be maintained to serve the slave trade for as long as it continued and then to protect new colonial undertakings. “It also deserves to be remarked that the area close to these previously mentioned fortresses is fertile and very well suited for culture” [in the sense ‘agriculture’].

49 There is a marvelous manuscript example of the genre in the Pictures Collection, Guinea Folios, Royal Library, Copenhagen. See the map in J.K. Fynn, Asante and its neighbors (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press [Longman Group, Ltd.], 1971), p. 3. africa in the atlantic world: guinea plantations 85

The commission recommended a state investment of five thousand rigsdaler a year to encourage private plantations. The matter was then passed to the Chamber of Customs, with the suggestion that the Department for Foreign Affairs be consulted regarding the diplomatic feasibility of disposing of some of the forts to another power. Thonning, in his annotation for the benefit of the Guinea Commission, laid stress on the five thousand rigsdaler the old Slave-trade Commission had budgeted, but was otherwise rather dismissive of this new tack: This representation was written in 1796 when the slave trade was in full swing and kept everyone, who could otherwise participate in colonial culture, tied to the infertile shore region—it was furthermore not encouraging that they wanted to abandon Xborg [i. e., Christiansborg], which could best support the first plantations. They had formed very wrong notions about the islands in the Volta. In a draft of a letter from the Chamber of Customs to the Department for Foreign Affairs,50 the rather cynical idea was floated that it might be advantageous to trade the forts in question to a nation that remained heavily involved in the slave trade for an advantageous sugar island or colony in America, such as that lying so near the Danish islands, Porto Rico, or a part thereof, a stretch of land in South America either in the vicinity of Brazil or the Spanish and Dutch colonies, or some other country or island which by cultivation could be made fruitful. Schimmelmann had at one time had it in mind to trade the Guinea forts to the crown of Spain for the island of Vieques, between Puerto Rico and the Danish West Indies, and had actually engineered a secret mission to Madrid in that errand in 1786.51 In March, 1796, acting governor Wrisberg had reported briefly on the colonial situation.52 I have recently been up in the mountains of Aquapim to see what progress the colony (if it deserves this name) had made, but it pains me that so much money should be so badly applied…. Should, however, it remain His Majesty’s

50 Guineiske Uafgjorte (Journal) Sager, 1775–1803, draft of a letter to Count Bernstorff, the Foreign Minister; VI kopibog, August 25, 1796, to Bernstorff, No. 238 (with reference to GJ 218/1796). (Letters from the Chamber of Customs to the coast were recorded with the West Indian letters in the Vestindisk kopibog until 1816, and in some cases still later.) 51 Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 172; see E. Gigas, “En theologisk professors diplomatiske mission”, Historisk Tidsskrift, 8th series, Vol. 1, pp. 185–253. 52 GJ(S) 225/1796, Wrisberg, March 13, 1796, duplicate. See Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 306–308. 86 chapter three

will to establish colonies in Africa and [should] Lieutenant Colonel von Rohr (if he is alive), as a well known great man of knowledge in that field, not be entrusted with the management of same, I venture most humbly to suggest the islands in the River Volta. Such a colony should base itself on cotton, and competent people from the West Indies should be hired to work the plantings, with slaves purchased at Accra “of a nation that is called Donco, for these are industrious and faithful”.53 He also recommended that the state should provide financial support to private agriculturalists who settled here, which he understood to have been the government’s policy in the Danish West Indies. “The main thing is that no money be spared in the beginning to advance things forcefully, which has not happened before and has therefore also had a worse outcome than perhaps otherwise would have occurred”.54 In the fall of 1796, when a request for a new surgeon for the Guinea forts came in from the Council on the coast, the Chamber of Customs asked the Royal Surgical Academy to recommend candidates for the position. They noted, however, that the salary of a surgeon for the forts could hardly be justified, for, with only two garrisons to attend to, the office could not occupy all of a man’s time. What was really wanted was a medical man with some “knowledge of the natural sciences and the desire to cultivate them, so that, after he had got to know the country, useful reports and suggestions for same’s culture, etc., could be expected of him”.55 In other words, the Chamber was looking for a natural historian to carry out the study that von Rohr had not lived to make. No one suitable could be found, however,56 and the Chamber informed the Council on the coast that no surgeon could at present be appointed.57 With the same mail, at the end of November, the royal order to close forts Christiansborg and Prindsenssteen was sent down to the coast. The Government was notified that if any private persons wished to establish plantations in the vicinity of the two remaining forts, “then His Majesty wishes that these, in so far as circumstances permit, should enjoy royal

53 On the Doncos or Donkos, see W. Walton Claridge, A history of the Gold Coast and Ashanti from the earliest times to the commencement of the twentieth century, 2nd ed. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964 [1915]), Vol. 1, p. 484. 54 GJ 274/1797, Wrisberg, July 30, 1796, the Chamber’s annotation. 55 VI kopibog, to the Royal Surgical Academy, October 8 and November 7, 1796. 56 GJ 256/1796, Surgical Academy, November 30, 1796. 57 VI kopibog, to the Council on the coast, November 30, 1796. africa in the atlantic world: guinea plantations 87 protection, encouragement, and support”.58 Furthermore, Wrisberg was authorized to put the inventory slaves to work at clearing and planting if they could be spared. The Chamber asked for further report on the cultivation of cotton and coffee: In particular we wish to know who pre-eminently distinguishes himself with this cultivation, as well as what success the cultivation has had and whether there are regular opportunities for the export of these products, even if to other places in Europe. Half a year later, the Chamber reminded the Council on the coast that private planters could expect some support when their plantations are found good, and it can be seen that they are succeeding, to [the undertaking of] which plantations the Chamber very much wished the [royal] Council would encourage those on the coast who had the necessary desire, ability, and knowledge.59 In November, 1797, Wrisberg reported that he had begun work on a plantation “about a cannon-shot from the fort”.60 He had put a Sergeant Just, who was now too old for military service and who had some experience with plants, in charge of it. A three-room house for him and another building of eleven rooms for the slaves had been erected on a little hill. Wrisberg, raised in an affluent West Indian slave society, already had visions of the gracious life of the European planter in Africa: The main building, which will be of 2 storeys and 6 rooms of which one of the rooms intended for a billiard table for the officers and visitors, will be erected when we get the opportunity. The land that contains this and the courtyard is 224 feet long and 156 feet wide, which is fenced in with a wall of clay, thatched with straw, 7 feet high. To the buildings, which are all of clay and stone thatched with grass, a way leads from the fort 3500 feet long and 40 feet wide, where I intend to plant an allée of coconuts and cashew trees; for cotton a pc. of land has been cleared 1600 feet long and 400 feet wide and for a garden 500 feet long and 150 feet wide, in the latter I intend to cultivate all sorts of European garden vegetables as well as the fruits of this country.

58 VI kopibog, November 30, 1796, No. 363. 59 VI kopibog, June 9, 1797, (ad GJ 274/1797, Wrisberg, 30th July 1796) to the Council on the coast (Designation IV, Letter A), copy, in file marked “Om Culturanlæg m. V. fra 1797 til 1822”, apparently misfiled at GJS 144/1828. A copy of this letter was one of a half-dozen documents later assembled by the Guinea Commission in a file designated “Regarding agricultural undertakings, etc. from 1797 to 1822”. 60 GJ 365/1798, Wrisberg, Christiansborg, November 6, 1797, duplicate; copies at GJS 369 and at GJS 144/1828 (marked Designation IV, Letter B). See Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 306–307. 88 chapter three

He had already obtained seeds or seedlings of oranges, lemons, melons, coffee, cinnamon, grapevines, figs, African lilies, and ginger, some of them from the West Indies.61 But rain, which we expect every day, we lack; half of the cotton ground is already planted with the best variety of white cotton we have here, but not come up yet, the rest of the ground I mean to plant with yellow cotton of the same variety as I in August 1795 was so bold as to send what I had harvested at Fort Prindsenssteen home to the High Collegium. He intended to bring another large piece of land under cultivation in the next rainy season. (Several years later, Wrisberg reported that a large water hole had been dug, 120 feet in circumference and ten feet deep, and that a high wall had been put up around it, with a locked gate, “as it lies close by the general country road, and water is a precious article in the country there so close to the seacoast”.62) It was his purpose, he said, to “impart to the lazy Africans a notion of industry”, and he had “let it be made known in most of the negro towns that I will buy their products such as cotton &c. &c., and of the first they are beginning already to bring some that they have themselves cultivated for sale”. He expected that when the slave trade had ended that it would be possible to trade European trade goods for such products as gold, ivory, cotton, coffee, indigo, palm oil, “several types of wood such as tulip, mahogany, ebony, &c. &c., 5 or 6 kinds of African pepper, wild cinnamon, nutmegs and many other articles unknown to me, and in the course of time perhaps sugar”. Early in 1798, more than a year after the royal orders to close forts Christiansborg and Prindsenssteen had been sent out, the Council on the coast acknowledged their receipt.63 As the Council chose to read the order, “it is not absolutely required that the changes must immediately take place”, and they delayed acting on it until they had received further instructions.

61 In an account written years later, Wrisberg recalled that he had “on my own account ordered and introduced coffee plants as well as numerous other fruits unknown in Africa at that time”: ad GJ 1489/1816, Wrisberg, Copenhagen, December 12, 1816, filed at GJS 7/1831; see also GJ 996/1808, Wrisberg, Copenhagen, November 18, 1808, also filed at GJS 7/1831. See Hopkins, “A poisonous plant of the genus Datura”. 62 GJ(S) 179/1802, Wrisberg, Copenhagen, February 2, 1802, filed at GJS 175/1847, in packet marked nos. 201–400. 63 GJ 385/1798, the Council on the coast, Febr. 6, 1798; ad GJS 385/1798, the Council, January 25, 1798, with attachments; see also GJS 175/1847 (which is misfiled among documents numbered 201–400). africa in the atlantic world: guinea plantations 89

As their letter was abstracted in the colonial office in Copenhagen, the Council on the coast represent at great length the sorrowful consequences it would have if these forts should immediately be closed down, which will be no less than ruinous for the [royal] possessions and every white’s life and property, which would fall prey to the inhabitants’ rage. The Council was uncertain of the state’s plans for the establishments, “but presumes that a significant change is under way, and much regrets that the Chamber has not shown the confidence to hear its opinion”. Coming from young Wrisberg and the pack of slave traders that were his council, this last may seem mere petulance, but it legitimately, if rather boldly, invoked administrative norms of consultation between the central administration in Copenhagen, embodying the authority of an absolute monarch, and its officers on the ground in every part of the kingdom: the expertise of local officials was drawn upon as a matter of course.64 If the central administration insisted on closing some of the forts, the Council wrote, forts Kongenssteen and Prindsenssteen should be the two that were maintained. Kongenssteen was quite dilapidated, however, and should be replaced with a new fort at the mouth of the Volta, which should become the seat of the government. As it stood, the fort could not control the mouth of the river. On the whole, however, abandoning Christiansborg and Prindsenssteen would expose the Danes to attacks by the Accra on the west and the Augna (Anlo) on the east, and the enclave might as well in that case be abandoned. Wrisberg had asked his council for signed statements on the matter, and these responses were also sent to Copenhagen. Christian Schiønning wrote that it would be simply irresponsible to obey the Chamber’s order: he was willing to sacrifice all that was dear to him in the royal service, he wrote, but he did not care to risk his life for this foolish new disposition of affairs. The others pointed out that neither Fredensborg nor Kongenssteen was adequate to the central new function the Chamber of Customs envisaged for them. When the Council’s defiant missive arrived in Copenhagen, the Chamber of Customs forwarded it, in August, 1798, to the Slave-trade Commission, which appears to have been serving as a chamber of last resort on African policy. Although the Council balked at the Chamber’s orders regarding the forts, it eagerly endorsed the Chamber’s position on agricultural

64 See Hans Jensen, De danske stænderforsamlingers historie 1830–1848 (Copenhagen: Udgivet af den danske Rigsdag, 1934), Vol. 1, p. 17. 90 chapter three experiments; this may merely reflect Wrisberg’s personal interest in the matter. By a proclamation that seems to have rather overstated the Chamber’s undertaking, it was made known in the enclave that it was His Majesty’s Royal wish that all shall seek as far as possible to cultivate the land around the Danish establishments in particular the region by the Rio Volta. To encourage private persons in such culture it is henceforth His Majesty’s wish that these should enjoy all the protection the Danish forts can in any way give. It is permitted them to be provided as a loan with the [royal] inventory folk to work on establishing plantations, if the king’s own work and the maintenance of the forts does not thereby suffer nor be neglected. Anyone who distinguishes himself by his enterprise in cultivating cotton, coffee, and other useful products can expect support here in this land.65 In May, 1798, the Government on the coast sent in a fresh report on agricultural experiments in the enclave.66 Wrisberg now had both his own and some of Fort Christiansborg’s inventory slaves at work on the new plantation a mile or so from the fort. He again raised the idea that experienced workers should be brought in from the West Indies. Peder Meyer was reported to have started a large new plantation near Christiansborg; the colonial office’s abstract noted that he was the only private citizen on the coast who had so far demonstrated any interest in plantations. It was recorded that he owned many slaves and employed them daily in this work. The Council enclosed a small sample of scarlet cotton that Wrisberg had obtained from an English captain; he had in vain offered a reward to anyone who could provide him with the seed of it. The Council asked the Chamber of Customs to have this sample analyzed to determine whether it was in fact cotton, “or whether, if not, [it] perhaps is a kind of silk, which it seems to resemble”. (It was noted in Copenhagen that no such sample had in fact arrived with the letter.) The Council also reported that a little coffee had been planted near Christiansborg, but that the trees were still too young to bear. Indigo “would be cultivable at some profit, if there were anyone who understood its cultivation and had the necessary machines”. The Council also sent in a bale of cotton, cleaned by hand, some of it from Flindt’s plantation Frederikssted and some from the new plantation near

65 GJ 415/1798, Governor and Council, Christiansborg, February 13, 1798, copies at GJS 35/1799 and among papers collected by the Guinea Commission at GJS 144/1828. 66 GJ 415/1798, the Council on the coast, May 4, 1798, journaled at the Chamber of Customs on November 29, the best part of seven months later. The Guinea Commission labeled this Designation IV, Letter C, and the original is now filed at GJS144/1828; there is a copy at GJS 35/1799. africa in the atlantic world: guinea plantations 91

Christiansborg, which had been given the name Frederiksberg (which was also the name of one of the royal residences and the surrounding park on what at the time were the outskirts of Copenhagen). This cotton arrived, via the West Indies, early in 1799, and the Chamber sent two pounds each of white and yellow cotton to the Commerce Collegium for its opinion.67 The following year, the Commerce Collegium reported that the samples had been carded and spun at the Usserød cotton mill and found to be of particularly good quality, especially the yellow, from which excellent nankeens could be manufactured.68 In May, 1799, the Slave-trade Commission, having mulled over the Council’s arguments regarding the forts, declared in a communication to the Chamber of Customs that it found these so compelling that it advised the Chamber to propose to the king that the closing of the forts should be postponed for the time being.69 This the Chamber immediately did, and on June 12, 1799, the royal order closing the forts was suspended.70

67 GJ 6/1799, the West Indian administration, October 27, 1798. 68 GJ 18/1800, Kommercekollegiet, May 13, 1800, and ad GJ 18/1800, Watt, May 2, 1800. 69 GJ 19/1799, the Slave-trade Commission, May 10, 1799. 70 GJ 41/1799, royal resolution, June 12, 1799.

PART TWO

SCIENCE AND COLONIALISM: PETER THONNING’S EXPEDITION

CHAPTER FOUR

PETER THONNING’S AFRICAN SOJOURN AND THE FORMATION OF HIS COLONIAL VIEWS

Three weeks after the regent rescinded his order to close fort Christiansborg, the Chamber of Customs wrote to a “Hr. Tonning” [sic] to offer him an unusual commission, he having declared himself “willing to undertake for the Chamber a scientific journey to the Danish possessions on the coast of Guinea for two years to investigate and collect their natural products, particularly such as could become the objects of European trade”.1 No prior exchange with Thonning is recorded in the Chamber’s correspondence journals or copy-books: no application for a position, no letters of reference have been found. The initial contact had almost certainly been made through Niels Tønder Lund, who, in his positions at the Chamber and on the Slave-trade Commission, can be assumed to have had very considerable influence on colonial policy.2 Tønder Lund was also apparently in a position to see to it that the man sent out to Africa in this scientific and colonial errand should have come up through the Danish school of economic natural history he had had a hand in founding ten years before. Thonning was the youngest member—the “Benjamin”—of a circle of entomologists, all associated with the Natural History Society, who assembled regularly at Tønder Lund’s home. Thonning is reported to have harbored fond recollections of these gatherings, even forty years later.3 Tønder Lund’s daughter [born in 1800] recalled the distinguished scientists who came to see her father’s collection. “It was at that time my greatest pleasure to sit on the one end of Father’s great desk and see the lovely, many-colored, strangely formed insects and hear Father tell me their strange characteristics”, while he took notes and brushed the specimens with spirits. She remembered the rows of insects on pins in their

1 VI kopibog, to Thonning, July 2, 1799. See Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 308–309. 2 J.W. Hornemann, “Om de danske, norske og holstenske botanikere og botanikens yndere, som have nydt den ære, at deres navne ere blevne tillagte planteslægter til erindring om dem”, Naturhistoriske Tidskrift, Series 1, Vol. 1, 1837, pp. 550–597, on p. 579; “Lund, Niels Tønder”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 2nd. ed. 3 Kai Henriksen, apparently on the authority of one of Peter Thonning’s descendants, p. 105. 96 chapter four cases, a glass lid over every drawer; her father received insects from all over the world, in boxes wrapped in leather and full of camphor.4 The Chamber of Customs’s formal representation to the crown regarding Thonning’s expedition to the Guinea Coast laid out the circumstances in these terms:5 It is well known that negroes are almost the only object of the trade on the Guinea Coast and the establishments there at the present time. [As the abolition of this trade approaches,] the more urgently it becomes the Chamber’s duty to turn its attention to what other benefit the Fatherland can derive from the expensive establishments that it now has on the coast and can only with difficulty abandon. But to find such new branches of sustenance and trade it is first necessary that the coast and the country near the coast be known through more and other reports than it now is. In an age of national programs of topographic mapping,6 when coastal sailing directions were being composed and canals dug,7 when ancient agricultural patterns on the land were being rearranged,8 when the society’s best-placed found it urgent to explore more rationally the nation’s relationship with the natural world, when governments were in general expanding the range of their official interests and investments and tight- ening their technical, political, and intellectual grip on their domains and landscapes, the sense in the central administration was that it was operating more or less in the dark on the Guinea Coast, although there had been Danish forts and lodges there for generations. “Hitherto the negroes have only through the slave trade obtained the manufactured products of Europe and the civilized peoples”, the Chamber’s representation to the king went on; But now that these have become necessities for them, it follows that they will not be able to do without them when the only avenue by which they hitherto obtained them is stopped up. They will thus be compelled to apply

4 Anna Holst (née Tønder Lund), Bedstemors erindringer, Royal Library, Ny Kgl. Saml. 4° 3279. 5 GTK, Vestindiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner for 1799 og 1800, Nos. 34a and 34b, representation, August 21, 1799, resolution October 2, 1799. 6 See Asger Lomholt, Landmaaling og fremstilling af kort under bestyrelse af Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab 1761–1843, Vol. 4 of Det Kongelig Danske Videnskabernes Selskab 1742–1942, samlinger til selskabets historie (Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, I kommission hos Ejnar Munksgaard, 1961). 7 H. Ravn, Det kongelige danske Søkort-Arkiv 1784– 22. Oktober-1934 (Copenhagen: Søkort- Arkivet, 1934), p. 15; “Ejderkanal”, Salmonsens konversationsleksikon, 2nd ed. 8 Roger J.P. Kain and Elizabeth Baigent, The cadastral map in the service of the state (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 83–88. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 97

themselves to other means of their acquisition, if such is only made available to them, and it is thus likely that the negroes’ diligent collaboration in the collection, preparation, and exportation of natural Guinean products can be counted on. The government’s investment in Isert’s and von Rohr’s expeditions had, by bad fortune, come to nothing, but “the Chamber has not on that account thought that it should abandon a matter of such significant importance for the culture of those regions, for commerce, and for the welfare and glory of the Fatherland”. The Chamber therefore wished to send to the coast a competent naturalist who … would occupy himself solely with visiting the areas, seeking out plants, animals, rock, and other natural products on and near the coast, collecting them, experimenting with them, and sending home for closer scientific investigation such thereof as he presumed … could become the objects of commerce of any kind. The Chamber informed the regent that one Peter Thonning had been found to have the background, the desire, the constitution, and the wit to undertake such an assignment; negotiations with him were already in hand. It would be necessary to pay him well, for the Chamber would not want a scientist on such a mission to be distracted by financial concerns. Furthermore, he would have to be supported for a time upon his return home, “for the aforenamed Thonning now, in traveling, will be altogether torn away from the career he is presently embarked upon and from the prospects he has hitherto had here at home”. The Chamber of Customs submitted to the crown a copy of the instructions Tønder Lund had already drawn up for Thonning.9 He would be called upon to: In general collect and send here new or remarkable plants, animals, and other natural products whereby natural history can be enriched, dried or preserved in spirits if necessary, together with such remarks and observations thereupon as he might find occasion to make…. But in particular, to observe which of these natural products are of such kind, as now are items of commerce or consumption in Europe, or resemble these and thus could be set in their stead. It is thus wished investigated, [for example,] which of the trees growing wild by the coast and in the vicinity of the River Volta could, depending on the fineness, hardness, softness, color, fragrance, or other qualities of their wood, advantageously serve for cabinet-, sculpted, or other useful work.

9 VI kopibog, July 16, 1799, ad No. 481, to the Council on the coast. 98 chapter four

The Chamber was especially interested in dye woods, “with which a few small experiments could be made there on the spot”; in trees that might yield gums and resins; and in the camphor tree or any other tree of significance to the materia medica. They were interested in indigo and whatever other dye plants might be found there in quantity, in “wild-growing cotton varieties”, and in “any form of Saccharum to be found wild there”. They wished to learn what aromatics grew there—ginger, peppers, or any other plants that “could yield Simplicia useful to apothecaries”. Thonning was to determine if the grasses, “millet, rice, etc., can yield grains useful for human nourishment in such quality and quantity that they would repay cultivation and transport here” and “whether any product of the animal kingdom might become an article of trade, f. ex. skins and hides, wool, hair, wax, the various products of Coccus and Chermes, etc.”10 He was to study minerals, including useful clays and saltpeter. Samples and reports were to be sent home with every ship bound for the West Indies or direct for Europe. Any particularly useful new information was to be imparted directly to the Council on the coast: Specimens of the plants, [and] their appellation by the negroes … must be communicated to the Council, so that it, also in the future, will be able to recognize and distinguish them. You will also inform the Council of the method of preparing indigo, and of the result of your experiments with each sort of the wild-growing Indigoferæ. Finally, Thonning was admonished, “You will keep a careful journal of all your observations and investigations”. It is notable that there is no word here of European agricultural colonization; nor did Tønder Lund project any general interest in the physical and human geography of the Danish African enclave in these orders. The regime’s African colonial ambitions, such as they were, were undoubtedly conveyed to Thonning in conversation. As for broader geographical studies, it may be that Tønder Lund operated on the presumption, perhaps quite unconscious, that Thonning was well versed in the broad economic and geographic traditions of Linnaean natural history promoted by the Natural History Society.11

10 These insects yielded the crimson dyes of the Old and New worlds, cochineal and kermes: “Cochineal”, in Alan Davidson, The Oxford companion to food (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 11 See Koerner, Linnaeus: nature and nation, pp. 115, 118. I am grateful to Peter Wagner for suggesting this. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 99

Thonning, the son of a general practitioner of medicine in Copenhagen, was then twenty-three years old. As he accounted for himself at this time in a résumé prepared ten years later, at the end of 1809,12 he had taken his Examen artium and Examen philologicum and philosophicum, with the highest marks, in 1794 and 1795. I determined thereafter to study medicine and surgery; to this end I frequented the public lectures and wards of Friderich’s Hospital to obtain, under the instructive guidance of Professor Schumacher, the necessary practical proficiency, by personally laying hands on the work.13 The Professor, who is science’s true friend and servant, sought with the most liberal unselfishness to ease my work, accommodating me in one of his rooms in the Hospital’s buildings. The many points of contact between medicine and surgery and the natural sciences gradually led me somewhat deeper into the latter than is professionally necessary, to which the Professor’s excellent natural history collections and wide knowledge of natural history contributed especially; I also owe a great deal to Professor Vahl’s guidance, especially in the subject of botany. Thonning had been “almost prepared” to take his surgeon’s examination, he wrote, when the Chamber of Customs approached him. The Chamber of Customs offered Thonning very attractive terms: he was to be given eight hundred rigsdaler a year (of which five hundred would be advanced to him immediately for “the purchase of necessaries”), free passage to and from Africa, and the prospect of as much as another year’s salary upon his return if his work was found satisfactory. “Your reply is requested”, the Chamber wrote, “and you can thereafter expect to be communicated more detailed instructions regarding the particular aim of your journey”.14 In July, after some negotiation, Thonning accepted the terms offered him,15 and he was immediately ordered to prepare to embark for Africa; passage had been reserved for him in a ship making ready to sail for the coast the following month.16 A draft of the instructions drawn up by

12 Rtk. 2214.86, P. Thonning, 1809, Copenhagen, December 20, 1809. 13 RA, Københavns Universitet, Kirurgisk Akademi, “Matricul-Protocoll”, 1785–1839, on p. 29, among the entries for 1797, is P. Thonning, “Student og Volonteur ved Frid. Hospital”. 14 VI kopibog, to Thonning, July 2, 1799. 15 GJ 51/1799, Thonning, [Friderich’s Hospital,] July 6, 1799, filed in Uafgjorte Forestillinger 1822–31, Studiosus Chirurgiæ Thonnings videnskabelige Reise til Kysten Guinea. 16 VI kopibog, to Thonning, July 16, 1799, and, on the same date, to the Council on the coast. Action was here being taken before the regent’s formal approval had been recorded: Thonning was engaged in July, the Chamber’s representation to the king was made on August 12th, and the king’s signature is dated October 2, 1799. The discrepancy is presumably merely due to bureaucratic exigencies. 100 chapter four

Tønder Lund was conveyed to him, and he was informed that a copy of this document had been sent that day to the Council on the coast with orders that he was to be assisted in the execution of his charge in every way possible. The Council would disburse his salary. He was to be assigned rooms in Fort Christiansborg and provided with the necessary number of fort slaves to assist him. He was to be given introductions to the neighboring caboceers, and transport within the territory was to be arranged for him. He was to remain in Africa for two years, although he was free to leave the coast sooner if his health required it. The Council on the coast was enjoined to receive and preserve whatever reports and information Thonning provided them and to report separately on these matters as they found advisable. The Council was to attend to the forwarding of anything Thonning saw fit to send to Europe. If Thonning were to die, the Council was to return his papers, collections, and journal to the Chamber of Customs. There was a great deal of news of the colonial world in the air at this period, and it seems likely that the young scientist fell on it eagerly as he prepared himself for his great adventure. It was already ten years since Isert’s influential memoir had been published; in 1797 and 1798 Frederik Thaarup, the historian, statistician, and civil servant, had published Danish translations of nine official documents in German regarding Isert’s colonial undertaking, including Isert’s last report on the founding of his colony. Thaarup also published the text of the coast administration’s response in 1774 to Henning Bargum’s angry inquiry and a long essay on the establishments written by Andreas Bjørn in 1788, when Isert and his party were still on their way to the coast and before he himself was appointed governor. This was a large amount of fresh African colonial information that was suddenly laid before the Danish reading public. Thaarup gave no indication of how the documents had reached him, but it is unlikely that he could have published the material without the administration’s acquiescence and assistance.17 Bjørn’s informative and wide-ranging geographical sketch worked east, fort by fort, down the length of the enclave from Accra. Bjørn reported that

17 Thaarup, Archiv for statistik, pp. 162–268. Years later (in his Udførlig vejledning, Vol. 6, p. 696), Thaarup thanked Philip Rosenstand-Goiske, the head of the Chamber of Customs’s colonial office, for providing him with official information regarding the history of the ban on the slave trade, and it is possible that these documents published in the 1790s also came to him from Rosenstand-Goiske, who had fought staunchly for the ban: Loftin, pp. 247–254; Kringelbach, Den civiladministrations embedsetat, p. 196. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 101

Accra was one of the most “considerable” towns on the Gold Coast. He expressed the greatest respect for its people, their laws, and the efficacy of the administration. The people lived by “commerce, agriculture, fishing, hunting, and also salt-making at the little river at that place called Crohte-lie-lie”.18 Fort Christiansborg supported the local fishers through the off season and received in return every tenth fish caught during the “Sinkesue” season. Bjørn recommended that the fort should normally be manned by a hundred male inventory slaves, who should have wives provided them by the company. There should be among them three smiths, “3 carpenters, 2 coopers, 2 gunsmiths, 10 stonebreakers, 20 masons, 50 paddlers and boatmen, and 10 hammock bearers”; all of these should be paid their stipends monthly.19 Akuapem, “a blessed land of an abundance of grain and fruits”, supplied Accra with grain and produce. The merchants of Asante and Akyem were obliged to pass through Akuapem to reach Accra on the coast, and the king of Asante kept an ambassador there.20 The people of Tessing [Teshi], a little way along the coast, where the Danes were building a small fort, Augustaborg, were by birth from the intervening town of Labadi but had come here for its convenience to the fishery; there might be two hundred and fifty arms-bearing men here. They had for a time been allied with the Dutch. At Tema, a few miles farther along the beach, Bjørn recommended building another small fort.21 Still farther down the coast, the Ponny [Kpone] River, unlike many other streams along this stretch, always maintained its outfall into the sea. (This is a sandy coast, and strong currents alongshore constantly create, reshape, and remove bars, spits, and barrier islands.) The Ponny was actually a barrier to communications, however, because the local fetish forbade the use of canoes on its waters. It was full of delicate fish and oysters, which, together with agriculture, sustained the inhabitants.22 The stream at Ningo, which was not always open to the sea, was exploited for its fish and salt. The people here were also good farmers and,

18 “Bjørns Beretning 1788 om de danske Forter og Negerier”, in Thaarup’s Archiv for statistik, pp. 193–230, on pp. 196–197, 199. On salt, see Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 27–28. 19 “Bjørns Beretning”, p. 199. 20 Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, p. 258, describes this representative of the Asante regent as a “minister”; he assesses the status of such men in the Asante government on pp. 421–422; Kwamena-Poh, pp. 82–83, calls them “residents” or “envoys”. 21 “Bjørns Beretning”, pp. 204–206. 22 “Bjørns Beretning”, p. 208. 102 chapter four in particular, hunters, for there was much game here. Fort Fredensborg, Bjørn remarked, was well defended by “prikkelbær”, or prickly-pear cactus.23 Ten or fifteen miles inland, the Krobo, an Adangme people, had found a secure refuge among mountains and cliffs.24 There were caves large enough to hold a hundred families. It was a fruitful land and the local crops “grow more abundantly than anywhere else on the Gold Coast, but these people, in Bjørn’s characterization, were a “thievish nation”.25 The construction of Fort Kongenssteen, at Ada, on the Volta, was proceeding slowly, as stone and lime had to be brought down from Mlefi, a dozen miles up the river. Bjørn recommended building another fort to protect the actual mouth of the river and to keep the peace between the Ada people, on the west bank, and the Anlo. Ada was one of the best sources of slaves on the Gold Coast: the people of many lands were brought down the river from Mlefi by canoe. The Danes had had a trade factory at Togbloku in the 1720s, Bjørn related, but had moved it to Ada Island, in the river itself. The Volta was said to rise in Nubia; the river was thick with game, fish, fowl, crocodiles, sea elephants, and venomous snakes. A great deal of salt was produced here.26 The people of Agraffi (Agave),27 up the river, were regarded as allies of the Danes. The easternmost fort, Prindsenssteen, on which work had begun in 1784, would when complete be the most substantial fort on the Gold Coast, Bjørn said, but the work was hampered by the lack of wood and stone there. Trade could conveniently be carried on here with the Qvahu [or Kwawu, as well as other spellings] and other peoples of the interior, of whom Bjørn admitted he knew little. The fort was built on a long barrier island, with an arm of the Volta behind it, and not much agriculture could be conducted there. The people “live from fishing, salt-making, trade, cattle-raising”. There were fish, shrimp, oysters, and game in plenty, but grain and other produce had to be traded for.28 The Government’s report to Bargum in 1774, which Thaarup now published,29 also contained a certain amount of ethnographic detail, although

23 “Bjørns Beretning”, pp. 209–210. 24 See Dickson, pp. 27, 60, and Ward, p. 57. 25 “Bjørns Beretning”, p. 210; see Kea, “ ‘I am here to plunder on the general road’ ”, p. 124. 26 See Dickson, pp. 86–87. 27 See Grove and Johansen, p. 1385, note 2. 28 “Bjørns Beretning”, pp. 212–220. 29 “Ærbødigst giensvar paa S.T. Hr. Hoveddirecteur Henr. Fr. Bargums notice under 23 Juli a. p. (1773) tilsendt gouvernementet ved skrivelse af 22de ejusdem”, signed Aarestrup, science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 103 the officers had professed to know little of the Africans’ social arrangements. Their houses, some round and some square, were quite small, and without ceilings, because it was cooler that way; the people slept on reed mats. They liked a small fire at night, partly for warmth but partly for the smoke, which drove out insects; “the Europeans, who cannot stand the smoke, are much plagued by the insects”. The Africans had rifles, leopardskin cartridge bags, brass bowls, and knives and other utensils. Bargum’s government did not find the Africans very sociable: “each has his own, and each tends to his own affairs”. At gatherings by moonlight, however, singing and dancing to the drums, “lust itself and the depraved life they lead reveal themselves in a way that says that nothing is indecent”. The Danish slavers regarded the Africans as utterly faithless. They had no particular, organized religion that anybody knew of for hundreds of miles inland, although they acknowledged an almighty god and creator; they cultivated fetishes, which the Government described in some detail. They relied in their legal disputes on various barbarous supernatural trials and proofs. They had no king, so far as the Danes were aware, but the king of Asante claimed dominion over all these lands.30 Much news of Europe’s colonies and the wider world was brought to that portion of the Danish populace that concerned itself with affairs beyond its own parochial bounds by the Handels- og Industrie-Tidende (the Trade and Industry News), both of whose editors in 1799 were Commerce Collegium officials.31 Most of it was foreign news, picked up from papers published elsewhere in Europe. In the course of 1799 the Handelstidende ran items on rumors that the Isle de France (Mauritius) had declared itself independent;32 on the fate of seized Danish vessels in English prize courts; on the accuracy of modern ships’ clocks;33 on the prices of Levantine commodities such as Smyrna cotton and bay leaves at Trieste and of Riga hemp, peas, oats, and other Baltic products at Gothenburg;34 on efforts to produce sugar from beets in Berlin, Paris, and Copenhagen;35 on the building of an inland canal at the Cape of Good

Bjørn, Kjøge, Gjønge, Rasmussen, June 8, 1774, in Thaarup’s Archiv for statistik, pp. 161–192. See the good historical geographical use made of this material by Grove and Johansen, pp. 1387–1389. 30 “Ærbødigst giensvar”, pp. 173–177, 183. 31 C.G. Rafn and C.F. Schmidt-Phiseldek: Handels- og Industrie- Tidende, No. 78, September 30, 1799; Søllinge and Thomsen, Vol. 1, p. 119. 32 Handels- og Industrie- Tidende, No. 7, January 21, 1799. 33 Handels- og Industrie- Tidende, No. 9, January 28, 1799. 34 Handels- og Industrie- Tidende, No. 10, Febr. 1, 1799. 35 Handels- og Industrie- Tidende, No. 14, Febr. 15, 1799; No. 51, June 28, 1799. 104 chapter four

Hope, where the Dutch, “even under those distant skies, have not been able to renounce their nature”;36 on an epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia;37 on the tremendous growth of plantation production in Demerara and Essequibo;38 on the history of the English East India Company;39 on the emancipation of slaves in Massachusetts;40 and on the apparent impossibility, illustrated by recent events in the Americas, of maintaining colonies in distant lands.41 There was an article on the commodities most in demand in North America and on the skills that would enable a man to get ahead; the richest and most refined would not care much for the life there, and no speculator could expect to become rich overnight, but an “enterprising class of agriculturalists, craftsmen, and manufacturers … can foresee for themselves a high degree of prosperity after some years industrious endeavor”.42 There was a piece on Madeira, going back to its discovery in 1419, in Portugal’s “golden age, when this brave nation opened hitherto unknown harbors to Europe’s shipping and trade, and crowned its proud undertakings by sailing around the Cape of Good Hope”, with the result that the East India trade “was torn loose from the monopoly of the small Italian republics”.43 In January and February, 1799, the paper ran a report on Wadström’s Essay on colonisation particularly applied to the Western Coast of Africa.44 New establishments were being attempted on a fresh economic basis in Sierra Leone, as well as in New South Wales. The intent in West Africa, as the Handelstidende represented it, was that “the colonists should cultivate the earth and by their example incline the negroes to farming and civilization, whereby there would be opened to them a rich source of prosperity”; as a result, “the negroes would no longer need to sell their brothers to provide themselves with European goods…. [S]everal of the so-called colonial articles are described to be domestic products of Sierra Leone”. Travelers had also reported coffee plants on the Guinea Coast, “and Postlethway[t] reports in his commercial dictionary that the tea plant, already at the beginning of this century, was known and cultivated in the area of Cape

36 Handels- og Industrie- Tidende, No. 15, Febr. 18, 1799. 37 Handels- og Industrie- Tidende, No. 16, Febr. 22, 1799. 38 Handels- og Industrie- Tidende, No. 22, March 15, 1799. 39 Handels- og Industrie- Tidende, No. 37, May 10, 1799. 40 Handels- og Industrie- Tidende, No. 43, May 31, 1799. 41 Handels- og Industrie- Tidende, No. 57, July 19, 1799. 42 Handels- og Industrie- Tidende, No. 74, September 16, 1799. 43 Handels- og Industrie- Tidende, No. 12, Febr. 8, 1799. 44 Handels- og Industrie- Tidende, No. 8, January 25, No. 13, Febr. 11, 1799. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 105

Coast Castle on the same coast”.45 It was remarkable that Europeans had taken so little interest in “investigating a nearby continent that with far less trouble and expense could have supplied them with the aforementioned necessities” and had indeed resorted to trafficking in slaves in order to cultivate elsewhere in the world the things that were naturally produced here. “If only Sierra Leone becomes the means whereby things are brought back to their natural order! then Europe and especially England by the creation of this colony will have expiated a portion of their ancient offense”. Wadström’s passages on the Danish colonial efforts were abstracted at some length; the paper reproduced Wadström’s various inac- curacies, but the report served well enough to convey that Denmark’s colonial project on the coast was of a piece with all these others and was making promising progress. Perhaps carrying some of this current colonial baggage with him, Peter Thonning sailed from Copenhagen in September, 1799.46 He gives an account of the voyage in the only letter to his family from Africa known to survive; this was sent to his parents about a month after he arrived on the Guinea Coast.47 The ship had made its offing from the Norwegian coast on October 1 and was then five weeks, in stormy weather, working down the North Sea into the English Channel. Somewhere beyond the Bay of Biscay the ship was stopped by a privateer under the French flag, whom Thonning was sure must actually be English, for the privateer thought Thonning spoke very good French. They were stopped again by a Spaniard and yet again, near the Canaries, by another Frenchman, who boarded them “perfectly à la Corsair”. This pirate insisted on going through the entire cargo and, having found thirty pounds of Liverpool tobacco, was only with difficulty dissuaded from seizing the ship. “The warmth increased daily”, Thonning wrote, “and everyone’s health began to improve”. The drinking water cleared up, in time, although the cabin fare never improved. On December 21, they raised the coast of Africa at about Cape Mesurado, in what is today Liberia, and on January 12, 1800, the ship anchored off Fort Christiansborg.

45 On Malachy Postlethwayt and his Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, see Deryck W. Holdsworth, “The counting-house library: creating mercantile knowledge in the age of sail”, in Geographies of the Book, pp. 133–156, on pp. 142–146. 46 Rtk. 2214.86, P. Thonning, 1809, Copenhagen, December 20, 1809. 47 Royal Library, Copenhagen, manuscript collection, Nyere Brevsamling, Dansk, XVII, Thonning, Fortet Christiansborg i Africa d. 17 Febr. 1800. The letter was published in 1923, with little comment, by I. C. H. Thonning, a descendant, under the title “Fra gamle Dage”, in Tidsskrift for Søvæsenet, Vol. 94, 1923, pp. 344–49. 106 chapter four

Thonning professed himself delighted by his new situation: greedily I roam the fields every morning; now a plant, now a bird, now an insect is the object of my cupidity. The day is spent in studying and ordering my captures, and the evening is whiled away in a small but brotherly company. The heat, the stifling heat, as they scream in Europe, is not so dreadful; one stays in at midday, and the fort is very cool. The way of life is elegant, one gets up at 5 o’cl., drinks tea and coffee at 6 o’cl., eats twice a day, viz., at 10 o’cl. and 4, both times European meals in abundance, in the evening at 7 o’cl. one drinks tea again, and then punch, grog, wine, porter, or pytto (negro-beer) until 11 o’cl., when each goes his way. Thus we don’t live quite so Hottentotish here as our good countrymen think. “I keep two negroes as servants”, he wrote. “One can have these folk for a bagatelle, and they do everything, even the washing and ironing”. He had no expenses for food and drink, for he dined at the governor’s table; “in short, I am living on rather a large footing”. He passed on a bit of war news that had come his way and said he hoped to be able to send home “some new officinals which will merit my father’s attention”. He had wished to write more, but an opportune ship was to sail the next day, and he was obliged to close. He asked that his special greetings and thanks be conveyed to Professor Schumacher. The archival record of Thonning’s sojourn in Africa is scattered and incomplete.48 In his 1809 résumé, Thonning relates that in the English bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, four years after his return home, “I suffered the irretrievable loss that my whole Guinean collection of naturalia and almost all of my Guinean and scientific drafts were burned up with my dwelling”.49 His reports to the Chamber of Customs from Africa are preserved, but the scientific journal he was enjoined to keep is nowhere to be found. Thonning wrote the Chamber of Customs a matter of a dozen letters from Africa, but, taken all together, they do not amount to a coherent narrative record of his work; a firm chronological account of his time on the coast cannot be reconstructed in much detail. The Guinea Commission’s archives, however, contain a considerable amount of manuscript material, none of it in finished form, that apparently dates to the years Thonning spent on the coast. These old African

48 C. D. Adams, in “Activities of Danish botanists in Guinea 1783–1850”, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, Vol. 3, Pt. I, 1957, pp. 30–46, on p. 38, states: “Thonning seems to have written little about the coast. We know of his journeys only through the annotations of his collections concerning the places in which they were made”. He published little, indeed, but in fact he wrote a fair amount. 49 Rtk. 2214.86, P. Thonning, Copenhagen, December 20, 1809. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 107 notes include three fragments in rather loose journal form: these may be the beginnings of attempts to extract a narrative account from the journal he had been ordered to keep.50 The tone of the entries is a trifle studied in places, but the notes are on the whole direct, informative, and evocative. The earliest of these fragments, which covers the whole of 1800 in a few very roughly written pages,51 opens on January 12, the day Thonning arrived at Christiansborg. “The fort has from the sea an impressive but not regular appearance”, he wrote. He had to make do with a single room in the fort until Governor Wrisberg left the coast early in February for a visit to Denmark, leaving Johan Ahnholm in charge.52 Until that time I examined few plants, but mostly made myself familiar with the area, as much as the prevailing season of the oriental allowed—the plants are also so dried out by the latter that very few had flowers. Thonning was immediately confronted with the terrifying mortality that prevailed among the European on the coast: disease was abroad in the fort. On February 5th, a Dr. John Clexton (or Claxton) died at Christians borg. Thonning purchased a box of paints at the auction of Clexton’s estate, for ten times the estimated value, as well as a writing case with a lock and key, a small mahogany table, a teapot and four unmatched cups, and a water pitcher. (Figure 5) Very little was manufactured here, and European household wares of all descriptions tended to circulate endlessly in the establishments, and at high prices; the nearest shops were half a year away. A clarinet, a thermometer, a gold-dust scale, a twenty- volume universal history, and a couple of lots of other unspecified books were among the unfortunate Clexton’s effects. Peder Meyer purchased a grandfather clock from the estate. A couple of weeks later Thonning bought a tea kettle, five plates, and an old suitcase at another of these sad but doubtless popular affairs.53 Thonning did not himself escape illness. He was soon “bedridden with the illness of the country for eight days, quite hard taken”. His strength only very slowly came back to him, and, hoping the change of air would do him good, he accompanied interim governor Ahnholm to Keta, at the far

50 See Poul Olsen’s “Supplement” in Scandinavians in Africa, pp. 110–120, on p. 118. 51 GK III, Geografiske Noticer, Kasserede Udkast til Kort over Danske Guinea, Adskilligt ang. Reisetourer i Guinea, notes dating from January 12 to December 21, [1800]. 52 Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 180; Larsen, p. 137. 53 Diverse Arkivalier fra Guinea, Auktions- og Skifteprotokol, 1800–1812, Pakke No. 63, book opened January 29, 1800, Dr. John Ecroide Clexton, dead February 5, and Halvor Lather, warehouse assistant, dead March 13, 1800. 108 chapter four

Fig. 5. Claxton, watercolor view of Fort Prindsenssteen, 1799, detail. Labelled on front “Fredensborg” but on the back, in English, “Quittah Fort, by Claxton, 1799”. RAKTS, Rtk. 337, 719. (By courtesy of the Danish National Archives.) end of the territory, to formally install Christian Schiønning as commandant at Fort Prindsenssteen.54 They traveled overland in hammocks down the coast to Fredensborg and then sailed with a passing ship around Cape St. Paul to Keta. There Thonning took note of a small planting of young sugar cane: “It is said to achieve a height of 10–12 feet, and the thickness of a wrist. The ground in which it grows is low, very sandy, cut through with canals to lead the water off”. It was said “not to have the sweetness as some that is cultivated in the fertile fields several miles [north] of Xborg”. He found indigo growing in quantity, and here his entry breaks to refer to a botanical description elsewhere in his notes. Close to Fort Prinsenssteen there is a little piece of ground of excellent quality, which is used as a garden. Otherwise the character of the earth is very sandy here, with a little mold, and here and there clayey; especially in the vicinity of Thebe, about [six English miles] southwest of Quitta [Keta], a kind of clay earth mixed with sand is dug, which, dried in the air, takes on

54 GK III, Geografiske Noticer, Kasserede Udkast til Kort over Danske Guinea, Adskilligt ang. Reisetourer i Guinea, Thonning’s notes dating from January 12 to December 21, [1800]. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 109

almost the hardness of stone. A portion of Fort Prinsensteen is said to be built with such stone. I did not find particularly notable plants here. “Said to be”: Thonning repeatedly resorts to this general attribution, as does many another European reporting from the coast, no doubt, and due note should be taken of it everywhere it occurs. Thonning in this manner implicitly acknowledges, even as he appropriates, the experience, ideas, beliefs, and, in general, the local authority of unnamed interlocutors, some of them identifiable, most others not, whose own voices are now forever still. Thonning was never alone here: someone—black or white—was always at hand to point things out to him, to answer his questions, to supply the local names of plants, and to interpret and amplify upon everything he saw and heard. There survive only snatches and echoes of innumerable exchanges—with his personal servants, the other Africans in the forts, and his interpreters; with the old coasters that formed his immediate social circle; with the people of all stations he encountered in his peregrinations about the territory.55 Almost everyone he came into contact with here will have understood that he was a privileged reporter, the king’s scientist, and not just another slave trader or some mildly interested traveler: he was, in effect, the agent of the Danish Slave-trade Commission, which had shaken colonial society to its foundations, both here in Africa and in the West Indies. It is likely that the enclave focused its attention rather closely on the young naturalist, at least for a time. His impressions and his reports are for this reason alone of particular interest. Thonning’s notes are not introspective, and in most of what survives he projects scientific reserve rather than romantic transports of enthusiasm; but everything he did and saw and heard and tasted and smelled now was overwhelmingly foreign and interesting. Sixteen years before, Isert had recorded his first reaction in these terms: God! how wonderfully different I found this world from that which I left 16 weeks ago. A new sky, a new earth, new people, animals and plants! Everything around me here is beautiful, remarkably beautiful! But maybe only because it is new?56 Peoples and languages and economies met and mingled here in the towns and forts between the imponderable vastness and cultural complexity

55 The journal of the Swedish naturalist Adam Afzelius in Sierra Leone a few years before, by contrast, is an extraordinarily complete record of the daily experience of such a visitor: Adam Afzelius, Sierra Leone journal 1795–1796, Alexander Peter Kup, ed. (Uppsala: Inst. för Jämförande Etnografi, 1967). 56 Letters on West Africa, p. 28. 110 chapter four of the interior of Africa and the seaways to all the world. This was, moreover, a literate and self-aware colonial society, however circumscribed. The Europeans here were by no means ignorant of the literature of the history and geography of West Africa and the plantation Atlantic,57 but another, even more lively, more urgent and personal history had also to be imparted to the young newcomer, a unique fabric, already old, of both local and trans-Atlantic experience, tradition, myth, and variously-motivated—if not idle—prevarication. Any intelligent, experienced, and articulate person here will have had a tremendous influence on the young man’s thinking. So very many of the Europeans who came to the coast died within a short time that men like Schiønning, who had come to Africa in the late 1780s and had apparently never left again,58 and Peder Meyer, who had been here for more than twenty years,59 represented extraordinary repositories of experience. These men, in the course of their business dealings, had their news from thousands of miles up and down the coast, from some smaller distance into the interior, and from across the wide Atlantic.60 The intimacy of these men’s acquaintance with Africa naturally stands in the strongest contrast to the experience of a Count Schimmelmann, for example, of officials at the Chamber of Customs, of anyone in a position to influence African colonial affairs in Copenhagen. Thonning’s career carried him through both spheres, and he was for the rest of his life a peculiarly well- placed intermediary between them. He was subjected to a barrage of information and sensation there on the coast: a world was taking shape in his mind, beneath his feet, under his skin, in his plant presses and speci- men jars, in his notes, and in the map he appears to have begun to compile in his first year on the coast. The seasoned old slave traders who were his companions here imparted to it all historical depth, geographical coherence, and cultural definition—in short, meaning.

57 To a certain degree, the establishments’ collective bibliography can be reconstructed from probate and other records. Besides the probate records in Diverse Arkivalier fra Guinea, Bundle 63, Auktions- og Skifteprotokol, 1800–1812, see, for example, ad GJ 604/1825, Peder Meyers Skiftebrev, Christiansborg, May 26, 1824. See Hopkins, “Books, geography and Denmark’s colonial undertaking in West Africa”. 58 GJS 1221/1811, Schiønning, February 3, 1809; GJS 1081/1809, Schiønning, February 4, 1809. 59 FJ ad No. 2129/1805, Peder Meyer, Ussue Bye, December 24, 1803; H. C. Monrad, Bidrag til en skildring af Guinea-Kysten og dens indbyggere (Copenhagen: printed by Andreas Seidelin, 1822), p. 323. 60 Henry Meredith, An account of the Gold Coast of Africa (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1812), pp. 198–199, 223, 226–29. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 111

Thonning spent several weeks at Keta, the earliest fragment of his chronological notes records, and traveled back west along the coast and across the Volta to Fort Kongenssteen early in April. He collected in the vicinity of the fort and on the islands in the river for a couple of weeks. A fragment from the fort’s books itemizes the expense of his porters and canoe-men; it appears that besides his two servants, Thonning traveled with as many as eleven men.61 “The bush is very unhealthy”, he wrote. “In the time I resided here, there prevailed an intermittent fever, but which was not dangerous, and an eye inflammation, which eventually could be driven out by the exterior application of dry camphor [spread] on a cloth”. It was painful if it got the upper hand. “I was myself attacked by it but got rid of it quickly, but when I became aware of a general indisposition, I hastened to leave this place and traveled to Xborg”. The two surgeons then in the establishments were both very willing to assist him in his botanical investigations, Thonning reported in his first letter to the Chamber of Customs, in February, 1800, but since both were bound by their regular duties, he was often without help.62 Every day plants must be brought in, examined, and laid away to dry (to examine a plant takes a great deal of time, and to press and re-arrange the necessary number of specimens in such a way that they preserve as much as possible their characteristics, is a work that I cannot leave to others); the plants already dried demand constant attention so that they do not spoil; with some, experiments must be performed; of some, I would wish the opportunity to draw the fructifications; all this is just as regards botany, and other branches of natural history must not be neglected therefor. The day is only 12 hours long, the midday hours permit no work, and my eyes are generally so weakened that they tolerate very little by candlelight. The result hereof is that I must either neglect the one thing for the other, or that the whole makes such slow progress that I can only accomplish a small part of what I would otherwise be able to.63 Thonning therefore proposed that his friend “Stud. Ole Smith, who lodges with Prof. Schumacher at Frid. Hospital”, be sent out to assist him.64

61 Uafgjort Forestillinger 1822–31, extract from the Indiske Contoirs Tegnebog, entries from March 15 to April 22, 1800; Diverse arkivalier fra Guinea, No. 65, Dag- og omkostnings- bøger for Fortet Kongensten, 1799–1800, 1814–17, April 5, 1800. 62 GJS 31/1800, Thonning, Christiansborg, February 7, 1800. 63 GJ 97/1801, Thonning, Christiansborg, May 10, 1800; at GJS 123/1801. 64 Det Kgl. Kirurgiske Akademis matrikel 1785–1838, Kristian Carøe, ed. (Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag, 1921), lists an H. Smith, 19 years old, a student at the Surgeon’s Academy and volunteer at Frederik’s Hospital at this time. Smith signed his letters “Schmidt”; see Carl Christensen, Vol. 2, p. 143. 112 chapter four

The Chamber of Customs found Thonning’s argument persuasive, and in the package of letters sent out to the coast in August, 1800, Thonning and the Council were informed that Ole Haaslund Smith had been engaged to serve as Thonning’s assistant and to carry on the work after Thonning’s departure at the end of two years.65 This represented a not insubstantial expansion of the original scope of the undertaking. In his letter in May, 1800,66 Thonning addressed, in a preliminary way, some of the economic substance of his orders. Approximately half a mile from Christiansborg, he informed the Chamber of Customs, there is laid out in a high place a cotton plantation, which thrives very well. The principal varieties, which grow here at random, are the white Siam, a variety of muslin cotton, and vine-cotton (this last I have found growing wild in many places); all of these varieties are cultivated under the name of Cürassao-cotton, although I have found no trace of that variety. In the negroes’ so-called Rossar-Plads67 about [12 miles] up in the country where the earth is very fertile, cotton does not do nearly so well; it ripens too late, and is spoiled by the rain. The same is said to be the case with the plantation established in Aquapim. From the hills nearby a kind of red wood of very high color is brought, which is excellent both as a dye and for small furniture work. The Assianthes bring along their ways through the mountains a kind of resin, which, judging by the experiments I have performed with same, most nearly approaches copal. The low price would perhaps make it a serviceable substitute for less fine work; English traders buy it gladly.68 He had found only one sort of indigo, which was common near Accra, Ningo, and Keta; at Ningo it thrives best in a loose and sandy ground; it is hardy through every season. By the Rio Volta I did not find it at all, and nowhere does it grow in that quantity that it without further cultivation could repay the establishment of an indigo works. Both at Fort Kongenssteen and among the Africans he had seen some worked pieces of what he called Nauclea africana69 and Robinia violacea, but he did not much admire the wood.

65 GJ 42/1800, Smith, August 1, 1800; VI kopibog, to Studiosus Chirurgus Tonning, August 19, 1800 (no. 618), as well as letters to Ole Smith and the Council on the coast of the same date (nos. 617 and 619). 66 GJS 98/1801, Thonning, [Christiansborg,] May 10, 1800. 67 These are cultivated places: Larsen, p. 145. 68 See Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, p. 316. 69 E. Charles Nelson kindly corrected this identification to Mitragyna inermis in Hopkins, “Danish natural history and African colonialism”, pp. 387–388; F.N. Hepper, The West African Herbaria of Isert and Thonning (Kew: Bentham Moxon Trust, Royal Botanic Gardens, 1976), p. 108. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 113

The area around the Rio Volta [and some distance] up the river is undeniably exceedingly fair, but I have nowhere found the fertility it is acclaimed for; the soil is for the most part sandy, boggy, or clayey, and contains a deal of salt and a little saltpeter. As most of the grass is varieties of rushes, domestic herbivorous creatures cannot thrive here. There are a number of large and small islands in the river, which all are for the greatest part subject to flooding; … probably rice and sugar will succeed very well; [25 or thirty miles] up the river the soil is said to be very fertile. At Keta, the soil was as by the Volta—loose, sandy, damp. This, in brief, is the most important that I have observed at each place and found necessary to notify the Chamber of; the descriptions of medicinal, economic, and other plants will follow with the plants themselves, when I get same prepared for shipment home. In June,70 Thonning reported that the rain had “lured forth the flowers on most plants”, but that he must now await the fruits to complete his analyses. “I can in passing report that I do not expect that wealth of new genera that Isert, in the preface to his travel description, leads one to suppose”.71 He had experimented with the red wood he had mentioned earlier and believed that it would prove “just as useful as sandalwood, but it has the common imperfection of wood dyes, namely that the color is not fast”. He had not yet seen the living plant, but he was informed that it was a large bush, which only obtained its coloring property upon its natural death: “in this it consistent with the Campeche-bush…. [P]resumably it is of the same family; to fell the living tree is of no use”. He had spied out a little patch of ground in which almost nothing but indigo grew and was waiting for the plants to mature: he hoped he would soon have an idea of how much indigo a measure of land would yield. He was unable to get out for some weeks because of trouble between the African inhabitants of Dutch Accra and those of Danish Osu (often Ussu), beneath the walls of Fort Christiansborg. The disagreement erupted in a battle in which a half a dozen men were killed and many wounded on both sides, and Thonning helped the doctors tend to these. A cease-fire having been arranged, Thonning moved early in July to the comfortable cottage at Frederiksberg, the walled garden Governor Wrisberg had established a little way north of Christiansborg. This place was more convenient for his excursions, and he could work on his collections in peace here.

70 GJ 114/1801, Thonning, [Christiansborg,] June 26, 1800. 71 See Letters on West Africa, pp. 17–18. 114 chapter four

“I had brought with me from Europe a deal of garden seeds”, he wrote, including mustard, cress, basil, and radishes, and these he planted at Frederiksberg.72 At the end of August, 1800, Thonning traveled up into Akuapem for a week or so with Christian Schiønning and a train of forty-two porters, “to become acquainted with the country and the most prominent people”. Thonning recorded the trip in some detail in fifteen pages of notes, probably written after the fact: the fragment, although loosely in diary form, may be the draft of a letter to his family or friends; a few of his remarks appear to be addressed directly to his family.73 The stages of the journey are recorded in fractions of miles, and Thonning provides fairly precise bearings between places. He may occasionally have got turned around, or perhaps he was not very scrupulous in his note-taking, for the directions he records do not always accord well with the maps he later made. From time to time he wrote down the temperature. He took note even of abandoned places of habitation and cultivation. At one place, he wrote, “I found especially remarkable a fence around a tree in the middle of the road, which is filled with a quantity of heads of antelopes, deer, buffaloes, and wild swine”. The people here were agriculturalists, some of them from Labadi, on the coast a little east of Christiansborg. At Jadosa (or Jodusa or Jadusa, and spelled Jadofa on Thonning’s maps), the landscape was open and fair, “bestrewn” with large trees. As they proceeded north, the underbrush began to crowd in on them, and Osai Kona, a few miles past Jadosa, is surrounded on all sides by impenetrable woods and small trees [which] form a thicket I never yet saw the like of. This town is inhabited by Aquapim negroes, whose only sustenance is agriculture and tending wine-palms. Schiønning and Thonning ascended “the lovely Aquapim mountains on foot (the journey hitherto had proceeded in hammocks)”, among beautiful tall trees, “which form complete shade above because the trees are quite grown together”. They spent the night at the first hill town, Abadee (Aburi), where they were most hospitably received.

72 GK III, Geografiske Noticer, Kasserede Udkast til Kort over Danske Guinea, Adskilligt ang. Reisetourer i Guinea, notes dating from January 12 to December 21, [1800]; see Jeppesen, “Danske plantageanlæg på Guldkysten, pp. 54–55. 73 GK III, Geografiske Noticer, Kasserede Udkast til Kort over Danske Guinea, fragment or extract of a journal beginning August 29, 1800 (the longest of the three fragments or extracts of Thonning’s journal in the Guinea Commission’s archives), and, in this same file, Adskilligt ang. Reisetourer i Guinea, notes dating from January 12 to December 21, [1800]. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 115

“Next morning I began my investigations and found such great prospects of being richly rewarded for the long, difficult journey that I would gladly have made Abadee my residence for a long time”, had he not been traveling with Schiønning. Aburi was one of the largest towns in all Akuapem, Thonning wrote, but appeared quite small, because the inhabitants lived out on the surrounding land. These negroes are different herein from all seacoast negroes, who would much rather live by begging and stealing from the Europeans than work. The inhabitants of Aquapim are, in their industry, the perfect contrast to the Accra and sea negroes and must on that account endure the same contu- mely as our industrious, honest peasants from the proud and indolent noble. Thus spake the proudly enlightened young botanist from his hammock, as he was carried by slaves through the West African landscape. “The method of building here is different from the other sea dwellers in that the houses are built of posts that are filled in with clay in such a way that they resemble a whole wall”. The houses here, “generally smaller and less impressive outside—on the inside, on the other hand, are cleaner and generally neater and reveal a simplicity that cannot otherwise than please”. There follows in the notes a little sketch half an inch high, executed in four or five strokes, which can perhaps be taken to be Thonning’s note to himself to insert a drawing at this point in whatever finished product he hoped might emerge from this draft. The air was clean and clear here, and not too hot, even at midday; “on the excursions I made, I felt absolutely no discomfort, but was confident, without suffering thereby, of being able to work here all day”. The land was “uncommonly fertile and yields its crops with very little work. The dew falls every morning so heavily that it resembles fine rain, [and it is not] possible to go out in the morning without becoming wet”. The people kept sheep, goats, small chickens, and Muscovy ducks and ate mostly yams and pisang, “as well as game”. The party marched on the next morning, passing through the small town of Asantema, the residence of a powerful fetish; “everything is so holy in and around this town that I was warned on the way not to touch a blade or a leaf here in the vicinity”. The fetish priest was out, so they were unable to greet him. Thonning related that these priests were much respected and feared: It is every man’s concern, therefore, to have a good understanding with the fetish-man and his assistants so as to prevent those of their slaves who are or think themselves discontented from committing themselves to 116 chapter four

the fetish’s protection and thus being forever lost to their owners. This happens often. Runaways were subject to considerable abuse, however, and to shameful neglect in the event of their death, and this, Thonning reports, kept altogether too many slaves from decamping. The runaways provided the fetish priests with a good deal of free labor, nevertheless, and the priests were quite wealthy. He reported Asantema to be an important judicial center, not only for the hill people but for the people of the coast: there could be no appeal of rulings issued here. They passed through Tuttu (or Tutu), Mangpong (Mampong), and Abotaki (Abotakyi), and hereabouts “we came upon the 2 famous fetish rocks that are so holy that no one may touch them and where there is so scant room that almost no one can walk between them without touching them”. They traveled on through Ammanno (Amanokrom) and Mangfe (Mamfe) and, after a couple of hours over a rough path, arrived at Akropong (Akuropon), where they were met by armed men, who honored them with a volley of shots. They were escorted to “my predecessor Hr. Isert’s old residence” in the town and thereafter to a reception lasting into the evening at the residence of the caboceer, at which they were introduced to all the prominent people of the town. The following day, with twelve villagers clearing the way, which was altogether overgrown, they visited the site of Isert’s plantation at Amanopasso.74 It has a majestically beautiful view not only to the large mountain Lathe [Larteh, also Lahte, or Late] just opposite but also to other surrounding mountains and valleys, which succeed one another so romantically as to awaken in any person of feeling the most delightful sentiments, Thonning wrote. “There is scarcely an indication that this place was ever inhabited. One can see a pile of stones where a flagpole is said to have stood—likewise the ruins of an old wall, where the dwelling was”. Among the tall grass and brush he found a few domesticated plants, including “rather sourish oranges of uncommon size and not unpleasant taste and an ornamental flower (Cisalpinea pulcherima)75—This is the only sign that still remains of Isert’s garden—of cotton there was no trace”. There remained “nothing more than the name of a little spot of ground, …

74 Thonning’s spelling of the name is uncertain. 75 Caesalpinia pulcherrima: Hepper, p. 33. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 117 the abode only of tigers and other wild animals”. Thonning found the soil here too rank for cotton, but he was so impressed with the “beautiful and rich nature” of the area that he resolved to return another time to study it further. The manuscript ends shortly thereafter, as the party was making its way to Dodowa, “where Hr. Flindt decided that a colony should be planted and called Friederichstæd”. They arrived back at Christiansborg on September 1 and found the establishments’ new priest Grundtvig (the younger brother of the great Danish religious figure Nicolai Grundtvig) deathly ill; he died two days later.76 In September, Thonning sent the Chamber of Customs a report on an experiment he had conducted with the local indigo.77 Having “sent people out to collect all the indigo plants they could find in the vicinity”, he filled an old rum barrel sawn in half to about five inches from the top with stalks, “laid crosswise”. At 10 A.M., he recorded, 140 pots of water were poured over the plants, sufficient to cover the stalks. “The same afternoon a few large bubbles began to rise and burst at the surface”. After three days, the liquid, now a deep blue, bubbled in a glass like champagne. He had some trouble drying his extract but expected to obtain about three quarters of a pound of good indigo: a test on a piece of white paper produced “a fine dark-blue color”. He sent in a botanical description of the plant with his report to the Chamber of Customs on this experiment. He remarked, it grows everywhere around the negro towns, but in the open field I have never found it; in Aquapim and near the Rio Volta I found neither this nor any other species; at Friderichstæd, where the earth is extremely fertile, I had a bit of land sown, so as to learn how it will thrive here in a quite different soil from that in which it naturally grows. The distinguishing characters provided in the 15th edition of Species plantarum78 are not sufficient to distinguish it from Indigofera argentea, which is cultivated frequently in certain places in the West Indies and is said to give a very good indigo. His plant had more seeds in the pod than the plant described in l’Heritier’s Stirpes novæ, so he believed he had something new.79 He had in fact found eight different kinds of indigo, of which “certainly the most are unknown”.

76 GK III, Geografiske Noticer, Kasserede Udkast til Kort over Danske Guinea, Adskilligt ang. Reisetourer i Guinea, notes dating from January 12 to December 21, [1800]. 77 GJS 266/1802, Thonning, [Christiansborg], September 18, 1800 (duplicate). 78 Linnaeus’s fundamental botanical nomenclatural work, first published in 1753: Koerner, Linnaeus: nature and nation, p. 16. 79 Charles Louis de l’Heritier de Brutelle, Stirpes novæ aut minus cognitæ, quas descrip- tionibus et iconibus illustravit carolus-Ludovicus L’Heritier, dom. de Brutelle (Paris: ex typographia Philippi-Dionysii Pierres, 1784–85); Thonning refers to Tab. 79, and he presumably had the book, and Species plantarum, with him on the coast. 118 chapter four

He had also experimented with the others, but they had rotted instead of fermenting. He went on: I have with great trouble dried a number of examples of these as well as other plants, so as, in accordance with the Chamber’s order to contribute to the advancement of natural history, [to send] home so large a number of perfect examples of each plant that the public and most important private collections could be provided with them, but it is thankless work; for before a plant can become completely dry, it is already so saturated by the salty sea air, which is occasioned by the surf, that it of itself draws moisture to it from the air and becomes moldy. He had collected, laid out, and then thrown away “countless” plants. “For the present I have almost given up hope, and decided simply to describe and examine the plants, and to await the time when I can expect to have the assistant I have requested of the Chamber”. Toward the end of September, Thonning again traveled down the coast to Fort Fredensborg. He recorded in his journal that the land around the fort was sandy and arid for miles inland.80 The fort was apparently quite dilapidated: “for even if the cannons were in usable condition, the building would not be in a state to withstand a cannonade of these 1-, 2-, or 3-pounders”. He collected here for about a week and then traveled on to Fort Kongenssteen. “I found here that the Rio Volta had risen out of its usual banks and had flooded the adjacent expanses—the way from [Fute, or Pute] to Ada was very difficult; the hammock bearers sometimes sank to the mid-chest”. In places, it was necessary to travel by canoe where there was normally no water at all. Unable to collect, Thonning went on to Prindsenssteen, confident that when he returned the vegetation along the Volta would be in flower. The river subsided early in November, but the mud it left behind filled the bush with “stench and sickness”. Thonning was advised not to return to Ada, whence it was reported that mortality among the Africans was high. He collected around Prindsenssteen for a time, but early in December, determined to see the trees on the Volta in bloom, he traveled down the “Quitta River”, the tidal channel connecting the Augna Songo, the large lagoon north and west of Keta, for which it is now named, to the Volta.81

80 GK III, Geografiske Noticer, Kasserede Udkast til Kort over Danske Guinea, Adskilligt ang. Reisetourer i Guinea, notes dating from January 12 to December 21, [1800]. 81 See Grove and Johansen, and esp. p. 1397 for the suggestion that this system of waterways extended past Lagos; Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong, Between the sea and the lagoon science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 119

The whole length of this channel “from Atokko [sometimes Atocco: perhaps the modern Atokaw] and almost to the mouth”, he recorded, was lined with mangrove. “This tour in the strongest heat caused me to arrive almost sick at Kongenssteen—my health did not improve here, became on the contrary day by day worse”. On December 9, he departed Kongenssteen and arrived at Christiansborg on the 12th. “As soon as I arrived here”, he wrote on December 21, “I became daily better and am at the present time healthy. The oriental time has begun, and soon all the plants will lose their leaves and flowers”. There is a third very short fragment of Thonning’s journal among the Guinea Commission’s papers, dating to January, 1801.82 Thonning had now been on the coast for a year. Ole Haaslund Smith had arrived from Denmark on the first of the year,83 and Thonning records that they had been busy correcting and writing clean copies of plant descriptions and preparing plants and insects for shipment to Europe. Jens Flindt was now again on the coast,84 and on January 15th, Thonning departed on a journey up into the country with Flindt and another Dane named Christian Jansen. They planned to travel “to the colony Fridrichstæd at Dudua and from there to find the source of the Ponny River” and to determine whether the stream could be made serviceable for the transport of cargoes inland; “further, to take the opportunity as far as possible to follow the mountains to determine, especially with Hr. Jansen’s practical knowledge, what the soil here would be useful for”. They had just reached Jadosa, on the second day, having spent a great deal of time searching for a large python that they were informed had recently swallowed an antelope, when this manuscript fragment abruptly ends, in the middle of a word. Immediately after Thonning’s arrival in the establishments a year earlier, the Council on the coast, having duly acknowledged the Chamber of Customs’s orders to support Thonning’s enterprise (“so fine a cause, as the most important goals can thereby be achieved, in time”),85 had written to the Chamber:

(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), p. 29; and Sandra E. Greene, Sacred sites and the colonial encounter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 38, 40. 82 GK III, Geografiske Noticer, Kasserede Udkast til Kort over Danske Guinea, Adskilligt ang. Reisetourer i Guinea, Thonning’s notes, dating from January 1 to 16, 1801. 83 GJS 267/1802, Ole Schmidt, Christiansborg, April 24, 1801. 84 GJS 267/1802, Ole Schmidt, Christiansborg, April 24, 1801. Flindt is likely to have trav- elled in the same ship with Haaslund Smith. 85 GJ 27/1800, the Council on the coast, January 15, 1800; GJ 34/1800, the Council, January 15, 1800. 120 chapter four

We have every reason to believe that the high Collegium has the notion that the establishment of colonies and agriculture will be of importance to this land. We would be acting contrary to our conviction as dishonest citizens and faithless servants of the king and the state if we did not provide all the information we can in this matter.86 First Isert, and then Flindt and Woodard had sacrificed ever greater sums “that have all melted away without the least benefit”, they wrote, not to mention the craftsmen who had lost their lives. For three months of every year everything grew well on the coast, but for the rest of the year very little rain fell and the sun “then scorches everything”. In the mountains it was somewhat better, but “here the question becomes: is it profitable to plant colonies in these monstrous mountains?” The costs and difficulty of transportation between the coast and the hills were simply insurmountable obstacles. As for the Volta region, they wrote, their predecessors had put it in the best possible light, but “none of us know these rich and fertile regions; on the contrary we know that the soil by the Rio Volta 8 or ten miles up into the country is the most infertile we know”. It was the most unhealthy place on the coast, salty 6 or 8 months of the year; nothing can grow there”. Ahnholm and Schiønning reminded the Chamber of the unfortunate English efforts at Sierra Leone, which had cost so many lives and “so many millions”. Here in the Danish enclave, after large expenditures, “Frederichsted is a nothing and Frederichsberg is a comfortable country house”. The Chamber of Customs first received this complaint seven months later and, in August, 1800, mildly reiterated its policy in a letter to the coast: its intention for culture in Guinea is only to encourage private individuals to take small parcels of land under cultivation, so the negroes thereby could experience the method of cultivation and by example be encouraged to produce goods for trade, but not on the general account to establish any colony on a large scale. The Chamber asked for regular reports on this matter.87 A somewhat more adventurous colonial policy was in fact being pursued through other channels in Copenhagen, as the Chamber of Customs was doubtless aware, although the currents and cross-currents of influence are not easily sorted out. Two weeks before the Chamber sent this note down to the coast, Crown Prince Frederik, acting on a representation

86 GJ(S) 37/1800, the Council on the coast (Ahnholm’s and Schiønning’s are the only signatures on the letter), January 15, 1800. 87 VI kopibog, to the Council on the coast, August 19, 1800. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 121 from the Finance Collegium, had advanced the round sum of six thousand rigsdaler to Jens Flindt toward a new colonial plantation experiment.88 In April, 1798, Jens Flindt had applied to the Chamber of Customs for the position of commandant at Fort Kongenssteen, where, he proposed, he would be able to significantly advance the colonial project. There was no further talk of his plantation at Frederikssted: he now expressed himself in favor of the lands by the Volta, “which are very suitable for colonial plantations”.89 In “a very long representation”,90 Flindt reminded the Chamber that in August, 1797, at the request of Count Schimmelmann and Frederik Moltke, the head of the Chamber of Customs and a member of the Slave-trade Commission,91 he had submitted a proposal regarding a colonial establishment; this had not on that occasion met with favor. He understood that the regime, having experienced one unfortunate setback after another in its African colonial undertaking, now favored small private operations, which could be supported with grants or loans. He was therefore convinced that the administration would be particularly interested in a project that would incur no costs at all: he asked for a large loan towards the installation of a distillery on the coast, with which to make spirits from locally-grown maize; he and his sister, he said, had experimented with this during their last residence on the coast. The loan would be paid back in ten years, and Flindt offered as collateral the distillery he had it in mind to construct. Besides that, he proposed to start a new plantation in the vicinity of Kongenssteen, relying on the labor of the fort’s inventory slaves and craftsmen, whereby the crown would incur no new expense. (Flindt took the occasion to attack Wrisberg, whom he accused of being “self-seeking”.) The Chamber of Customs deferred action on this application. Flindt again sought the command of Fort Kongenssteen in October, 1799, so as to be in a position to attempt a colonial planting by the Volta “on his own account”.92 Flindt’s letter recapitulated his five years in the

88 FJ 1527/1800, the crown, August 6, 1800. 89 GJ 370/1798, Flindt, [Copenhagen,] April 12, 1798. 90 GJ(S) 371/1798, Flindt, Copenhagen, April 12, 1798. 91 [Denmark’s] Hof- Civil- und Militair-Etat (Altona: Expedition des Mercurs, 1797), column 58; ad GJ 218/1796, the Slave-trade Commission, May 11, 1796, copy at GJS 226/1836 (Designation I, No. 2). 92 GJ (S) 90/1799, Flindt, [Copenhagen] October 28, 1799. For a time, perhaps until as late as the 1830s, when the Guinea Commission got hold of it, the letter was filed among unresolved matters in the Guineiske Uafgjorte (Journal) Sager, 1775–1803, as No. 44; copy among the Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen (Designation II, No. 12). 122 chapter four service of the colonial dream. Since von Rohr had placed the matter in his hands, he had in nineteen months, from May, 1793, to March, 1795, brought the new colonial establishment so far that buildings had been put up and cotton and corn had been harvested. As for his sister’s colonial errand, which was to investigate the use to which the country’s raw materials could be put, she had “also had the fortune therein to make profitable experiments, as well as for household use, such as distilling spirits and brewing beer from the land’s grain, called maize, and of which 2 samples [of grits] are sent in”. Flindt had been assured upon his arrival back in Copenhagen that the government would turn to him if it was decided to pursue African colonies, he said: full of expectation, he had remained in Copenhagen from 1795 to 1798. He had finally shipped out as cargadeur [supercargo] on a merchant vessel sailing to the coast, but the ship had been seized by the French and its cargo confiscated, and his hopes of amassing sufficient funds to personally finance a plantation colony by the Volta had been dashed. (Thirty years later, Peter Thonning circulated this letter to the Guinea Commission,93 remarking that “Flindt got his wish, but his appointment at Kongensteen was not a happy step, as the whole region over a wide area, with the exception of a few oases, is permeated with sea salt”.) A couple of weeks later, Flindt enclosed a copy of this application in a letter to Schimmelmann about plantations of cotton, sugar, and coffee by the Volta.94 He flattered himself that Schimmelmann was aware with what kind of tireless diligence I have always devoted myself to the advancement of this undertaking, indeed, even on this my last journey, both in the West Indian and in the South American colonies, with the utmost diligence, not merely sought to make myself more familiar with the culture95 of the West Indian products, but even brought home with me thence both coffee plants and ditto plant[‘s] beans as well as cotton-seed of the finest and most profitable kinds: all in the hopeful confidence that the high Government would think it important to see culture carried on, on private account, in Guinea. Flindt hoped, with the help of his sister and Hans Christophersen, who had been in the distilling business since they had all come home in 1795, to

93 Annotation on the copy among the Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen (Designation II, No. 12). 94 Guineiske Uafgjorte (Journal) Sager, No. 45, Flindt, Copenhagen, November 11, 1799, to Schimmelmann and Brandt (who had, however, by this time retired from Chancellery: “Brandt, Christian”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 2nd. ed.). 95 “Colture”, Flindt often spelled it. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 123 be able to produce beer and spirits within two or three months of their arrival on the coast; these “are and will remain 2 significant trade articles, for Europeans as well as the last for the negroes”. The proceeds from this trade would allow him to proceed with his agricultural plans, which in turn would soon permit him to repay the loan he hoped to obtain from the crown. This, he was convinced, was the surest, least costly … way whereby culture near our Danish establishments can be initiated and carried out. Indeed I dare most humbly assure: that after the elapse of a very short time there will soon be some of the old trade- officers currently on the coast apply themselves and take part in the culture, when they first see a beginning made in it with successful progress. A couple of days before Christmas, 1799, Flindt had once again pressed his case in a letter to the Chamber of Customs, in which he widened somewhat the environmental scope of his agricultural undertaking, perhaps to be on the safe side:96 if his appointment to the command of Fort Kongenssteen were to be approved, he suggested that the language of the royal authorization should provide that he “without restriction can continue the culture of the West Indian products where I find it most convenient”. In January, 1800, he again wrote to Schimmelmann.97 He refers in the letter to audiences with Schimmelmann and with Frederik Moltke, who had both encouraged his ambitions. Having heard nothing further from the Chamber of Customs, he had visited the Chamber’s offices and had been informed that it was feared that the production of spirits on the coast might have a deleterious effect on trade, “as the way of working with it would thereby easily become known to the negroes”. Nothing could be decided about Flindt’s application until Governor Wrisberg had arrived from the coast, for it was not certain that the post was in fact open. He had been referred on to the Finance Collegium, and at the same time, the Chamber, which had had no previous dealings with Flindt, had asked the Finance Collegium for information about him.98 Flindt pointed out to Schimmelmann that before the Africans could distill spirits, they would have to produce the necessary malt, which upon the addition of yeast would cause the mash to begin to work. He doubted

96 GJ 101/1799, Flindt, [Copenhagen] December 23, 1799; Guineiske Uafgjorte (Journal) Sager, No. 46, Flindt, Copenhagen, December 23, 1799, to the Chamber of Customs. 97 Guineiske Uafgjorte (Journal) Sager, No. 47, Flindt, Copenhagen, January 13, 1800, to Schimmelmann. 98 FJ 1923/1799, Chamber of Customs, November 9, 1799; GJ 101/1799. 124 chapter four that the Africans would soon learn the secrets of these processes. “Had Captain Isert lived, this experiment with the distilling of spirits would long ago have been initiated, for he brought with him a still for that purpose”, but his early death had prevented anything coming of it. The still had been sold at auction to Peder Meyer, who tirelessly made several attempts with it, which, however, were all fruitless, for he never got any further with it than to just get the scent of the spirits…. I long asked said Merchant Meyer about getting the loan of this works, but [he] would not, unless I first through my sister would tell him what his error was, and the right way to work it. This was to me just as sacred as the distilling apparatus was to him, which he kept. Beer brewed on the coast would doubtless “contribute much to the health of every European and prevent numerous illnesses, which especially in Europeans newly come out are caused by this land’s unaccustomed bever- ages”. Ships’ crews, who are so much exposed to scorbutic illnesses”, would benefit by “getting good fresh beer to drink instead of the so often ill-smelling and partly brackish water that they so often are obliged to be content with. And how many other useful experiments cannot there by initiated by a woman knowledgeable in the science of rural householding, by improving the products of this land. Flindt explained to Schimmelmann that Kongenssteen was one of the most important of the forts: it protected an expanse of unoccupied land and extensive woods between Ada and the mouth of the Volta. He intended to establish his colony at Togbloku, which was accessible from the open sea; Meyer and Lather before him had failed in their efforts there only because of their lack of expertise. The fort and its personnel would be crucial to his plans, since he would not at first be in a position to purchase as many slaves as he would require. He intended, therefore, immediately upon my arrival on the coast to offer each of the messrs. trade merchants to accommodate their purchased slaves, men as well as women, with whom I thus can continuously make significant progress in culture, whereby I can at all times have circa 50 to 60 negroes at work constantly, and this will cost me no more in this interval than to feed them, whereby the plantation will make progress. The negroes will obtain in this interval a better idea of their fate and thereby also can be kept healthy and lively until they are to be sent from this country, and the merchants will in particular be served thereby who otherwise for lack hereof are obliged for safety’s sake after the purchase to constantly keep them in irons in the fortresses and pay for their food, where these regrettably at the same time are much exposed to illness and other wretchedness. Indeed, it is under this distressing arrest that science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 125

they form the most abominable notions of us and the condition they can expect for themselves, which alone and solely is what so often occasions revolt when they get aboard the ships in which they are sent from the coast; how desirable [if] this so dangerous and pitiable despair in the mentioned way [can] thereby be prevented, and their ideas thereby put in a far more enlightened and soothing state. In March, Flindt sent documentation of his experience with West Indian crops and of the diligence and accuracy of his bookkeeping to the Finance Collegium,99 which then, three days later, wrote to the Chamber of Customs that it was not in a position to judge of Flindt’s ability as a planter, since the plantation colony von Rohr had been sent out to supervise had made so little progress, but that Flindt’s accounts for the plantation had been quite in order.100 Regarding Flindt’s plan to brew and distill in the establishments the Collegium had nothing to remark. The various papers in the case were returned to the Chamber of Customs, including the letter by which von Rohr, in New London, had transferred responsibility for the colony to Flindt and Woodard, which Flindt had kept by him all these years.101 By the end of April, the Chamber of Customs had decided to send Flindt back down to the coast as Government assistant at Kongenssteen, with the prospect of appointment to command of the fort as soon the position opened up.102 At the end of the month he sent in yet another long proposal regarding the plantation he hoped to establish and a formal application for assistance addressed directly to the crown prince.103 Besides brewing beer, he added to what he had written before, he and his sister expected, through the application of the science of agrarian home economics, to improve various of the raw materials available on the coast, such as preparing mead, for the woods are swarming with bees and where they by their wild nature seek their homes in trees suited thereto…. There are wild cows in multitude, by making these tame as calves, many domestic necessaries can be had. Three fishermen could take from the river twice the quantity of fish that fifty or sixty slaves working his plantation could consume. It would

99 FJ 672/1800, Flindt, Marts 19, 1800; Flindt’s Pro Memoria of March 19, 1800, is now to be found in the Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen and was read by the Guinea Commission (Designation II, No. 13). 100 GJ 5/1800, Finants Collegiet, March 22, 1800. 101 GJ(S) 9/1800, Finants Collegiet, April 12, 1800. 102 GJ 5 and 9/1800. 103 GJ 13/1800, Flindt, Copenhagen, April 29, 1800, and GJ 14/1800, Flindt, Copenhagen, May 1, 1800. 126 chapter four advance the colony greatly if “some of the negroes now in the West Indies, who had learned the culture of sugar and cotton planting, and their further processing”, could be brought back to Africa. “These should then be employed, not as regular work negroes, but as supervisors over the others”; they should be paid a wage. Such people might have a tremendous influence on the local “free and uncultivated negro nation”, and “by association and conversation with those brought here from the West Indies”, the fears of slaves destined for America would be allayed: they will therefore with far greater cheerfulness be able to depart from the land of their fathers, each day await setting foot in a new, where they possibly will find many of their friends and family in an unexpectedly happy state. “Craftsmen are highly necessary on every plantation in the West Indies”, Flindt knew, and he suggested that planters in the islands would gladly exchange field workers for some of the inventory craftsmen in the African establishments. He thought the Government could best make the necessary arrangements directly with the planters. It was also essential, in Flindt’s view, that a land surveyor be sent out with him to Africa, to by same immediately have the purchased extents of land taken under survey and demarcated, so as thereby in time to anticipate disputes, if it is not taken under cultivation all at once, as the consequences otherwise, for want of their observance, will be the same as with the land bought on the royal account by former Captain Isert from the Republic of Aqvapim, which according to the treaty was relinquished thus: that everything that was not occupied or taken under cultivation by the negroes should belong to the king of Denmark, and this the Republic believed should not extend farther than about to the boundaries and in the vicinity of the place he took into possession, which is circa 8 or 10 miles deeper into the country (and to which one must first surmount the high Aqvapim Mountains) than the place where the undersigned made the last plantation, and where His Majesty the King, in regards to the treaty, had just as great property rights as yonder; but had, however, the difficulties and consequences (as I beforehand realized) that the authorities in the thereabout living negro towns made claims for wages and cession of the land I there for the royal account took in possession; but by thorough and sensible representations I checked them from the realization of this claim. (After Flindt had left the coast, however, Governor Hager had found himself obliged to pay a monthly sum for the land at Frederikssted.) It is very unlikely that any portion of the Danish enclave on the coast had ever been surveyed. Flindt was here proposing, in his way, to science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 127 superimpose a central element of the enlightened state’s rational new approach to land on the norms of landholding in the societies among whom he intended to found his colony. Official programs of identification, delimitation, mapping, and taxation of land were developed and extended in Denmark in the last half of the eighteenth century,104 but it was doubtless in the West Indies, and in conversations with Julius von Rohr, with his long experience as a government surveyor, that Flindt was exposed to modern views of the administrative importance and intellectual charm of orderly surveys and cadastral record-keeping. Beginning in the 1730s, the island of St. Croix was subdivided by the Danish administration into an extraordinary grid of plantation properties reminiscent of the great rectangular survey that began to be laid out on the public lands of the United States half a century later.105 Von Rohr had administered this system, with its annually updated rural censuses, for thirty years, and the fiscal and legal advantages of such radical new systems of land management, which represented rather sharp departures from traditional practice (normally a much more local and informal affair),106 were apparently not lost on Flindt. In their complete disregard of the underlying terrain, gridded surveys put a strange and indelible stamp on a landscape, but Flindt never mentions having noticed it on St. Croix. On May 14, 1800, the crown prince approved Flindt’s appointment in a subordinate capacity, for the time being, at Fort Kongenssteen and ordered the Chamber of Customs to correspond with the Finance Collegium “on whether some support of his colony plantation could not be granted him”.107 The Chamber insisted in its letter to the Finance Collegium in this regard that although Flindt now enjoyed official rank, his commercial and agricultural projects were to be regarded as a private affair, although it acknowledged that they might “also, if they succeed, have a beneficial influence in general”.108 On August 6, in response to a representation by the Finance Collegium, no doubt at the instigation of Ernst Schim melmann, the crown prince granted Flindt an interest-free loan of six thousand rigsdaler toward his colonial undertaking, against the

104 Kain and Baigent, pp. 83–88. 105 Daniel Hopkins, “The Danish cadastral survey of St. Croix, 1733–1754” (unpublished dissertation, Louisiana State University, 1987). 106 See Jacob Mandix, Haandbog i den danske landvæsensret, 2nd. ed. (Copenhagen: Gyldendalsk Forlag, 1813), Vol. 1, p. 361, Vol. 2, p. 165. 107 GJ 17/1800, royal resolution, May 14, 1800. 108 VI kopibog, May 24, 1800, to Finants Collegiet. 128 chapter four security of the plantation he undertook to establish.109 Colonial jurisdiction was a trifle muddied by this new royal commitment to plantation projects: the Finance Collegium inquired of the Chamber of Customs whether Flindt could be given the permission he had requested to treat directly with the Africans, as Isert had done, and whether he could be granted a monopoly on distilling in the enclave, so as to safeguard the royal interest in his enterprise. The Chamber was reluctant to accede in either of these demands.110 In September, Christian Jansen, whom Flindt had recruited to sail with him to Africa, addressed himself to Count Schimmelmann:111 I have been engaged, by the commandant of the fort Kongens-Steen on the Guinea Coast Hr. J. Flindt, as planter at a sugar and coffee plantation to be established there in the place. In 22 years’ service as director of a Dutch sugar and coffee plantation in Suriname in the West Indies, I have obtained the necessary expertise for such a plantation and [its] management.112 With the help of the modest fortune I have earned I had had the hope of finding sustenance in my dear fatherland, and to this end I left my service about 12 years ago. The great fire of Copenhagen in 1795 had destroyed such property as he had attained to, and he found himself obliged to take up his old trade again, and “it will be in more than one regard doubly difficult, as I now in an age of over 50 years must leave my wife and a five-year-old son, to earn by heavy work in another continent life’s first necessities for them and myself”. He expressed the patriotic hope that his efforts would benefit his country but asked that his wife and son be provided for in the event of his death. It was with these two remarkable colonial figures that Peter Thonning traveled back into the country in January of 1801. It is a very suggestive connection. Flindt’s enthusiasm for African colonial agriculture, the crown’s willingness to support him with a substantial advance of funds, and Jansen’s tales of the great plantations of the Caribbean can scarcely

109 FJ 1527/1800, royal resolution, August 6, 1800; VI kopibog, October 25, 1800, (ad GJ 50/1800), to the Council on the coast, and draft filed at GJS 171/1836. 110 FJ 1527/1800; GJ 43/1800, Finants Collegiet, Aug 8, 1800; FJ 1565/1800, Chamber of Customs, August 14, 1800; GJ 44/1800, Finants Collegiet, August 16, 1800, letter filed at GJS 171/1836. 111 Uafgjort (GJ) Sager, No. 48, Christian Jansen, Copenhagen, September 13, 1800, to Schimmelmann. 112 For a glowing characterization of the plantations of Suriname in the 1780s, see Historical essay on the colony of Surinam 1788, Simon Cohen, transl., and Jacob R. Marcus and Stanley F. Chyet, eds. (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1974), pp. 128–129. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 129 have failed to make an impression on Thonning. Jansen is otherwise utterly unknown, but he represents perfectly the importance of the New World experience and example in these new African colonial schemes. Just as Schimmelmann had turned to von Rohr in the West Indies for the expertise he needed to resuscitate Isert’s colony, Flindt had found a man with decades of experience in the plantation world of the American tropics.113 The idea that the cultivation of luxury crops for export was a viable proposition in West Africa was thus brought very forcefully and directly home to the young botanist. Flindt had arrived with not merely six thousand rigsdaler worth of equipment and supplies and trade goods, but with important colonial news from the metropolis. Compared with the Chamber of Customs’s cautious statements about agriculture, this substantial royal capitalization of a new African plantation scheme doubtless raised some eyebrows in the enclave. Men like Flindt and Jansen, and Peder Meyer and Johan Wrisberg, were quietly instrumental in the transfer to West Africa, not merely of the crops but of the experience of centuries in the plantations of the West Indies. The immediate locus of their operations was the West African coast, but these men were citizens of the plantation Atlantic. Meyer may have been the first person to plant coffee on this stretch of the coast,114 and he appears to have introduced the tamarind tree, which came to be planted quite widely by the Danes.115 His tamarinds are recorded to have been shipped in pots from the West Indies to Copenhagen and from there down to the coast of Guinea.116 These men had been making their livings from the slave trade for years, and had certainly not forsworn the use of slave labor, but it is in these new schemes, nevertheless, that some of the beginnings of what came to be called the legitimate trade are to be observed.117

113 Jansen and Flindt, it happens, were both from the Danish island of Langeland: GJ 412/1803, the Council on the coast, January 2, 1803, including a payroll list. 114 FJS 2158/1806, Meyer, Ussu Bye, 10 April, 1806. 115 Old tamarinds have been important archaeological indicators: Jeppesen, pp. 57–61; Henning Henningsen, “Besøg på Guldkysten”, Handels- og Søfartsmuseets Årbog, 1970, pp. 108–142, on pp. 119–20, 123. 116 ad GJ 498/1804, J. E. Richter, Christiansborg, May 8, 1803, filed at GJS 144/1828. 117 Hopkins, “The Danish ban on the slave trade and Denmark’s African colonial ambitions”, p. 167; Kea, “Plantations and labour”; Reynolds, Trade and economic change on the Gold Coast, pp. 63–69; Daendels, passim; Martin, pp. 153–154; Fyfe, pp. 46, 72–73, 94; A. G. Hopkins, An economic history of West Africa, p. 137; Robin Law, “Introduction”, in From slave trade to legitimate commerce, pp. 1–31; Kwamina B. Dickson, A historical geography of Ghana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 120–132; Philip D. Curtin, Economic change in precolonial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), p. 215. 130 chapter four

In the standard reckoning, the colonial period of African history does not begin until formal territorial regimes were imposed by the European powers toward the end of the nineteenth century, but the seeds of European colonialism—settlers, crops and cultures from across the sea, new colonial approaches to metropolitan administrative authorities, capital, and markets—had been germinating since the latter part of the eighteenth century. Vital Atlantic originals like Isert and Flindt, who dealt both with naked slaves in chains and with stiff-collared and high-minded civil servants in Copenhagen, were the agents of these changes, to at least as great a degree as were the officers of the central administration, none of whom, with the significant exception of Peter Thonning, ever set foot in Africa, and very few of whom crossed the Atlantic to the West Indies. Flindt was immediately put in command of Fort Kongenssteen when he arrived on the coast early in 1801.118 Nothing had changed at Frederikssted, it was reported at this time; the plantation was being maintained by a soldier and two inventory slaves. At Frederiksberg, near Christiansborg, cotton was being cultivated, and it appeared that it might be possible to send a couple of bales to Denmark before long.119 Yarn spun from the samples Wrisberg had sent in had been sent back down to the coast, and the Council promised to “make it their duty to encourage everyone to cultivate same, especially the yellow”.120 In April, 1801, Peter Thonning expressed his gratitude to the Chamber of Customs for having sent Ole Haaslund Smith to assist him and reminded the Chamber that his own time on the coast was approaching an end.121 Haaslund Smith also wrote home on this date and undertook to remain three years on the coast, suggesting that he, in his turn, would require an assistant.122 Thonning sent nine boxes of natural history specimens and the formal descriptions of about a hundred plants to St. Croix with this post, to be forwarded thence to Copenhagen.123 The shipment included a

118 GJ 125/1801 (duplicate at GJ 256/1802), GJ 132/1801, the Council on the coast, both February 6, 1801; GJ 133/1801, Flindt, February 6, 1801. 119 GJS 129/1801, Ahnholm and Schiønning, February 6, 1801. 120 GJS 130/1801, the Council on the coast, February 6, 1801. 121 GJS 268/1802, Thonning, Christiansborg, April 24, 1801; GJS 269/1802, Thonning, [Christiansborg,] April 24, 1801. 122 GJ 267/1802, Ole Schmidt, Christiansborg, April 24, 1801. 123 GJS 270/1802, Thonning, [Christiansborg,] April 24, 1801 (his third letter of this date). Several manuscript copies of Thonning’s descriptions of his Guinean plants, including ethnobotanical notes, are preserved at the Botanical Museum, Copenhagen. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 131 sample of the indigo he had manufactured, seeds for the Botanical Garden in Copenhagen,124 and samples of the red dye-wood, among which a couple of pieces that show how the tree dies from the inside out and takes on the red color. I have not been able to complete the wood’s economic and botanical description, as I have not seen it with either flowers or fruit. He sent two boxes of insects to Niels Tønder Lund and more plants and insects to his teachers Vahl and Schumacher. Thonning enclosed “a copy of the plants’ description for professors Vahl and Schumacher, in the secure hope that these my teachers, out of the love of science, will not forbear to correct my errors, and overlook what is missing”. These formal descriptions were in Latin, except where Thonning appended notes in Danish about the immediate environment in which he had found the plants, the uses to which they were put by the Africans, or, occasionally, their economic potential.125 His notes on his plants are full of place names and the vernacular names of plants, as his orders had directed, and they add a great deal of life and depth to the geographical picture that he was putting together as he traveled about the territory and the seasons came and went. He collected along the main footpaths, in damp places in the valleys of Akuapem, in the loose sand along the beach and around the lagoons, in the brush in Gã and Adangme, in the silts laid down by the Volta, in the secondary growth in abandoned fields, on swampy islands in the great lagoon west of Keta. The intimacy of his contact with the Africans and the very close attention he was paying to his surroundings emerge clearly in these ethnobotanical notes. The cultural impressions are fragmented and fleeting, but often quite vivid. Much of this information may have been passed to him by experienced old coasters, but these notes have

124 Offices of the Botanic Gardens, Copenhagen, Directionens Protocol and journaled correspondence, from the Chamber of Customs, January 17, 1801; J.W. Hornemann, Enumeratio plantarum horti botanici hafniensis (Copenhagen: Johannis Frederici Schultzii, 1807), p. 45; Hepper, p. 10, mentions plants grown in Vienna from seed provided by Thonning. 125 F.C. Schumacher, Beskrivelse af guineiske planter som er fundne af danske botanikere, især af Etatsraad Thonning, specially offprinted from the Skrifter of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters (Copenhagen, printed at Hartv. Frid. Popps Bogtrykkerie, 1827); Hepper, in his complete overhaul of Thonning’s (and Isert’s) botanical material, also published (see his p. 15) W.C. Worsdell’s translations of Thonning’s published ethnobotanical notes; the notes were also translated by P. Ascherson in “Botanisch-ethnographische Notizen aus Guinea. Aus den Aufzeichnungen von Thonning in Schumacher’s Beskrivelse af Guineiske Planter”, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, Vol. 11, 1879, pp. 231–258; see Adams, p. 42. 132 chapter four very much the ring of first-hand reports. Thonning was a medical man, carefully observant, and not squeamish; there are indications that he himself experimented with some of the vernacular remedies he described.126 Clearly he was trusted by his informants. The degree to which he could communicate directly with the Africans is unknown: his friend Christian Schiønning later published the Ten Commandments in the language of the Accra, with rather sophisticated notes on points of grammar and vocabulary: his example may have encouraged Thonning to take up the language, and much can be learned in three years immersed in a foreign culture.127 In his communication of April, 1801, Thonning passed on to the question of natural products that might be exported:128 To seek out and investigate the natural products that could become the object of trade in Europe and to contribute as much as it is in my power to the advancement of natural history is the main substance of the instructions provided me by the Chamber for my guidance and observation: if I have not misunderstood the Chamber’s words, it was especially the first point that was the aim of my being sent out, but as all reports on this matter demand just as much knowledge, based on experience, as diligence and care, … I only now after 5/4 year’s residence here on the coast feel in a position to begin such reports…. In the mail package follows the beginning of a draft of a description of the land and its inhabitants, and with same a map of the provinces that will eventually be described in said draft”. The cover note for this geographical description opens:129 As I find how little is known of the land and its inhabitants, as I see daily how many false notions the travel writers must necessarily occasion, especially hereby, that most have written up a work of memory after their return home to Europe, in which they have confused many things and often presented obvious untruths, partly from want of memory, partly from a desire to deceive; and as I regard it as very necessary to have a correct knowledge of the land and inhabitants in order to be able to conduct a commerce with the

126 See Schumacher, pp. 264–265. 127 C. Schønning [sic], De ti Bud, det apostoliske symbolum og Fader Vor, oversatte i det accraiske sprog (Copenhagen: Trykt i det Kongl. Vaisenhuses Bogtrykkerie af C.F. Schubart, 1805). Schiønning appears to have had complete command of the language, but was unable to find suitable expressions to convey the sense of “holy ghost” and “immaculate conception”: pp. 6–7. The Bishop of Sjælland (whose see included Copenhagen) had this printed in a hundred copies, but it was never put into the trade: “C. Schønning”, in H. Ehrencron- Müller, Forfatterlexikon, omfattende Danmark, Norge og Island indtil 1814 (Copenhagen: H. Aschehoug & Co. Dansk Forlag, 1924–1932). 128 GJS 270/1801, Thonning, [Christiansborg,] April 24, 1801. 129 GJ(S) 271/1802, Thonning, Christiansborg, April 24, 1801. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 133

greater profit, I have, then, considered it my duty to obtain as clear and truthful knowledge hereof as my ability and my intended stay here on the coast will permit. My intent is first to describe the land and the inhabitants, and thereafter the mutual relations between the Europeans and the inhabitants, and within this last section to include trade with the products of the land and all the means of obtaining them, and also the land’s suitability for foreign products, and the means whereby these could be obtained, as well as the difficulties to be overcome with each. Such a compilation would be a large undertaking, he said, for he had taken very extensive notes “on my travels and investigations, but especially on daily conversations with the negroes”. For the present, he would attempt only to collect the most important things in a draft, whose development I expect to be able to complete after my return home to the Fatherland from the notes I will have made, partly from my own experience and investigations and partly with messieurs Commandant Schiønning’s and Merchant Mejer’s help, the most experienced men in the ways of the country, and who both have the desire to impart their knowledge to me; what might then be lacking, my colleague Schmidt, who will remain here after me, will surely go to the trouble to make up. Thonning’s “Draft of a historical and geographical description of the allied provinces of the Danish possessions on the coast of Guinea”,130 far overstepped the instructions he had received from Tønder Lund.131 His description is perfectly in keeping, however, with the strong geographic, economic, and administrative elements of the Linnaean tradition that had been passed on to him in Copenhagen through the Natural History Society.132 The map Thonning sent in with this report was not simply a sketch for the orientation of his readers in the Chamber of Customs but quite an elaborate representation, of great graphic immediacy and usefulness, of

130 ad GJS 271/1802, unsigned and undated “ Udkast til en Historiske og geographiske Beskrivelse over de Allierede Provindser ved de danske Besiddelser paa Kysten af Guinea”. 131 Thonning still found it necessary eight years later to justify this use of his energy (Rtk. 2214.86, P. Thonning, Copenhagen, December 20, 1809): my efforts were devoted to discharging the duties laid upon me by my instructions; but as these tasks, because of circumstances attendant thereupon, did not always fill my time, I used the opportunity to acquaint myself with everything that could contribute to acquiring as complete a knowledge as possible of Danish Guinea”. 132 See Tore Frängsmyr, “Editor’s introduction”, in Linnaeus, the man and his work, pp. vii–xiv, on pp. x–xi. 134 chapter four his evolving grasp of the geography of the Danish enclave on the African coast.133 It would be insufficient simply to assign Thonning’s map some more or less predictable cultural provenance among the common passions and pursuits of the educated bourgeois elite from which he sprang. His map appears to embody quite an original cartographic ambition, an eager and intuitive appreciation and appropriation of this complex plani- metric trick that renders a portion of the world accessible in such a way as no place on earth can ever in fact present itself to the observer. Neither the Danish nautical charts administration134 nor the national topographic program of the Academy of Sciences and Letters135 operated in the Danish colony on the African coast, and nothing has been found to link Thonning to these organizations or to any formal cartographic background. He had no military training. He was as familiar with pen and rule as any schoolboy, but he was not a cartographer in any professional sense. He said himself that his map was “a work that was very difficult for me”,136 but it appears to have been crucial to his approach to his geographical study. Three “cashiered” drafts of Thonning’s map lay among the Guinea Commission’s papers until they were removed to the Rigsarkiv’s Maps and Drawings Collection for safe-keeping in 1980.137 Two of these are undated, and the third is dated 1802; it is likely that the two undated drawings, and perhaps the third, as well, were made on the ground on the Guinea Coast. One of them, in particular, is marvelously formative and tentative: it records strikingly the emergence of Thonning’s rich and lively cartographic image from the extraordinary African landscape around him.138 There are also some rough landscape views of uncertain provenance, but which may be Thonning’s, among the Guinea Commission’s papers, and he can be imagined in his rooms at Christiansborg, with rule and pen in hand and his notes and sketches around him, laying this scattering of

133 The map is not with the essay in its original place in the Guinea journal files. Quite a number of manuscript versions and copies of the map are to be found in various Danish repositories, and these have been moved about so often over the years that it does not appear possible to say with certainty which of the surviving manuscripts was this first map sent in from Africa: see Hopkins, “Peter Thonning’s map”. 134 See Ravn, Det Kongelige Danske Søkortarkiv. 135 See Lomholt. 136 Rtk. 2214.86, P. Thonning, Copenhagen, December 20, 1809. 137 RA, Kort og Tegningssamling, GTK U-Samling Nos. 21, 22, and 23. The maps were removed to the map collection from GK III. The archival marker does not so indicate, but the maps presumably lay originally in the file marked “Kasserede Udkast til Kort over Danske Guinea” (cashiered drafts of maps of Danish Guinea). 138 GTK U-Samling No. 22. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 135 settled spots on his paper—constructing for himself a corner of the world, trying in this unfamiliar and on the whole rather difficult and sophisticated medium to both grasp and convey something of his mind’s view of the wild coast. He appears to have compiled his map largely from scratch: nothing else of this scale and detail appears to have existed, and if he drew his map’s basic outlines from a published map, or from some manuscript available in the enclave, he never identifies it. Indeed, although he refers, in a couple of manuscripts that were both probably written on the coast,139 to matters “laid down” in the “african Pilot 1800”, he declared later: “I found all, including the newest English charts for 1801, full of errors, even for the coastlines”.140 A faint grey line on the sketchiest of these maps can be taken to represent Thonning’s itineraries about the territory.141 His two trips east along the coast to Fort Prindsenssteen are represented by a single line, with a spur quite a long way up the west bank of the Volta to the vicinity of Tøffri (Tefle) and another running eight or ten miles directly west from Prindsenssteen to some of the islands in the great Keta Lagoon.142 (Figure 6) His exploration of the country around the upper reaches of the Ponny River with Flindt, his journey to Akuropon with Schiønning, and his visits to the plantation Frederikssted all appear to be represented. Finally, the old map bears a series of broadly concentric arcs out into the countryside around Christiansborg, and these may depict shorter botanizing excursions around the fort.143 (Figure 7) Thonning asserted that his map was “based on observations of latitude and the bearings of the places from all sides:”144 any ship’s captain could have provided him with some latitudes along the coast, and he doubtless carried a compass on his perambulations, but there is no evidence anywhere in the record of a formal survey of the terrain depicted in his map.

139 GK II, “Udkast til Beskrivelse udarbeidet i Guinea”, p. 13, and “Det danske Guinea”, p. 1. 140 GJS 726/1806, Thonning, Copenhagen, December 12, 1805; see The African pilot: being a collection of new and accurate charts, on a large scale, of the coasts, islands, and harbours of Africa, from the Straits of Gibraltar to Cape Negro … compiled from draughts, observations, journals, etc. of Messrs. Robert Norris, William Woodville, Archibald Dalzel, and George Maxwell of Liverpool (London: Robert Laurie and James Whittle, 1799). 141 RA, Kort og Tegningssamling, GTK U-Samling No. 22. 142 See Akyeampong, p. 16. 143 The notes in his botanical descriptions confirm that he collected in these places: see Schumacher and Hepper. 144 GJS 726/1806, Thonning, Copenhagen, December 12, 1805. 136 chapter four

Fig. 6. Early version of Thonning's map, detail, showing, in faint grey lines, his journeys to the eastern forts. RAKTS, GTK U-Samling 22. (By courtesy of the Danish National Archives.)

Thonning’s map was in fact based much more on impression and report than on measurement: most of the territory encompassed on his map still lay outside the experience of any of the Danes in the forts.145 Thonning’s notes among the Guinea Commission’s papers contain the statement, for example, that the Akuapem range, cut through by the Volta, “raises itself again on the east side of the Volta and continues toward the N.E.,” but “I know only the mountains as far as Adumang”, a few miles west of the river to the northeast of Akuropon. Again, “East of the Volta, bearings were taken from Fort Prindsenssteen to the single standing mountains Adaklu [and] Aqu, but Anjambo and Dodome were laid down according to the

145 See GJ 264/1829, Undersøgelseskommission, [Findt and Hein, Christiansborg,] April 14, 1828. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 137

Fig. 7. Early version of Thonning's map, detail, showing, in faint grey lines, the routes of his excursions with Christian Schiønning and Jens Flindt. RAKTS, GTK U-Samling 22. (By courtesy of the Danish National Archives.) 138 chapter four natives’ description”.146 Thonning makes no reference to any native map, if indeed such a thing existed, but it is by no means unthinkable that he laid his own maps out before his African interlocutors when he asked them about what lay beyond the horizon to the north.147 Thonning gives some indication of how he put his map together in a note in the journal of his trip to Akuapem with Schiønning: “Abadee lies [north-northeast] from Chrbg & N. W from Temma. This last I learned by looking through an opening towards the sea coast where one can clearly make out the sea and the coast from Ponni to beyond [Tema]”.148 With a series of such notes, a rough map can be constructed. Time and again, for almost fifty years, Thonning revised and added to this map on the basis of subsequent surveys and travel accounts and had fresh versions and copies of it drawn: at least sixteen manuscript versions and copies of the map are preserved in public Danish collections. Almost all of them bear the date 1802, but the latest of them incorporates information that came to him as late as 1846.149 Thonning’s map depicts something over a hundred statute miles of coastline and about a degree of latitude, or almost seventy miles.150 There are a large number of towns and villages (one hundred and seventy or so, on later versions), their locations picked out or their names underlined in bright colors to distinguish among ethnic groupings. On two of the maps, probably early versions, Thonning outlines the territories of these nations rather peremptorily, or perhaps wishfully, with straight lines

146 GK III, Diverse, Materialier, undated sheets of Thonning’s notes. 147 On the authority of Ivor Wilks, the Asante “lacked cartographic skills” and had to rely on mental maps: “On mentally mapping Greater Asante: a study of time and motion”, Journal of African History, Vol. 33, 1992, pp. 175–190, on p. 175. See Denis Wood, “The fine line between mapping and mapmaking”, Cartographica, Vol. 30, No. 4, 1993, pp. 50–60, on p. 55. 148 GK III, Geografiske Noticer, Kasserede Udkast til Kort over Danske Guinea, fragment or extract of journal beginning August 29, 1800. 149 On succeeding versions of his map, he was at pains to credit the main sources of new information, and the title on the most recent, a very rough draft, reads: “Map of the Danish possessions in Guinea made on the spot by P. Thonning in 1802 based on his own journeys and investigations and corrected in 1847 by same, after Captain Lind’s survey in 1828 of the Volta from Fotjuka to the mouth; after Assistant Herbst’s survey in 1837 of the landscape between Christiansborg and the closest Akvapim Mountains; after Captain Vidal’s surveys in 1838; and after Governor Carstensen’s Journey, 1846, from Akvapim to Kibi in Akim”: RAKTS, Rtk. 337,30. No finished copy of this map has been found, but in April, 1847, a draftsman billed Thonning “for constructing and drawing a map of the Danish possessions in Guinea”: GJS 459/1848, Wedel, [Copenhagen], on behalf of the Guinea Commission, April 7, 1848. 150 Some versions of the map extend a few miles farther west than others to include the course of the Sacumo-fjo River to the west of Accra. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 139 and sharp angles.151 He marks the Danish forts, the English and Dutch forts St. James [sometimes simply James Fort]152 and Crevecoeur at Accra, and the English Vernon’s Fort, at Prampram. He marks cultivated spots and a good number of “formerly inhabited places”. There is a well distributed symbol for “Powerful fetishes that protect runaway slaves”. On some of the maps, Thonning depicts the local compass declination. A few anchorages and soundings are marked. He indicates the seasonal variations in the flow of currents along the shore. He renders the Cinques Sous or Sinkesu Bank, which he indicates is “very rich in fish in August and September”. There are inscriptions regarding the annual floods along the Volta and the tides in the estuary. On some of the maps, Thonning distinguishes between reaches of salt and fresh water in the lower Volta. On one particularly fine exemplar, the rip off the mouth of the river is very delicately rendered. The whole is set, on most of the maps, against a perfectly rectangular four- minute graticule, each square a Danish mile (24,000 feet, or somewhat over four statute miles) on a side.153 Together, Thonning’s “Draft of a historical and geographical description” and his map represent an impressive beginning on an ambitious geographical project. The essay is highly informative and sensible, and the map is a subtle and convincing representation. It is as if a window on the Danish West African enclave was suddenly opened in the offices of the Chamber of Customs in Copenhagen: nothing of such scope, immediacy, detail, and authority had hitherto been seen. Nevertheless, the arrival of these documents in Copenhagen in June, 1802, was marked only by an annotation in the Chamber’s Guinea correspondence journal that the map and the description were filed away for the time being.154 Ole Haaslund Smith died in August, 1801.155 Governor Ahnholm reported that Hr. Thonning and said deceased Schmidt apparently exerted themselves too much; they traveled the 31st July to Friederichstæd, there to carry on their investigations and botanizing to advantage, but after 18 days they both returned here very sick.156

151 RAKTS, Rtk. 337, 26, and a rough sketch of uncertain date with some of the Guinea Commission’s files now at GJS 702/1849 (GJS 447/1837). 152 See Metcalfe, Maclean of the Gold Coast, throughout. 153 See the table of measures in Letters on West Africa, pp. 248–249. 154 GJ 271/1802. 155 Uafgjort Forestillinger 1822–31, a sheet of notes regarding Smith’s accounts. 156 GJ(S) 182/1802, Ahnholm, Christiansborg, October 5, 1801. 140 chapter four

Haaslund Smith had died a week or so later. Thonning was now out of danger; his “dauntlessness” in his illness “unmistakably contributed much to his recovery”.157 Thonning reported in December that he was still too weak to undertake any work “that demands exertion of mind or body”. His illness and the loss of his assistant had set him four months behind in his work, he reckoned. A ship would soon be leaving the coast, but if he sailed in it, he would have to leave various work incomplete; I have therefore decided to spend several months yet here in this land, so as thereby to make up the lost time and, as much as it stands in my power, execute the charge the Chamber laid upon me.158 The Chamber filed this letter without remark, and it is not recorded that there was any further communication with Thonning for another year and a half. In March, 1802, Governor Wrisberg, who was still in the metropolis, making reference to the crown’s orders to Governor Olrick almost ten years before, sent in further report on the Danish forts and the areas they controlled, enclosing a number of views of the forts and of the plan tation Frederiksberg, near Christiansborg.159 Production of cotton at Frederiksberg could easily be increased, and at little cost, by making use of the fort’s inventory slaves. Above all, in his view, it would be best, if indeed it was the royal intention to establish a colony, “to begin at the water’s edge and thus in time move higher into the country”, so as to assure the “supply of foodstuffs, etc., in the event that one came into some disagreement with the natives”. He thought that Isert’s approach had been “not the most correct”. It was quite a detailed and authoritative report, with long descriptions of the forts and estimates of the numbers of arms-bearing men in various towns along the coast, but Wrisberg actually appears to have mainly been interested in pursuing another colonial project altogether, deep in the Gulf of Guinea on the far side of the mouths of the Niger, just opposite the island of Fernando Po, at Bimbia, at the mouth of an arm of the Cameroon River, where he proposed to trade in such goods as ivory, dye-woods, and

157 GJS 182/1802, Ahnholm, Christiansborg, October 5, 1801. 158 GJS 283/1802, Thonning, [Christiansborg,] December 14, 1801. 159 GJ(S) 179/1802, Wrisberg, Copenhagen, February 2, 1802, filed at GJS 175/1847, in packet marked nos. 201–400; see RAKTS, Rtk. 337,716 (Frederiksberg), Rtk. 337,717 and 337,719 (Prindsenssteen). science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 141 beeswax.160 He offered to draw up a formal plan for the establishment of a royal colony there: land, building materials, and provisions were to be had at low prices; hurricanes were unknown; and there was no surf, which so hampered transshipments at the Danish establishments. Slaves could be bought there for half what they cost in the West Indies (and it seems likely enough that it was this price differential that Wrisberg really had foremost in mind, and a cargo of slaves from Bimbia was indeed sent to the West Indies). The local people were “children of nature”, quite innocent of Europeans and their trade goods, unlike the Africans of the Danish enclave farther up the coast, but he believed they could “be turned to work and the preparation of the products of the land”. Wrisberg apparently played his Bimbia project rather well, and the mood in the Danish administration was sufficiently expansive that he was asked to further develop his plan.161 The Chamber of Customs wished to know if sugar plantations at Bimbia could be worked without making use of slave labor, but Wrisberg thought it would be impossible to expect of these people the “exertion that a sugar harvest demands”. They lived without clothes in dwellings that took a few hours to construct, and the land and the shore offered them their nourishment for nothing; “thus they live out their lives unaccustomed to work”. A planter could not hope to get ten people out of a thousand to work on a sugar harvest, as long they still had food for a day. The English colony at Sierra Leone was to have been based on free labor, Wrisberg reminded the Chamber, “but the whole enterprise has almost disappeared. The nature of raising sugar makes it impossible to work with people of the negroes’ present way of thinking unless they are driven by physical coercion”: when the cane was ripe to be cut, a few days’ heat could wilt it and considerably reduce the harvest; “the work must therefore be forced along”. However, he said, if the slaves were provided with homes and land and one day a week in which to work their plots for themselves, and the promise of their freedom in six or eight years, their loyalty, at least, could be counted on.162 The Chamber of Customs sought the Finance Collegium’s opinion, and it was agreed that the scheme had promise. The Finance Collegium suggested that thirty or forty inventory slaves from the existing establishments could be spared, especially if the latter were closed down upon the

160 Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 182; see “Bimbia River”, The Columbia gazetteer of the world, Saul B. Cohen, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). (It was perhaps in this connection that the Chamber of Customs in March obtained a book of English charts for the African coast. The maps were purchased from Jo. G. Blankensteiner, a Copenhagen dealer: GJS 187/1802, March 4, 1802.) 161 GJ 179/1802. 162 GJ 197/1802, Wrisberg, March 25, 1802. 142 chapter four cessation of the slave trade. The Collegium thought it would be best to limit agricultural experiments at Bimbia to cotton and coffee, until it could be determined whether sugar, which was very expensive to produce, could be cultivated in Africa at all.163 In May, the crown prince authorized the expenditure of fifteen hundred rigsdaler for a suitable piece of land at Bimbia, and Wrisberg was ordered to submit a plan for the cultivation of colonial crops there.164 There was very little concrete geographical substance to Wrisberg’s proposition, and the crown’s willingness to provide funds for this new venture is difficult to account for. The existing establishments were great stone fortresses, agricultural undertakings were in progress, and the political and economic relationships with the peoples of the enclave were of long standing; the Bimbia project seems in comparison wildly speculative. The metropolitan government had perhaps to some degree to defer to its governor’s rank and judgment. It may also be that he presented himself well, and could speak of what he had seen along the coast and in the West Indies rather compellingly; there were, after all, few others who could. In the summer of 1802, the Finance Collegium wrote to the Chamber of Customs that it had had word from Flindt regarding his activity at Kongenssteen in the course of 1801.165 Christian Jansen had planted sugar cane in the fort’s garden, and, after three heavy rainstorms, the cane had begun to grow vigorously but had then dried out and failed completely. “Jansen could not be induced to make a new attempt anywhere else”, for he regarded the whole area as “unsuitable for culture”, but Flindt intended to press on, and with cotton and yams as well, for which ground had already been taken up. Flindt’s brewmaster had arrived on the coast, and the prospects for his distilling operation appeared promising. The Finance Collegium urged Flindt in its reply to limit his efforts to cotton and perhaps coffee, which it was known “could with success be cultivated in Africa” and not to “concern yourself with raising sugar”; furthermore, the Collegium reckoned, the recent peace established between France and England would be likely to depress sugar prices as French and English West Indian sugar was once again brought to European markets in normal quantities.166 Acting governor Ahnholm reported at the end of 1801 that the Council on the coast had taken Jansen into the Government’s service,

163 GJ 211/1802, Finants Collegiet, May 1, 1802. 164 GJ 224/1802, royal resolution, May 19, 1802. 165 GJ 305/1802, Finants Collegiet, July 17, 1802, filed at GJS 171/1836. 166 Finants Collegiet, Missiv Protokol, July 10,1802, to Flindt. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 143

to experiment with sugar-planting at the places Fredrichstæd and Fredrichsberg. As a planting of sugar by the Rio Volta, because of the soil’s saltiness, will probably not succeed, he has, in agreement with Flindt, taken his leave. The establishments were in need of someone “who understands the right way of proceeding with the cultivation of the earth”, and Ahnholm hoped the Chamber of Customs would approve this step. The Chamber referred the matter to Governor Wrisberg, who, in the summer of 1802, after more than a year in Copenhagen, was preparing to return to the coast.167 Wrisberg recommended that the plantation Frederickstæd be closed down altogether; the plantings at Frederiksberg could be supervised directly from Fort Christiansborg, and Jansen’s skills would be better employed at Bimbia.168 Wrisberg again took up his post on the coast in October of 1802,169 and it is recorded that he had brought with him another scion of this remarkable Danish family of the tropical colonial Atlantic, his brother Philip W. Wrisberg, to serve as warehouse assistant; Philip Wrisberg, fourteen years the young governor’s junior, was born in 1785.170 In December, Wrisberg tersely reported that he had closed the colony in Akuapem down, as he had been ordered to do as long as the “right to the land is not thereby lost”.171 In May, 1803, the merchant Peder Meyer, after a long silence, wrote to the Chamber of Customs to ask for a loan of twelve thousand rigsdaler, twice the sum Flindt had received, in support of his own agricultural experiments; it was his understanding that it was the crown’s wish to encourage such undertakings.172 Meyer had put the savings of thirteen years’ work into his plantings at Togbloku in 1790, he wrote, and it had all but ruined him. He had applied to Governor Bjørn for endorsement of an application to the Finance Collegium for funds, but Bjørn, whom Meyer asserted was interested only in the slave trade, had again and again put him off with promises, and Meyer had in the end been obliged to abandon his farm and take up the trade again. “Driven by a tireless passion for this profitable and beneficial science”, however, he had planted some cotton in the dry environs of Christiansborg,

167 GJ(S) 279/1802, Ahnholm, December 15, 1801, filed forward at GJS 282/1801; the Chamber wrote to Wrisberg June 22, 1802. 168 GJ 282/1802, Wrisberg, Copenhagen, June 23, 1802. 169 Larsen, p. 137. 170 GJ 412/1803, a payroll, January 1, 1803. 171 GJ 407/1803, Wrisberg, [Christiansborg,] December 23, 1802. 172 GJ 491/1804, Meyer, Christiansborg, May 17, 1803; reading here from a duplicate sent in on July 31, 1803, journaled as ad GJ 498/1804, subsequently marked Designation IV, letter D, by the Guinea Commission, and now filed at GJS 144/1828. 144 chapter four where he found it could be brought to great perfection with little trouble. “And furthermore”, he wrote, “in the year 1800 I was so fortunate as to get some fresh coffee beans, in their shells, from Printzes Island”, or Principe, the Portuguese island deep in the Gulf of Guinea, at which ships trading on the Leeward Coast often stopped before heading out across the Atlantic with the trade winds.173 Meyer had managed to raise eight seedlings from his beans from Principe. “These I very carefully nurtured, and when I had brought them to such maturity that they could be planted out, I then laid out a nursery ca. 8 miles N. by W. of Christiansborg, which is in the vicinity of the Aquapim Mountain Range; these 8 plants were in the “greatest desirable flower, and already year before last I harvested good, fully ripe coffee beans”. From these in turn he had raised more seedlings. He related that he had also planted “sweet orange trees and West Indian tamarinds”, neither of which had grown at the Danish establishments before, and both had borne fruit that year. He knew of some oranges at the Dutch fort Elmina, but there were no other tamarinds on the coast. He had experimented with cotton, sugar, rice, indigo, and ginger “in different kinds of soil and in different places. I have assuredly found out which kinds of soil that are most serviceable for each sort”; he had found that for all of them, except cotton and indigo, “the stretch by or beneath the Aqvapim Mountains is the best of all and most fertile”. Cotton and indigo could advantageously be planted closer to the sea, “for the earth higher up is altogether too rich and drives the cotton tree to an extraordinary size but the harvest of the cotton is therefore only very slight”. The same was true of indigo: in rich soil the plants developed strong stalks but fewer and smaller leaves than otherwise. Meyer hoped by the following year to have two thousand coffee plants, which was all he could possibly manage to clear enough land for and maintain without support from the state. With the proper funding, all the plants he mentioned could be grown here, indeed, perhaps even to greater perfection than in the West Indies, but all new plantings are infallibly difficult in the beginning. These my findings in many years’ residence here in this land and tireless diligence in making tests

173 George E. Brooks, Jr., Yankee traders, old coasters, and African middlemen (Boston: Boston University Press, 1970), pp. 103–104. (Adam Afzelius, the Swedish naturalist at Sierra Leone, made a note in his diary of efforts to bring coffee and other useful plants from the islands in the Gulf in 1795: a Captain Mason, he recorded, talked at dinner one day of his visits to São Tomé and Principe, where there were large plantations of coffee, which had been introduced from Brazil five years before: Adam Afzelius, Sierra Leone journal, pp. 17 and 32. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 145

I have found it my host humble obligation and duty to report to the High Collegium for closer consideration. Three testimonials to the truth of his statements, supplied by the merchant Johan Richter (later governor), Jens Flindt, and Johan Ahnholm, the acting governor, are filed with Meyer’s letter and were examined decades later by the Guinea Commission.174 The Chamber of Customs sent Meyer’s application on to the Finance Collegium,175 remarking, according to the Chamber’s annotation in its correspondence journal, that “Meyer is a deserving man of agriculture, but that such a sum could not be entrusted to this old man. But it is suggested that he may be given a reward and later a bounty for that which is produced”. Meyer sent in a copy of his application three months later.176 He reported that the land at his plantation in Akuapem was revealing itself to be “uncommonly” fertile; “6 coffee trees were so full of fruit that the branches had to be supported”. He had planted beans for fifteen hundred more trees, which he reckoned would be a not insignificant plantation. The way to his plantation at Jadosa, he was careful to note, was level and easy to traverse. The Chamber of Customs sent this copy of Meyers’s petition to the Slave-trade Commission, whose work, although the ban on the export of slaves from the Danish enclave had taken effect at the beginning of the year, was not yet done: political pressure was being brought to bear by Danish West Indian interests.177 Flindt, too, had obtained some coffee beans, these from São Tomé. In a report addressed to both the Finance Collegium and the Chamber of Customs in August, 1803,178 he said that he had it in mind to plant them at a place called Eibo, four or five miles southeast of Fort Kongenssteen, where he also intended to start a planting of cotton and to put up some buildings. Ships supplying Kongenssteen landed cargo at Eibo, which was cut off from the Ada mainland by a “krikke” running in from the Volta almost to Pute. Flindt reckoned that in time the peninsula could be made quite secure.

174 ad GJ 498/1804, Richter, Christiansborg, May 8, 1803; Flindt, Christiansborg, April 27, 1803; Ahnholm, Christiansborg, May 17, 1803, all filed at GJS GJ 144/1828 among papers assembled by the Guinea Commission. 175 GJ 491/1804. 176 GJ 498/1804, Meyer, July 31, 1803. 177 See Hopkins, “The Danish ban on the Atlantic slave trade and Denmark’s African colonial ambitions”, pp. 171–176. 178 GJ 490/1804, Finants Collegiet, August 18, 1804, sending a copy of a letter from Flindt. 146 chapter four

He would have done more by this time, he reported, but he had been ill for the better part of a year. Since his first failure, he had made no further attempt with sugar cane, which required so much care and “knowledge of its agricultural operation, since for one lone planter, with this land’s unpracticed folk, it is scarcely possible to make any progress”. He seemed rather glad to have received the Finance Collegium’s order to limit his agricultural experiments to cotton and coffee. Cotton that he had planted in the garden at Kongenssteen had shown much promise but had been inundated by the high water in 1802, which had lasted from August to November. All he had got out of it was seed for another attempt. Wrisberg had agreed with him that it was of no use to make further attempts at Kongenssteen or on Ada Island, and Flindt hoped Wrisberg would travel down the coast to inspect his operation at Eibo before he proceeded much farther. He was making little progress with his distillery because of the high price of corn. This report was later unearthed from the files of the Chamber of Customs by the Guinea Commission.179 A week later, Governor Wrisberg reported that Christian Jansen (whom Flindt had not seen fit to mention in his report) was dead.180 In October, Wrisberg reported that he had abandoned his factory at Bimbia; he never drafted the formal colonial plan he had promised the administration before leaving Copenhagen.181 On the same date, he reported182 with some enthusiasm that he had begun to cut a road from Christiansborg to the hills of Akuapem, where, he said, the fertility of the soil “gives me assurance that all possible plantations there will succeed and when once the country is His Majesty’s then there is no trouble to be feared. I am sure that coffee will be very fruitful there”, and he confirmed the substance of Meyer’s account of his work on his plantation. Meyer intends to expand his planting to 10,000 plants and when it is in order it will provide him an ample living, he has been twenty-some years in this land and intends never to leave Africa. Similarly there is sugar cane here in quantity

179 ad GJ 490/1804, Flindt, Kongenssteen, August 6, 1803, copy, addressed to both the Finance Collegium and the Chamber of Customs, marked Designation III, Letter A, filed at GJS 1697/1818, where it appears to be out of place: it should probably be at either GJS 1569/1817 or GJS 1751/1819. 180 GJ 460/1803, Wrisberg, August 12 [or 13], 1803. 181 GJ 468/1804, Wrisberg, October 22, 1803. There is a thick file of correspondence regarding Wrisberg’s Bimbia project at this place in the files; see Poul Olsen, “Bimbia- projektet”, Siden Saxo, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1989, pp. 4–8. The Guinea Commission’s papers included the Chamber of Customs’s brief résumé of the matter, Designation I, No. 5, n. d., now filed at GJS 226/1836. 182 GJS 466/1804, Wrisberg, October 22, 1803. science and colonialism: peter thonning’s expedition 147

and when we have a good road from the mountain the transport to the sea will not be difficult, especially if mules were imported from St. Jago in the Cape Verdes. Wrisberg wrote that he had in hand a good deal of cotton from the plantation Friederichsberg but it is so difficult to get their seeds separated from the wool; what clean cotton I have on hand I will send home with a cutter which is supposed to go direct to Copenhagen from here in the spring with a cargo of coffee which came from the Portuguese islands. It would be much to be wished that the administration would engage an expert planter from the West Indies who was young and send here to begin setting up sugar and coffee plantations, I am sure that when such a person received a fitting advance he would make good progress which would give occasion for others’ wishing to establish themselves here. He also thought that the Moravian brotherhood, with whose works on St. Croix he was doubtless familiar, would find fertile fields in which to labor here on the coast.183 An extract of Wrisberg’s letter was sent to the Slave-trade Commission in June, 1804, but no immediate upshot is remarked in the Chamber of Customs’s Guinea correspondence journal at this place.184 A fragmentary extract of the Council on the coast’s accounts, apparently preserved only because some discrepancy attracted an auditor’s scrutiny in Copenhagen many years later, lists the wages paid Peter Thonning in November and December, 1802, toward the end of his stay.185 The officers in the Danish establishments took at least part of their pay in trade goods from the forts’ inventories, for nothing else was negotiable in traffic with the Africans, and their involvement in the local barter economy—and thus in the commerce of the Atlantic—was direct and rather intricate. This appears to have been quite an important cultural link to African society: the quality of these men’s lives depended to a great degree on their commercial acumen in this extraordinarily exotic market.186

183 See C.G.A. Oldendorp’s history of the mission of the Evangelical Brethren on the Caribbean islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John, Johann Jakob Bossard, ed., English edition and translation by Arnold R. Highfield and Vladimir Barac (Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers, Inc., 1987 [1777]). 184 Dokumenter vedrørende Kommissionen for Negerhandelens bedre Indretning & Ophævelse m. m., I, abstract of Wrisberg, October 22, 1803, and the Chamber’s cover letter to the Slave-trade Commission, June 16, 1804. 185 Uafgjorte Forestillinger, 1822–31, ad GJ 439/1804 (filed forward from GJ 435/1803), a wage sheet, Christiansborg, December 31, 1802, covering November and December 1802, enclosed with a letter from Thonning, [Copenhagen,] December 20, 1803. 186 Nørregård, Danish settlements, pp. 160–162. 148 chapter four

Some of the items on this list of goods drawn against his wages for this short period Thonning will have consumed personally, but his account was also charged for trade textiles (royal platillas, for example); for cases of French and Rhine wines; for wine vinegar, a half-dozen bottles at a time; for more than forty-five pounds of various grades of sugar; for very large quantities of rum and brandy (some of which, to be sure, may have been used to preserve specimens); for twenty-five flintlock rifles; for sixteen bars of Danish iron, each half the value of a gun; for beer by the barrel; and for a great deal of “Haysang” (hyson) tea, among many other things. He was also charged for a quarterly payment and one final payment to the so-called mulatto account upon his departure from the coast. The administration on the coast required its officers to contribute through this general fund to the support and education of their African offspring after they themselves had left the coast. (Fines for various minor infractions and derelictions might also be directed to this fund.)187 Most of the local administration’s records for this period have not survived, and no other shred of direct evidence has been found that Thonning entered into a liaison with an African woman, but his willingness to remain so long on the coast, in spite of his fears for his health, may perhaps reflect his satisfaction with his domestic situation as much as his sense of his duty.188 Late in 1802 or early in 1803, Thonning left the coast. He arrived in the Danish West Indies in February, 1803, and spent several months there. He traveled on to Europe in June and arrived in Copenhagen early in August.189 “The naturalist Hr. Thonning has come home from the coast of Guinea”, read, in full, the report of his homecoming in a Copenhagen newspaper.190 Thonning never visited Africa again: it was these three intense years of life and work there at the turn of the century that formed his view of West Africa and of Denmark’s place as a colonial power on the coast.

187 Nørregård, Danish settlements, pp. 166–167. 188 For a treatment of these relationships, see Pernille Ipsen, “Koko’s daughters: Danish men marrying Ga women in an Atlantic slave trading port in the eighteenth century”, (unpublished dissertation, University of Copenhagen, 2008). 189 VJ 708/1803, the West Indian administration, June 6, 1803. The administration also reported that a cotton gin sent down to the coast in 1800 or so, which had been sent on to the West Indies when no one on the coast had been able to make it work, had found no buyer in the islands; see GJ 94/1799. 190 VJ 708/1803, the West Indian administration, June 6, 1803; Rtk. 2214.86, P. Thonning, Copenhagen, December 20, 1809; Dagen, No. 126, August 6, 1803. CHAPTER FIVE

REPORTS AND REVERBERATIONS: THONNING’S EARLY AFRICAN WRITING

Thonning’s joy upon beholding the wooded brows of the Danish coast, the golden fields on the moraine-land above, the castle guarding the narrows at Elsinore, and the church-spires and crowded cobblestone streets of Copenhagen will have been boundless, after three years abroad on a tropical colonial frontier, but his fresh African experience—reinforced at every moment by all the material he had brought home, his plants, insects, maps, notes, and more or less finished essays—will have fairly crowded his imagination as he settled himself in his old haunts and undertook to organize and consolidate the work of three years. In the résumé Thonning drew up in 1809,1 he declared that he had come home from the coast with “Material for a detailed description of land, climate, inhabitants, etc.” In the English bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, he wrote, I suffered the irretrievable loss that almost all my Guinean and scientific drafts were burned together with my residence…. This loss of my collections from Guinea has prevented me from producing a flora of Danish Guinea, and such an exact and complete description of the country, as I wished; in the meantime, I am trying to write it from what I have left; the desire to make it as complete, clear, and useful as possible in the circumstances will rather protract its composition. Thonning never published a description of the Danish establishments and their environs, nor indeed any account at all of his African sojourn, but even such of his papers as survived the bombardment, some of which, at least, he appears to have laid with the Guinea Commission’s papers twenty-five years later, when he commenced the Commission’s research, taken together with the reports he had already sent to the Chamber of Customs and his botanical notes, are indeed the materials for a geographical and ethnographic description of considerable scope. Thonning’s early writings are priceless contemporary reports from Africa, fresh, coherent, sober, and exceptionally rich. He was clearly proud of his work, and was at

1 Rtk. 2214.86, P. Thonning, Copenhagen, December 20, 1809. 150 chapter five some pains to disparage well-known published travel accounts (usually, however, without naming them).2 His observations have the ring of authority and authenticity: they are strongly evocative of the place and of the lives of the people among whom he had spent so much time. Besides his fairly ambitious “Draft of a historical and geographical description of the allied provinces near the Danish possessions on the coast of Guinea”, which Thonning had sent in from the coast with his first map in 1801, but which is not recorded to have awakened the Danish government’s interest, and an excellent concluding report on the territory’s suitability for “Indian colonial products” that he submitted at the end of 1803, there survive among the files of the Guinea Commission a couple of other quite extensive drafts, apparently written either on the coast or soon after his return to Europe, as well as a few smaller fragments. Beyond that, his manuscript plant descriptions, in duplicate and triplicate, that he had passed to other scientists, are preserved with his herbarium specimens at the Botanical Museum in Copenhagen.3 These botanical manuscripts include, besides the Latin analyses, Thonning’s quite extensive ethnographic notes on his Guinea plants. These notes are full of life and local detail; they are strong evidence of the intimacy of his contact with the Africans, not only in the forts, but out in the towns and villages.4 A 72-page manuscript, on the first leaf of which Thonning inscribed in a large script the title “Det danske Gvinea” (Danish Guinea), opens with the argument that the enclave lay on the Slave Coast and not, as was generally held “by newer geographers”, on the Gold Coast, which in his view ended at the river Sacumo-fjo (possibly the Nsaki, which runs down out of the Akuapem hills), rather than at the Volta.5 (The Accra River, he wrote in

2 GJS 271/1802, Thonning, Christiansborg, April 24, 1801. It is likely that Thonning drew upon the descriptions published in Thaarup’s Archiv for statistik. 3 Botanisk Museet, Copenhagen, a file drawer of octavo or duodecimo slips labeled: “Schumacher og Thonning Beskrivelse af Planter fra Guinea”. These descriptions first saw print in the flora published by Schumacher in 1827. 4 Thonning made a number of starts on his material, and his more finished essays and the ethnobotanical notes, not to speak of the rougher drafts and notes, overlap one another considerably. What follows here combines, rearranges, and abridges these early descriptions of the Danish territory on the coast. This arrangement of the material does not correspond perfectly to that in any one of the reports Thonning actually submitted to the government. Thonning reworked his manuscripts considerably, and, in general, where necessary, Thonning’s editorial changes have been executed in the passages translated here. Much has been omitted, and some of the material included here he would himself perhaps have discarded. 5 GK II, Thonning, but unsigned and undated, “Det danske Gvinea” (hereinafter modernized to “Guinea”), a 72-page ms., plus pp. 1. a. – 4. a., on pp. 1.a–4.a; ad GJS 271/1802, reports and reverberations 151 one of the earliest of his drafts, an insignificant stream, and dry most of the year, was recognized locally as the boundary between the town of Osu, which was Danish, and English and Dutch Accra.) No gold was found east of Accra, he said; the currency in this area was cowrie-shells, not gold. The people west of the Sacumo-fjo, by their own traditions, had common origins, he said, and all spoke dialects of the Asante language and shared customs of “inheritance, circumcision, etc.”, while the people on the opposite bank of this stream had their roots farther east. Danish Guinea therefore occupied the westernmost Slave Coast, extending from the town of Osu, beneath the walls of Fort Christiansborg, to Point Auguja east of Keta, a stretch, according to Thonning’s maps, of a little over a hundred miles, sixty or seventy miles deep, running “almost parallel to the Line” at five or six degrees north latitude, ten or eleven degrees of longitude west of the meridian of Copenhagen. The extent of the territory, Thonning wrote, was more or less defined by the political and economic connection between the African peoples in the area and the Danes in their forts. “Although the land is not very large, it nevertheless divides itself, by distinct boundaries, forms of government, and languages, but particularly by the origins of various tribes, into various provinces”, or “landscapes”, as Thonning referred to them, “named for the nations that inhabit them”. Along the coast and extending ten or fifteen miles into the country were, from west to east, Gah [Gã], Adampi [Adangme], and Augna [Anlo]. Farther inland lay Aquapim, Akvambu, Voltakrepeh and Avinno, with Akim, Kvahu, Krepeh proper, and Akotim farthest in.6 (The territories of all of these peoples, except Kvahu, are distinguished one from another on Thonning’s maps.) North and west of Akyem lay the territory of Asante. Thonning spent most of his years on the coast in the Gã territory, and his descriptions of the lands inland and down to the east are comparatively sketchy.7 At the westernmost end of the Danish enclave, then, the Sacumo-fjo, called the Humo farther up its course, divided Gã from Fante. It reached unsigned and undated, Thonning’s “Udkast til en historiske og geographiske Beskrivelse over de Allierede Provindser ved de danske Besiddelser paa Kysten af Guinea”, p. 1. 6 R.A. Kea, “Population and economy”, has these modern equivalents for the names Thonning used: Akuapem, Akwamu, Rio Volta Krepe, Avenor, Akyem, Kwawu, Krepe, and Agotime. 7 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 1. a–4. a; ad GJS 271/1802, Thonning’s “Udkast til en historiske og geographiske Beskrivelse”, p. 1; DfuA, GG, Box 872, Peter Thonning, “Indberetning om det danske Territorium i Guinea fornemmelig med hensyn til nærværende Kultur af indiske Kolonial Produkter eller Beqvemhed for samme”, [Copenhagen,] December, 1803, marked ad GJ 434/1803, § 2; GK II, unsigned and undated draft, “Udkast til Beskrivelse udarbeidet i Guinea”, in Thonning’s hand, p. 12. 152 chapter five the sea six or eight miles west of Accra, and Thonning presumed it rose in Asante. It was “navigable by small, flat-bottomed vessels”, but shifting sandbars at the mouth rendered its passage treacherous, although the outfall into the sea was only in the driest years actually blocked by sand. Most of the canoes in use along the Danish stretch of the coast were carved from trees taken out of the woods here. The Sacumo-fjo was full of fish, but tensions between the peoples on either bank prevented its exploitation.8 All of the small streams that came down to the coast between the Sacumo-fjo and the Volta at the other end of the territory ended in lagoons at the beach, their mouths closed by sand in the dry seasons, although during the rains they became rather large rivers and broke through to the sea. When the floodwaters subsided, the tides filled the lagoons with salt water, and “the first uneasy sea” then once again blocked their outfalls with sand. The lagoons were very shallow and evaporated quickly, leaving a very thick crust of salt; the Africans also constructed salt pans of the local blue clay around the lagoons. The Laloe, the largest of these small streams, Thonning thought would be navigable for lighters up almost as far as Larteh.9 “The River Flau or Volta begins very deep in Africa, but where, I have not been able to obtain information on”, he wrote. The main direction of its flow appeared to be from north to south, until it made a sharp bend to the east after passing close under the foot of the inselberg Nåjo. Six or eight miles from its mouth it widened and flowed on either side of a number of islands, of which Ada Island and Honey Island were the largest; it narrowed again right at the mouth. Where there were no islands, the river was a half a mile or a mile across.10 It was largely unaffected by local rains, which was an indication of the great volume of the flow and the extent of its drainage basin. “In September, when the rainy season in the interior of Africa has filled all streams and small rivers, Volta rises over its banks”, flooding the adjacent regions to such a degree that travel was only possible by canoe; the river “often even washes away negro towns, which are laid

8 GK II, “Udkast til Beskrivelse udarbeidet i Guinea”, pp. 9–10. The stream was labeled Sacoom in “the african Pilot 1800”, Thonning said: see A new survey of that part of the coast of Africa comprised between Cape Verga and Cape Formoso …. Digested from the draughts, observations, and memoirs of Mr. Robert Norris of Liverpool, and under his Inspection (London, Laurie and Whittle, … as the act directs, 12th May, 1794), map No. 9 in The African pilot, 1799. 9 GK II, “Udkast til Beskrivelse udarbeidet i Guinea”, pp. 10–13; DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, §16. 10 GK II, “Udkast til Beskrivelse udarbeidet i Guinea”, pp. 2–3. reports and reverberations 153 out on the highest places by the riverbank”. The river proper flowed with “incredible speed” at this time, and it was dangerous to venture out on it in a small boat; eight or ten miles out at sea off the mouth the water was still fresh, and the river and the sea between them raised a frightfully high rip quite some distance off the mouth. This half-circle of breaking seas, for which, Thonning related, Portuguese explorers had named the Volta, was normally no more than a mile from the shore at the ebbing tide; at the flood tide it was almost in the mouth. Thonning had it from an experienced skipper that the surf at the mouth of the river was “more frightening than dangerous”. The salt water normally penetrated sixteen miles up the river, and the tides worked even farther up. The mouth of the river was two fathoms deep at best. With care, boats drawing nine or ten feet could pass up to Ada, and smaller vessels to Mlefi.11 There were crocodiles and hippopotami in the river, but these kept mainly to the tributaries and backwa- ters. “Sailing upon the Volta is romantically beautiful, one will scarcely be able to imagine anything more beautiful than its banks and islands, bound by palm- and other woods, constantly alternating with thickets, cultivated and uncultivated fields, and negro towns”.12 The Tojeng [or Todzie] River appeared to be a tributary of the Volta; it flooded suddenly in September but fell again within a few days. According to Thonning’s map, it flowed into the Augna Songo [or Keta Lagoon] and thence through the Amu or Augna River to the Volta. The Amu was a tidal reach, and always salt, except when the Volta was in flood and the salt water was pushed back up into the lagoon. It was rich in fish, with “ a fearful quantity of crocodiles and pelicans”. It was so densely over- hung by mangrove and other trees that sails were of no use here. The Keta Lagoon lay fifteen miles west of the Volta and was twenty miles long and twelve wide. It was so shallow that in the dry season it could be waded across almost anywhere, and a loaded canoe could only with difficulty cross from the Amu to Fort Prindsenssteen. Thonning had “here seen at a great distance a countless flock of large marsh birds, which without doubt were flamingoes”.13

11 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 6; GK II, “Udkast til Beskrivelse udarbeidet i Guinea”, pp. 1, 4, 5; GK II, an unsigned, undated, and untitled draft in Thonning’s hand, marked “Lit. C pag. 1–40”, laid inside an old book binding, the spine of which bears the title “Collegium uber die vornems Mathem. Vissens”, pp. [18–19]. 12 GK II, “Udkast til Beskrivelse udarbeidet i Guinea”, pp. 5–6. 13 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 6; GK II, “Udkast til Beskrivelse udarbeidet i Guinea”, pp. 6–8. “I must here remark”, Thonning wrote in the Indberetning’s § 6, 154 chapter five

East of Cape St. Paul lay the Bight of Benin; the Danish territory, west of the cape, lay on the Gulf of Guinea itself, which, Thonning declared, opened off “the Æthiopian Ocean”. “As everywhere on the coasts of the great world ocean in the hot climates there prevails a constant ebb and flood”, with a normal tidal range of about a fathom. A strong current ran along this coast from west to east at the rate of a mile or two an hour, reversing itself once in every month for up to three days, at no regular time, but most often at spring tides. This was especially likely to occur when the wind was in the east. The current ran strongest close in under the land. It was of considerable significance to ships sailing along the coast: “a well-sailing copper-clad merchant ship needs scarcely 20 hours to sail from Christiansborg to Prindsenssteen, but against that 8-10 days to tack its way forth against wind and current the opposite way”; a poor sailer with a foul bottom would be lucky to be able to make its way back up the coast at all. The winds were favorable all the way from Madeira to the Guinea Coast, but ships leaving the coast for Europe had to sail south across the Equator to catch more southerly and easterly breezes across the Atlantic into the regular sea lanes from the East Indies and the Cape. The journey back to Europe took several weeks longer than the trip down. “Since it is not possible in the ocean to reckon the current, it is thus necessary, when one is bound for a particular place in Guinea, to approach the coast a long time beforehand, to be sure of not sailing past”; most ships therefore aimed to strike the coast at Cape Palmas or even farther west.14 There was not the least danger in sailing along this coast unless a skipper ventured too close to the land and was unable to set an anchor in a rocky bottom in time when a storm came up from the south.15

that Rømer in his Efterretning om Kysten Guinea, p. 285, refers to the Augna lake as a part of Volta and gives it an extraordinary size and an unreasonable number of islands; he has also given occasion to Kloppenborg’s expanding this error, in his Geographie, Pt. 2, p. 220, by placing Malphi, Tøffri, and Agraffi on islands in said lake. Neither Rømer nor Kloppenborg, whose treatment expanded from a word or two in the German edition published in 1785–86 to quite an extensive article (based on Rømer’s description) in the Danish version published in 1787, attempted to map the area in question: Rømer, Tilforladelig efterretning om negotien paa Kysten Guinea; Rømer, Tilforladelig efterretning om Kysten Guinea; Jacob Kloppenburg, Geographie für Jedermann, insonderheit für die Jugend, Vol. 2, on “Asia, Afrika und Amerika” (Schleswig: gedruckt bey J.W. Serringhausen, 1786), and Geographie for Enhver, især for Ungdommen, vol. 2, Asien, Afrika og Amerika (Copenhagen, 1787), pp. 217–223. 14 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, §5; GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 4–6; see Brooks, Yankee traders, p. 30. 15 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, p. 6. reports and reverberations 155

The waves almost always rolled from the southwest to the northeast and were of little significance to ships at sea. On the beach, however, a great surf was raised, “because the rollers here find insufficient depth for their motion”. They “rage ceaselessly” all through the year all along the coast, even in the mouths of rivers, except, very rarely, when the wind blew from the land for several days. “The surf thus forms as it were a natural coast guard, and every foreigner that intends to set foot in the land of Guinea must first go through this frightful outer wall”. The surf was higher in the evening than in the morning and on rising tides, and higher at spring tides than at the moon’s first and last quarters, “and sometimes particularly strong without one’s being able to surmise any other cause than storms on the Æthiopean Ocean”. On still nights, the surf could be heard more than sixteen miles inland, Thonning said, and when the sea was high, one could count sixteen ranks of surf approaching the beach. It was not so high east of Lai, where the beach was less steep. “By the account of seafarers who have been both in the East Indies and here, the surf on the Coromandel Coast is both higher and more powerful”.16 No European boat with keel, rudder, and oars could land through this surf, and still less be launched against it. All transports through the surf were handled by dug-out canoes. There being a sufficiency of large trees, no planked canoes were built, unlike in the East Indies. The canoes were from fourteen to forty feet long, three to six feet wide, and from a foot and a half to three feet deep. The bottoms were flat, broad, and thick, and the stem turned up at the ends. They were not well suited to carrying cargo. In the after two thirds of the canoe’s length were the thwarts for the paddlers (known locally, after the Portuguese word, as “remidores”); the cargo was carried forward. The canoes were driven by between three and nineteen paddles. In the larger transport canoes, there were two paddlers to each thwart, with one man handling a steering oar aft. The paddles were about four feet long, with a heart-shaped blade, and cut from a single piece of wood. The paddling was very rhythmical, and the canoes could make about four miles an hour.17 The Africans handled their canoes with such skill that it was often possible to pass through the surf quite dry. The paddlers looked far out to sea for lulls in the waves and took quick advantage of them. Even if a canoe capsized, the crews were strong swimmers, and Thonning had several times seen them seize hold of passengers and goods in the water and swim

16 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 6–9. 17 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 9–11. 156 chapter five ashore with them. The trick was to leap, if possible, to seaward of the capsizing canoe, to avoid being struck by it as it was swept in by the surf.18 A mast could be stepped forward for a square sail of woven reed mats, but the canoes were difficult to sail except on what Thonning called a three-quarter wind, or a broad reach. They served the Africans well, Thonning said, especially for fishing, ‘but as transport vessels for a flourishing trade they are very deficient”.19 West of Lai, the sea bottom was in most places rocky, and good anchor ground was “difficult to find without the closest familiarity”. The rocky bottom appeared to be an extension of the reefs of gneiss, granite, and sandstone that lay at about sea level at the beach, “whence they little by little are lost in the depths”. Twelve or fifteen miles offshore, a large bank, the Sinkesu Bank, ran parallel to the shore for more than sixty miles, ending at about the longitude of Lai. Thonning understood that at its shallowest, there were seven fathoms of water over this bank. “In the older maps it is not found, but in The African pilot 1800 it is marked under the name of the Porgue Bank”.20 East of Lai the sea-bottom was of clay and sand, “completely free of stones and rocks”; this was a very secure anchor ground. The seabottom must otherwise everywhere be rather free of marine plants, for one finds only very few thrown up on the beach shore; nor are there coral reefs, and only very few fragments are thrown up by the sea; on the other hand the seashells are in such numbers that they are gathered in large quantities at a very low price and are used for lime. Although the land rose to considerable heights in the western portion of the territory, the sea bed descended very gradually into the depths. As far east as Lai the water was only seven fathoms deep two miles off the beach. East of Lai, the bottom dropped off twice as sharply. Ships could safely sail along the coast as little as two miles offshore, but it was wisest to sail farther off to avoid the points at Tema and Kpone, the jutting spits at the mouth of the Volta, and Cape St. Paul. Even the largest ships could cruise along the Gold and Slave coasts in perfect safety at a distance of four miles from the land.21 The coastline itself was low, in few places rising higher than twenty feet above the sea, but navigators could easily orient themselves by the

18 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 7–8. 19 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 10–11. 20 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, p. 1. 21 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 2–3. reports and reverberations 157

Akuapem hills in the western part of the enclave and by the absolute flat- ness of the coast to the east, which accentuated every landmark: “trees have at a distance an appearance as if they grew out of the sea”. The land was very low at the mouth of the Sacumo-fjo, and there were many palms there; Accra, where the coast was higher, could be distinguished by forts St. James and Crevecoeur; and the marks at Osu were Fort Christiansborg, the redoubt Prøvesten, and the plantation buildings at Frederiksberg, on a hill a mile from the beach. Ningo was situated on a bay with Fort Fredensborg to the east; some distance north of Ningo lay the inselberg Nåjo. In the flat land east of Lai the Volta was marked by its woods and the high surf at the mouth, which first opened up to view from the southwest. The towns between the river and Cape St. Paul could scarcely be made out from the sea, but the fetish grove between Augna and Waj (presumably Anlo and Woe) was clearly distinguishable. From Cape St. Paul on, the coast trended to the north; here the landmarks were a single very large tree, called Huga, and, farther along, Fort Prindsenssteen, just to the north of Keta.22 The anchorages lay a couple of miles off the forts, in between seven and ten fathoms of water. At the Volta ships anchored off Eibo or Gunable, which were situated on the spits on either side of the mouth, and at Prindsenssteen the anchorage was “scarcely a mile from the land”. English naval vessels anchored four miles offshore between Christiansborg and Fort St. James.23 Should Danish Guinea ever attract notice because of its advantageous suitability for producing all intertropical products (which is very probable, when one surveys the current state of the West Indies and America, which more and more approach independence ), then it would be very profitable if either a landing place free of surf or better contrived vessels could be arranged. Thonning thought that strong vessels twenty feet long and eight in beam, drawing rather more water than canoes, and manned by perhaps nine paddlers, would be able to carry larger cargoes with greater security through the surf, but he doubted that local boat-building styles would soon change; similar efforts had been made in the East Indies, he said, but traditional vessels were still prevalent there.24 Thonning favored the construction of a mole somewhere west of Lai on the foundation of the rock shelf along the beach; it would be “neither

22 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, p. 3. 23 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, p. 4. 24 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, p. 12. 158 chapter five difficult nor very costly” to erect a strong breakwater of stone, which could be quarried “everywhere in the vicinity”. Thonning pointed out, perhaps a trifle overeagerly, that drifting ice, otherwise so destructive of such structures, would not present any difficulties here. He thought the sea itself would in time actually strengthen the mole with shoulders of sand. Such a breakwater would not only greatly facilitate the loading and unloading of ocean-going ships, it would provide a haven for small coastwise traffic. Larger vessels would still have to anchor at some distance offshore, but, although the ships were exposed to wind, wave, and current, this was actually not so risky as might be thought. There was never a dangerous swell here, the winds were light and steady, except when thunderstorms approached, and hurricanes, “which rage in most intertropical regions, and can destroy the ships in the best harbors, are here unknown”. The current, to be sure, required the use of strong anchor tackle. The seabottom close inshore west of Lai was so littered with lost anchors that cables fouled easily and were often chafed through; ships seldom left the coast after a stay of four months without having lost several anchors, and many a ship’s voyage had ended unprofitably simply because the vessel had been insufficiently equipped with anchors and cables.25 A crew had to be ready to make sail at an instant’s notice in case a ship’s hold on the bottom was suddenly lost;26 rigging could therefore not be brought down and repaired and was subject to more wear than was normal on an anchored ship. Thonning reckoned that permanent moorings on heavy anchors could be placed quite close inshore; this would reduce the time lost in fer- rying cargoes out to ships, and mooring fees would soon cover the cost of the anchors. The Dutch had had such arrangements at Elmina when their trade on this coast had been more flourishing, Thonning said, and English merchant houses on the Guinea Coast had often moored blockships permanently to facilitate the movement of cargo on- and offshore. If a ship should spring a leak or otherwise require repair, even a slow vessel could reach the island of Principe, where there was a good harbor with fairly good facilities, within a few days.27 On the whole, the lack of a proper harbor at the Danish establishments was not so severe a liability as might be thought, Thonning said: many

25 See New England merchants in Africa, a history through documents, 1802 to 1865, Norman R. Bennett and George E. Brooks, Jr., eds. (Boston: Boston University Press), p. 52, on Eliza, which lost not only all her anchors but two guns that had been pressed into that service. 26 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 12–14; DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, §48. 27 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 14–15. reports and reverberations 159 important trading entrepôts had to make do with worse circumstances. Indeed, many lives might be saved among the crews because of their inability to reach the shore, for the open roadstead was very healthy. “The harbors, on the other hand, are precisely the unhealthiest places between the tropics, where the yellow fever and similar illnesses begin, spread quickest, and are most fatal”.28 The products of the sea are: many kinds of good-tasting fish, turtles, lobsters, excellent oysters, [and] some beautiful seashells…. Because of [glowing creatures,] which actually phosphorize with the motion of the sea, the waves at night have their own faint glowing whiteness which is all the more beautiful the darker the night and the more the surf foams. Especially from the middle of July, until up into September, the sinkesu, a kind of mackerel, was taken on the Sinkesu Bank “in such extraordinary quantities that it constitutes an important branch of trade for the shore negroes west of Lai”. East of Lai the inhabitants made little of the sea fishery, because the rivers and the Keta Lagoon yielded an even greater abundance of fish, and with less trouble, and because the surf on that stretch of the coast was so high. Furthermore, it was their custom to raise cattle, rather than to fish.29 “Because of the country’s situation so near the Line, the temperature, seasons, weather, and the length of the day are subject to incomparably smaller changes than in the temperate regions of the earth”, Thonning wrote. Measured on Réaumur’s eighty-degree thermometer, the temperature in airy rooms or in the shade of trees was 22 to 27 degrees at midday, 20 to 23 degrees in the evenings, and 19 to 21 degrees in the mornings. The sun’s position in the heavens at different times of year had little effect on temperatures, but day-to-day weather could lower the temperature to 17 or 18 degrees. Europeans in this climate found these temperatures quite tolerable, Thonning said, because their bodily fluids were quickly thinned by the heat and their pores opened, so “one perspires without feeling the languor that a comparable temperature would occasion here in our colder land”; one could do physical work without much more discomfort than would be occasioned on warm summer days in Denmark. “Buildings and clothing are adapted to the climate”; there were windows in opposing walls to allow

28 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 15–16. 29 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, p. 16, and on an inserted slip marked “efter pag. 16”. See Grove and Johansen, p. 1403. 160 chapter five the breeze to pass through rooms, and this was both comfortable and healthy. “On the other hand, the difference in temperature between an airy room or a shady wood and out in the open sun’s rays is great beyond all expectation”. It was necessary to seek shelter from the sun from about half past eight in the morning until after four in the afternoon, “but before and after that time, any outsider can stand the sun’s heat here just as well as in his fatherland”. After long residence, Europeans became so acclimatized that, with a hat or a parasol to ward off the direct rays, they could tolerate the sun’s heat in the open “at any time of day and for as long as might be”; some of them could bear the heat as well as the Africans. A newcomer who thus exposed himself, however, would quickly suffer from headache, fever, or a more dangerous illness. The dampness of the air increased the discomfort of the heat, which was far less tolerable in the low, still areas by the Volta than in the more open and drier regions along the beach; it was cooler still in the mountains. After one was accustomed to the heat, a drop of a few degrees in temperature made the air feel surprisingly cool. In the season of the harmattan or on cool nights in the woods, one feels a penetrating cold and is obliged to change one’s usual attire and sleep under thicker covers. One could be tempted to believe that this increased sensitivity was a consequence of the weakening of the nervous system, if one did not at the same time see the healthiest negroes shiver with cold and sleep around substantial fires. It was with domestic animals and seeds and plants brought from Europe as it was with human beings: they could thrive here, if they were gradually exposed to the African climate and protected from the heat of the noonday sun; the animals would not reproduce themselves so willingly, however, and the seeds of plants raised here “degenerate more and more with every generation”.30 The Africans seemed unaffected by the heat and “no more seek to avoid the sun than Europeans in their native land”. Indeed, “they tolerate the midday sun’s rays on their bare and often clean-shaven heads without the slightest ill consequences, and it may reasonably be that this exposure is the cause of their extraordinarily thick cranium”. They seldom traveled by night to avoid the heat, and worked the whole day through in the fields.31

30 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 17–20. 31 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, p. 21. reports and reverberations 161

“Although the country … is of no significant extent, there is nevertheless to be found here almost everything that can have an influence on a climate”: the sea, rivers, large bodies of standing water, mountains, dry plains, and swamps. The local climates along the beach, in the hills, and by the Volta varied greatly, and so, as a result, did the vegetation. The rain fell more often and for longer in the hills than closer to the sea, for the clouds, driven in by the sea wind, gathered themselves towards the hills. The vegetation there benefited both by the moisture and by the shade cast by the clouds, Thonning thought. The daily cycle of land and sea breezes was interrupted only by the harmattan, the southerly winds of August, and passing storms. The sea breeze weakened considerably twenty miles from the coast and seldom was to be felt at all so far out at sea as fifty or sixty miles, beyond which the winds were usually calm. Inland, beyond the working of these “periodic” coast winds, the winds were variable and unsteady.32 On the coast, however, “this wind’s influence is significant”. It raised the surf and drove the prevailing current, and its effect on the vegetation was very marked for quite some distance inland. The sea breeze harms the vegetation partly by driving the rain clouds into the interior of the land, partly by dissipating the evening dew, which should refresh the plants after the burning heat of the sun, and partly by the mist of seawater it carries with it from the surf. By harming the vegetation, this wind similarly has a harmful influence on the character of the soil, which is very thin, for lack of plants that by their decomposition could provide mold. Even the buildings by the beach suffer from the sea breeze, in that they become so permeated by sea salt, which attracts the moisture from the air, that all ironwork in a very short time rusts, and any stored goods that are not carefully seen to and protected, are ruined by the damp.33 The sea breeze seemed nonetheless salubrious, and “the negroes who live on the coast are gayer, stronger, and healthier than those who live in various parts in the interior of the land; and for the Europeans the heat of the day would be very troublesome in the tree- and shadeless shore regions, if the sea breeze did not cool the air”.34 An hour or two after the sea breeze abated in the evening, the land breeze came up and blew until about seven o’clock in the morning. It was strongest in the dead of the night but seldom half so strong as the sea

32 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 34–35. 33 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, p. 36. 34 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 36–37. 162 chapter five breeze. When it first began to blow, it carried “a peculiar, pleasant and quite strong jasmine-like smell” out to ships at anchor or sailing down the coast. (The scent disappeared after a few minutes, and Thonning thought that this was because the sense of smell quickly loses its sensitivity to a new odor.)35 Thonning attributed these winds to “the unequal temperatures of the sea and land air day and night”, which had the result that “during the day the colder and heavier sea air streams in over the land, just as the land air for the same reason blows at night out over the sea”.36 The harmattan, which was most commonly a northeasterly wind, blew in Senegambia and Guinea from the middle of December to the middle of February, “when the sun is on the tropic on the other side of the Line”, Thonning said. “Its arrival, duration, and strength are indefinite and seem not to depend on the motion of the sun or moon, although some who have long resided here in the land, assert that they have noticed that it occurs more often at spring tides”. The harmattan wind blew twice or four times in every harmattan season, gaining strength gradually and as gradually falling away. It sometimes lasted for only a few hours, on occasion persisted for a couple of weeks, but usually blew for two or three days. Its force was comparable to that of the sea breeze, a “topgallant breeze”, if that. It was remarkable for its “extraordinarily dry, strangely hazy, and to the senses cold air”.37 No dew fell, swampy places dried up, furniture warped and cracked. It has in a few days the same effect on the plant kingdom as the lack of rain for several months: the grass and most herbaceous plants wither away, many trees and bushes lose their leaves, the flowers fall off barren, and the unripe fruit shrivel up. The skin dried out, the lips cracked, the eyes and lungs felt dry, and one urinated less, even though one drank more. It was generally thought that perspiration ceased, but Thonning knew that “it is not noticed because of the ease with which the moisture is absorbed by the air”.38 He compared the thickness of the air during the harmattan to “the foggy air in a heavy frost”; one could not see more than one or two thousand paces. The sun could not be seen at all for a couple of hours after it had risen in fiery red obscurity, and then showed itself only as “a glowing disk”. The cause was a white dust so fine that it could not be seen with the

35 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 37–38. 36 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 39–42. 37 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 23, 42–43. 38 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 43–44. reports and reverberations 163 naked eye but settled everywhere. Thonning thought that this dust was mainly of organic origin, the particles bleached white by the sun; “as the air where the wind originates, namely the sand deserts, is known to be clear”, the dust must be picked up by the force of the wind as it crossed the continent between the desert and the sea.39 The characteristics, season, and direction of the harmattan reveal sufficiently its origins. The air over the dry, salt-heavy, and at this season cooled sand sea between Barbary and Nigritia must stream toward the hotter south, and should occasion a northerly wind in Senegambia, Nigritia, and Guinea, but because these lands lie closer to the Line, and thus by the rotation of the earth are swung with greater speed to the east than this flow of air, it is felt here as a wind that becomes more and more easterly as it approaches the Line. This wind has thus the same main cause as the periodic winds.40 The coolness of the harmattan Thonning thought resulted from the inability of the sun’s radiation to penetrate the atmosphere to the ground and from the dryness of the air; although temperatures when the harmattan blew were indeed somewhat lower than normal at that season, they felt even cooler, “probably because the body, through the heavy perspiration that is immediately absorbed by the dry air, is deprived of a larger portion of its natural heat than otherwise”. Both Africans and Europeans experienced chills similar to those occasioned by fever during a strong harmattan. The Europeans found it rather bracing, as it reminded them of the winters in their fatherland.41 The harmattan normally reversed the usual current offshore, so west- bound ships “can in a few days cover the same distance that with normal wind and current would take at least as many weeks”. It also suppressed the surf to such a degree that European boats could land without danger.42 From December to March was the driest time of the year. The people of the shore region now often had to fetch water great distances, because there were no natural reservoirs and they did not care to trouble themselves to dig water holes. Both wild game and domestic cattle sought water and grass farther inland. This was an unfruitful time and can in this respect can be regarded as this land’s winter…. But the dryness notwithstanding, the vegetation maintains the appearance of the

39 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 44–46. 40 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, p. 51. 41 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, p. 47. 42 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, p. 48. 164 chapter five

intertropical eternal summer, many plants are even blooming and fruiting, only the trees are not so vividly green as in the rainy season, and the fields look withered, because the tall dry straw hides the shorter grass.43 For those new to the coast, it was easy to imagine that the misty air of the harmattan had something pestilential about it, and its effect on the vegetation led one to “anxious conclusions about its effects on the human body”. Many writers on Guinea had thus mistaken the matter: some had described cases of dangerous sickness occasioned by the harmattan, “but despite diligent inquiry and my own observation for three years I have been unable to discover any such thing”. The Africans went about their business as at any other season except when the chill, which in their nakedness they felt piercingly, drove them indoors. Domestic animals were unaffected by it, as long as they could find or were provided sufficient water. It was, indeed, the healthiest time of year, at least in the parts of Guinea with which Thonning was familiar. It dried up morasses and dispersed dangerous miasmas, “and why should the wind from the desert have a less beneficial influence here than in Egypt, where it is regarded as cleansing the air”. When the wind was very strong, it could call forth inflammation of the eyes, coughs, and other afflictions in those disposed to them, but one need only keep out of the wind, wear close-fitting clothes, keep one’s rooms closed, and spray water on the floor, and keep a damp cloth to one’s face if obliged to go out.44 Thunderstorms were rare during the harmattan season, but it often ended with a “travat” [or travado, a violent storm of wind and rain and lightning—both forms of the word, which is of Portuguese origin, now obsolete in English] from the south or southwest. The travats of this part of the Guinea Coast were not so violent as those of the Cape Verdes Islands and the Cape of Good Hope, and Thonning thought that perhaps they did not deserve this fearsome name. They were really no different from “a very strong thunderstorm in Europe”, and seldom lasted longer than a half hour.45 They were accompanied by strong winds, to be sure, although the danger to ships lay mainly in the suddenness of their onset and in rapid wind shifts; in the mountains there could be rather strong gusts, but on the whole the Guinea Coast was spared the storm winds that could be so dangerous in the West Indies, in the Cape Verdes, at the Cape of Good

43 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, p. 24. 44 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 48–50. 45 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 23, 28–29. reports and reverberations 165

Hope, and in “the Asiatic archipelago”. Damaging winds blew in the interior of Africa, however, “according to negroes who, as far as I can judge, must be from Nigritia”. (Who these people might have been, their station in life, and the circumstances and the languages in which Thonning inter- rogated them remain unstated.) According to their account, these storms—Thonning here used the word “hurricane” loosely—could come from any point of the compass. The sky was reddish in the direction from which they approached, and the air was quite still before the storm, which always commenced toward sundown or at night and always blew itself out before sunrise. Cattle sensed when such a storm was imminent and came in from the fields of their own volition. The storms brought heavy rain and hail and were usually accompanied by extraordinary thunder. Trees were broken off or uprooted by the wind, “and many birds lie dead in the fields”.46 As for “that frightful meteor” the waterspout, Thonning saw only one of them, a long way out at sea, in three years. He speculated that they were caused by electrical releases between differently charged layers of air.47 The heat increased towards the end of February and in March, but the days remained clear, with a few scattered clouds in the mornings. There was the occasional thunderstorm, but still no widespread rain; the dew, on the other hand, was heavy enough to “refresh the plant kingdom, which now prepares itself for a new life”. Trees began to unfold new leaves and grass sprouts from the stubble of the withered, which the negroes in the open fields everywhere had burned off in the harmattan season, in order thereby to destroy snakes and insects, of which last a great many at that time are in the pupal stage and enter into their insect life at the beginning of the rainy season. When, toward the end of March, the sun approaches the zenith, the air becomes cloudier and cloudier, and the negroes are now fully occupied with clearing the soil, planting, and sowing.48 In April and May and part of June it was often cloudy and cooler in the mornings, and thunderstorms and rains of several days’ duration were now more common; hail fell only rarely. In the hills, drizzle and mist in the morning and evening were usual. This was called “the big rain season”. The vegetation was now at its most beautiful, and enormous numbers of insects hatched out. Travel from place to place became difficult, as rivers and streams rose over their banks and “water that cannot seep into the

46 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 53–54. 47 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 30–31. 48 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 23–24. 166 chapter five ground finds its course down the common footpaths”. Toward the end of June and in July, the rainfall came mainly in thunderstorms. This was the season of the primary grain harvest, and almost all fruits ripened now. Late in July and in August, as the sun moved south again toward its zenith at this latitude, the sky again became cloudier, and the wind came from the south and southeast, bringing drizzle. The hills were often enveloped in dripping fog until about nine in the morning and again in the late afternoon; the nights and early mornings were very cold, although it was “intolerably hot” in the midday sun.49 What Thonning called the August wind blew from the south or southeast from the middle of July to the middle of September, although by no means steadily. It seemed to blow most often when the sea was high and at spring tides, and more often by day than by night. Unlike the sea breeze, it brought with it fog, drizzle, and chilly air, “a consequence of its long journey over the ocean”. Thonning thought it was generated by the cooling of the southern hemisphere at that time of year. It was as unhealthy a wind as the harmattan was salubrious, but it was welcomed nonetheless, for this was the sinkesu wind, bringing with it the rich fishery of that name. Thonning thought this might more appropriately be called the yam season, for that important crop now attained its greatest “perfection”. The August wind, too, favored ships trying to make their way west along the coast: “The harmattan and the August wind are in a way to be regarded as the Guinea Coast’s monsoon or trade winds”.50 The fogs and drizzles ended in September, but now and in the beginning of October there were often violent thunderstorms: this was the “little rain season”. From mid-October up into December the weather was mostly clear, and a secondary but very significant harvest was now taken.51 This was, in all, clearly a healthy climate for the peoples of this land, Thonning wrote: they are good-sized, healthy, strong, not burdened with the Europeans’ unhealthy fatness of the abdomen, they can tolerate hardship, reproduce themselves strongly, are seldom ill, and live to quite an old age. What most limits the population is wars, the slave trade, early and dissolute relations between the sexes, but especially smallpox, which appears after intervals of a few years and rages like a real plague, as inoculation has not been introduced. On the other hand, the land here is free of every other plague and

49 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 24–26. 50 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 26, 51–52. 51 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 24–27. reports and reverberations 167

similarly from the horrible lockjaw (trismus), which kills so many children in the West Indies. The area between forts Christiansborg and Fredensborg was the healthiest part of the enclave; Fort Christiansborg was considered one of the most salubrious of the European establishments on the Guinea Coast. The wooded hill country from Aburi to Larteh was perhaps less healthy, because the air here is damper; the inhabitants of these mountains are generally blacker and somewhat stocky, and one finds not a few among them disposed to consumption, to which in part the cold, damp night air and thinner mountain air, in part an immoderate use of the extraordinarily hot Cayenne pepper (Capsicum baccatum) [sic] perhaps contributes. The mountains farther inland were apparently healthier. The mountain valleys, on the other hand, were often very unhealthy. Most dangerous of all were the swampy regions of the Volta, Tojeng, and Amu rivers, especially after the rivers flooded, “because they leave behind a great quantity of stinking mud and rotting organic matter, which poison the air”. The landscapes to the west were fortunate to be protected from this unhealthy air by the prevailing winds. As soon as the annual floodwaters receded in October, “various sicknesses appear, such as jaundice, bile and nerve fevers, and afflictions of the eyes of the same nature but less dangerous than the Egyptian”. Hydrocele, or testicular dropsy, was also common by the Volta. The Africans attributed this ailment to the consumption of a kind of palm wine, but Thonning thought that “probably the damp air and soil, and immoderate pytto-drinking (many Volta negroes drink 10-20 pots of this fermenting beer daily during the flood season) contribute at least as much hereto”. Otherwise, the healthiest time of the year was from November to May, especially during the harmattan season. August and September were the most unhealthy months, and the Africans and acclimatized Europeans alike suffered now from agues; unacclimated Europeans, if they had avoided it before, now surely fell ill of the climate- sickness, and were more severely stricken than would have been the case had they succumbed to it earlier.52 It stood to reason, Thonning thought, that this great variation in climate between the mountains and the shore and the low-lying Volta flood-plain should also have “significant influence on the inhabitants’ mentality”,

52 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 55–57. 168 chapter five allowing, to be sure, for so many other factors that it would be difficult to determine which was decisive. In general one finds that the shore negroes are gay, rash, quick-tempered; the mountain negroes serious, decisive, and sincere; the river negroes under- handed, suspicious, and malicious; in short—there comes forth among the shore negroes the sanguine, among the mountain negroes the choleric, and among the river negroes the melancholy temperament.53 As healthful as the land might be for its natives, it was, “like all other, especially uncultivated lands in the hot climates, harmful to the Europeans’ health”. Every European here was subject sooner or later to serious “putrid asthenic fevers”, just as in the East and West Indies and, for that matter, in parts of southern Europe, such as Sardinia. A study of those who died and those who survived indicated “the most important circumstances whereof, before choosing Guinea as a permanent residence, one can conjecture the greater or lesser danger one is there exposed to”. These factors were age, sex, physical and mental state, style of life, and place of residence both before and after arrival on the coast. Young men between eighteen and thirty commonly withstood the onslaught. There was no such likelihood that middle-aged and older men would survive. “The other sex seems to more easily reconcile itself to the climate than the men”. The safest constitution was one that tended excessively neither to sthenia nor to asthe- nia—in other words, was neither too strong or too weak. The strong exhausted themselves in fighting the disease. The sickness progressed less rapidly in the weak, giving the doctor “a chance to guide the organism, support the vital forces, and restore the sinking vitality of the parts”. Recovery was very slow in this case, however. Cheerfulness and optimism in the face of the disease was “extraordinarily” beneficial. The manner of living, “which contributes so significantly to maintaining the organism’s mutual harmony and the parts’ necessary vitality, is also of the greatest importance to all who do not wish, in union with the climate, to assail their health”. Europeans acclimatized elsewhere in the tropics “have little or nothing to fear”, and people arriving in the western part of Danish Guinea from very unhealthy places like Benin and the Biafra coast regained their strength here.54 “The course of the illness is usually so quick that the patient’s fate is decided before the 8th day” after taking to his bed. “Bleeding and purges

53 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 57–58. Only the phlegmatic humor, it appears, was not manifested among these peoples. 54 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 58–61. reports and reverberations 169 are sufficiently well known to be dangerous”, Thonning wrote, and he had his reservations about the internal use of opium and mercurials, but on the whole his faith in the medicine of his day, which he had learned at home in his father’s house and under the supervision of C. F. Schumacher at Frederik’s Hospital, was such that he thought a patient had little chance of surviving the climate sickness without an experienced doctor in close attendance.55 Having survived the climate sickness, the foreigner could regard himself as safely acclimatized. “Of the few Danes who at the present time reside at the establishments, most have been there 10-30 years”.56 To quite escape the illness is scarcely to be thought of, as one is not able to avoid its primary causes, which lie in the nature of the air; but it is indubitable that each can either promote or limit its severity by his way of life and conduct. Indeed one finds this confirmed by the example of the women, for their mortality is less than the men’s, although they, by their bodily constitution in general, should only with greater difficulty be able to resist the illness; it seems therefore indubitable that the illness’s smaller danger for this sex alone arises therefrom, that they, less than the men, expose themselves to the operation of the harmful potencies (of the sun, of the air, and of the common way of life in the Indies). Every unacclimated [person] will therefore certainly feel better by avoiding as much as possible the sun, the evening dew and the night air, by residing in the healthiest places—the unhealthy almost always reveal themselves by a great number of mosquitoes, which multiply extraordinarily in swampy water and stagnant air—by restricting himself to moderation in every enjoyment, especially shunning everything that disturbs the order of the organs of digestion, by shunning Venus, Bacchus, every passion and every weakening exertion. The Government, also, should make it its duty not to expose the unacclimated to duties that could be harmful to the health, and least of all send them to the unhealthy eastern establishments before they are acclimatized at the western.57 “To expatiate at greater length on the relationship of the climate to health is not the intent of this essay”, Thonning wrote in best academic style, having indeed provided a substantial medical discussion of the course of the disease and of its treatment, but I have regarded what has been presented as necessary, in part for the information of those who will settle in the country, in part, since the doctors are often replaced, to give a competent doctor, still unfamiliar with the country’s most common and most serious illness, an overview of the illness’s

55 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 63–64. 56 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 66–67. 57 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 67–68. 170 chapter five

usual character and cure. It is highly to be desired that a competent practitioner should prepare a reference-book of the intertropical illnesses for inexperienced doctors; this is so much the more necessary, as most doctors, who either as officials or privately establish themselves between the tropics are young people first beginning to practice, and who thus could do with the experience of others.58 Seamen had “an inordinate fear” of voyages to the Guinea Coast, but Thonning thought that this was due as much to the awful conditions they endured as to actual mortality on the voyages, although “the calculations laid before the English parliament in connection with the discussion of the slave trade cite a relatively large number of seamen who have lost their life in that trade”.59 Thonning suggested that most of this mortality occurred on voyages to places on the coast where there were no European establishments, “for there the slave trader must send heavily manned and armed boats up the rivers to buy slaves, provisions, cut firewood, and fill the water barrels”. The crews were thus exposed in open boats to the most extreme heat in the unhealthiest places during the day, and at night to the most dangerous emanations. “But the ships that only trade on the Gold Coast, where there are European possessions or factories everywhere, scarcely lose more people than they proportionally lose in the trade to the West Indies”. The navigation to Danish Guinea can be one of the least dangerous to the health between the tropics, for the roadstead, except east of the Volta after the flood, is very healthy, and experience has shown that the seamen who do not come ashore very seldom get any other illness than that they could bring on themselves by being too much exposed to the sun. This was in sharp contrast to the West Indies, he said, where the harbors were so unhealthy “that the climate fever easily takes on the contagious and dangerous character of the yellow fever”. A captain need only provide fresh provisions, rig sun shades, forbid the men to set foot on land more often than was necessary, and above all prevent them, for a number of reasons, from remaining ashore overnight, to preserve the health of his crew.60

58 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 68–69. 59 See Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic slave trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 152–153. 60 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 69–71. reports and reverberations 171

He concluded: It would have been desirable if at least the most important rules of conduct had always been observed, and especially if the colonizing states had from the beginning organized health policies that could have prevented the set- tling of many unsuited subjects in the Indies; Europe would not then have brought the intertropical climate so monstrous a number of victims, and its colonies would more quickly, surely, and at less cost have flourished, if the fear grounded in that mortality had not frightened off so many better and more serviceable people. He himself, it is to be understood, had not been among those frightened off.61 Thonning described the varying constitution and character of the country’s vegetational cover in considerable detail in another of his personal manuscripts among the Guinea Commission’s archives.62 This is a forty-page manuscript in the form of a scientific report, or perhaps of a long lecture (although there is no independent evidence that Thonning ever addressed the Natural History Society,63 the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, or any other public assembly). Perhaps the greatest part of the list of species later published as a formal Latin flora is here put in its place in the countryside just as Thonning had come upon the plants; an experienced botanist (allowing for changes in the nomenclature since Thonning’s day64) could doubtless read this essay and visualize the landscape the way a trained musician can read a score and hear the music in his head.65 Thonning laid particular stress on the zonation of the vegetation with altitude and distance from the sea, and the essay would have been a highly pertinent contribution to the emerging study of plant geography if he had ever published it.66

61 GK II, “Det danske Guinea”, pp. 71–72. 62 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C. 63 The Society, having achieved its goals, liquidated itself in 1804: Hopkins, “Danish natural history and African colonialism”, pp. 377 and 409, notes 30 and 31. 64 Hepper, pp. 177–187; Jens Junghans, “Thonning’s and Isert’s Collections from ‘Danish Guinea’ (Ghana) in West Tropical Africa”, Botanisk Tidsskrift, Vol. 57, 1961, pp. 310–355 and Vol. 58, pp. 82–122, pp. 317–318. 65 As Thonning put it, “I believe that what has been said is sufficient to give plant experts an idea of the flora of the country”: GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. 11–12. 66 J.W. Hornemann, review of Schumacher’s Beskrivelse af guineiske planter, in Maanedsskrift for litteratur, Vol. 1, 1827, pp. 315–22; Anonymous, review of Joakim Frederik Schouw, Grundtræk til en almindelig plantegeographie, 1822, in Dansk Litteratur-Tidende, 1823, pp. 324–362 and 369–373, on pp. 339–340; Hornemann, De indole plantarum guineesium observationes (Copenhagen: Typis Schultzianus, 1819), pp. [3]–4 (I am grateful to Peter 172 chapter five

The territory’s “natural character” varied considerably. Thonning first took up the western portion, between the rivers Sacumo-fjo and Sacumo- nupa, from the coast back to the feet of the Akuapem Hills. This was the highest ground not only in Danish Guinea but along the whole of the Slave Coast. “Constantly alternating between long ridges, valleys, and plains, this landscape raises itself higher and higher from the shore and up toward the mountains”, although it was considerably lower both to the west and to the east, by the Sacumo-fjo and the Sacumo-nupa. The higher elevations ran for the most part parallel to the coast: “The land therefore also seems to those sailing by, or when it is seen from the roadstead, to consist of several terraces or small mountain ridges, each higher than the other, and the Akvapim Mountains in the background”. Legon, a few miles north of Fort Christiansborg, was the highest of these intervening hills.67 The make-up of the soil varied greatly, consisting of “differing propor- tions of sand, stones, mold, and ochre-colored or blue clay; there is no trace of limestone, although the appearance of the land shows clearly that it was formed by the sea”. In the first four miles inland from the beach, the higher spots and sometimes the plains between were of clay mixed with sand and small stones, with very little mold in the soil. The ground was so hard as to be difficult to work except when it had been softened by rain. The earth was everywhere very rich in iron. In the valleys and on the lower plains the soils were somewhat better mixed with mold, but their main constituents were clay and sand. A few feet down in the ground one encountered pure blue-grey clay. Before one had traveled six miles from the sea, the soil was already so fertile, that it can produce all kinds of provision plants, and this, the earth’s goodness, increases so up toward the mountains, that it gradually becomes the most fertile mixture of mold, clay, and sand…. The particular reasons for the decrease in the amount of mold down toward the shore are: in part the different causes, especially the climate, already adduced [—the salty sea breeze, in particular—] for the sparser vegetation, which should in its decomposition yield mold; in part the custom among the negroes of burning the grass off in the dry season, whereby the soil is both robbed of its

Wagner for allowing me to work from his typescript translation into Danish of Hornemann’s 1819 essay); Hopkins, “Danish natural history and African colonialism”, pp. 401–403. Thomas Söderqvist would presumably classify Thonning as a “proto-ecologist”, along with Linnaeus himself and Georg Wahlenberg, whom he calls a Swedish “counterpart” to Humboldt, in The ecologists. From merry naturalists to saviours of the nation (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1986), p. 20. 67 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. 1–[2]. reports and reverberations 173

most important manure, and the mold it contains is also gradually destroyed by the fire. In the more fertile areas, which were broken up by woods and streams, the fires could not spread so widely and were less destructive of the soil.68 The productivity of the soil increased the farther inland one went: here pisang will scarcely bear fruit, and there a single bunch of fruit is often more than a man’s burden; here yam (Dioscorea Sativa) can scarcely grow, and there it commonly gets to be two feet long and almost as thick in circumference. Excepting cassava (Iatropha Manihot) and some fruit trees, most provision plants do poorly in the shore region, for that little that can be produced, in the few places that have shelter against the sea breeze and a little better soil than usual, is of no significance. European kitchen vegetables thrive only with difficulty and only with the most painstaking care in selected places. At some distance from the shore, where the sea breeze is less sharp, the cotton bush thrives to perfection, and yields such excellent wool so abundantly, that the land seems here in most places to have the most natural character for this colonial product. The innermost land, on the other hand, is, because of its fertility, less suited to it. Three miles from the shore begin the small towns, where the shore negroes’ cultivators live in the vicinity of their plantations, and from here the land becomes everywhere more and more suited to the cultivation of provision plants. But especially the fertile 4- to 8-mile-wide stretch of land by the mountains is capable of producing every kind of provision and colonial product—except cotton—in abundance and to perfection. The sugar cane grows here to an uncommon height and thickness, the coffee tree sags under the weight of its fruit, and Brazil tobacco spreads by itself where once it has been sowed. Most European kitchen garden vegetables also did well here, especially root crops; plants such as the cabbages, that could not be propagated by cuttings, had to be restarted twice a year from seed brought from Europe. It is this region that the shore negroes especially choose for planting their provisions, although the greatest part of the land that lies six or eight miles nearer to them can both produce all their needs and even completely repay its cultivation; but the crop here is more plentiful, better, and surer, for the other regions sometimes, because of lack of rain, suffer crop failure; these circumstances cause the negroes, who are practiced load-bearers, not to particularly mind the longer transport; especially since the cultivation of the earth is the man’s work, but the transport the women’s.69

68 ad GJS 271/1802, “Udkast”, § 1; GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. [2]–4. 69 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. 5–[7]. 174 chapter five

The vegetation of the country is so varied that the mountain region and the shore region even as much as two miles from the sea have quite distinct floras. One will scarcely in the one region come upon any of the other region’s plants, and the few that are found in both places are of such different appearance that a close examination is needed to recognize them for the same; those that in the shore region are gnarled, stunted bushes of a few feet in height become in the mountain region rather large trees.70 On the beach grew “creeping sand plants” (here Thonning named perhaps a couple of dozen plants, some of which he believed were new to science) “and small thickets of shrubs, which lie in long, 2-3-foot-high hedges in the same direction as the sea breeze, as tight and compressed as if they were cut with shears”. The country near the sea was open, overgrown with grass and widely separated tickets; but gradually, as one distances oneself from the sea, one finds these thickets getting larger, more frequent, and more beautiful, first mixed with single trees and larger groves, and finally, in the vicinity of the mountains, making a crowded and dense stretch of woods, which is here and there cleared for agriculture, but otherwise impenetrable on account of bushes and thorny vines, with which the trees are everywhere woven together and entwined. The most common grass species, which has almost completely crowded out all others, is a species, hitherto unknown to plant experts, of the family Andropogon, which is 5–8 feet tall, coarse, wide-spreading, branched and almost bushy, as it annually sprouts from the old stubble. He mentioned a great number of other grasses, herbaceous plants, bushes, trees, and palms, many of them new species, and some apparently of altogether unknown families. Of other families, including some that he knew to be well-represented in southern Africa, he had found no trace.71 To one who has for a time resided at the establishments and accustomed himself to the meager appearance of the shore region, no surprise can be more pleasant than that one enjoys on a tour up toward the mountains. The increasing richness and beauty of the vegetation, in concert with the land’s alternating heights and valleys, and Akvapim’s distant wooded mountains, present to the eye a constant variety of the most romantic situations; but gradually, as one approaches the mountains the view is cut off more and more by the lush vegetation, which at last quite restricts the traveler to a narrow footpath, which people must constantly fight the plants for. One must himself have seen such a place to be able to imagine the monstrous quantity of plants the earth in favorable circumstances is able to produce. The insignificant population compared to the number the land is capable of

70 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. [7]–8. 71 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. 8–[11]. reports and reverberations 175

supporting has the effect that the land remains quite in a natural state, and when I except the unobtrusive towns, narrow footpaths, and dispersed plantations, one finds in most places no trace of the presence of people.72 A traveler reached the western end of the Akuapem Hills about sixteen miles from the sea near the Sacumo-fjo River; they rose gradually to their highest near the town of Aburi and then continued in an unbroken chain, but decreasing in height, to the northeast. On the other side of the Volta this mountain chain is said to continue in the same direction, according to negro reports, but no one has been able to give me any information on where it ends, thus it probably stretches very deep into Africa and presumably once formed Africa’s coast in this place. The hills were all “very steep” on their south faces but descended more gradually into the surrounding country to the north. They appeared very tall, for their tops were often shrouded in cloud, but palms grew all the way up, so they could not in fact be so very high. Thonning judged that “from their form and composition, they are among the planet’s original mountains”.73 The soil everywhere here was an excellent mixture of mold, clay, and sand, and there was sufficient moisture at all times of year to allow the cultivation of all tropical crops except those—like cotton—that actually craved a more meager soil and less rain. The whole range is covered impenetrable woods of ancient trees often mixed with palms and here and there with the proud, solemn silk-cotton tree, Bombax pentandrum, which with its single straight trunk raises itself high over the tops of the tallest trees, and thereupon spreads its horizontal branches as if to show the giant trees standing beneath it their insignificance by her side. This abundance robs the eye of the pleasure of the fairest prospects, which one is only able to enjoy here and there on the edges of the steep declivities. Art here need merely rob Nature of some of its riches to transform Akvapim into the most bewitching country.74 “North and northwest of Akvapim lies the land of Akim. I know it only by the negroes’ reports, and these are so confused that it is very difficult to draw anything coherent and perfectly reliable therefrom”. He understood

72 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. 12–13. 73 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. 13–[14]. On p. [14], Thonning left a short blank in his text, to be filled in later, for the altitude above which he supposed palms could not grow at this latitude. In a marginal note, he indicated that the hills of Akuapem were called the Krobbo Hills on some maps. 74 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. [14–15]. 176 chapter five it to be a fairly dissected landscape with scattered woods, “and on the whole a fair, pleasant, and fertile land”. About twelve miles beyond Akuapem, a small ridge extended a dozen miles to the northwest, and here “at the foot of this mountain the Akim negroes mine gold”; the metal occurred in a red clay in particles from of the smallest size up to nuggets of a few ounces. The eastern portion of Akyem was a heavily wooded, uninhabited plain. He understood that a small tributary of the Volta, the Pongpong, descended in this vicinity over quite a large fall, named Ofjum. On this otherwise unspecified authority, Thonning put both river and waterfall on his map, to the west of the Volta.75 East of the river Sacumo-nupa, which reaches the sea near Tema, as far as Lai, and inland to the hills, the land was lower but otherwise not strongly distinguishable from that to the west, except for the inselbergs Sjai (Shai), Ussudeku (Osudoku), Krobo, and Nåjo (north of Ningo), which stand apart from the main chain of Akuapem. The last of these hills was the highest and was marked on charts as Great Ningo; “it has a conical form not unlike a volcano, but one finds not the least trace of volcanic products, and the nearest volcano known to me lies about 600 miles from here in the land of the Camerouns on the Biafara [sic] Coast”; that mountain had been “on fire” in 1800.76 From Lai east to the end of the Danish territory and extending forty miles inland lay “a low, level, horizontal plain, which is cut through by the Volta and the numerous small rivers and streams that flow out into it”, and it was Thonning’s understanding that the rest of the Slave Coast and the Benin coast was similarly low-lying. Large areas were occupied by the natural salt pond Ada Songo (or Songaw Lagoon)77 west of the Volta, by the great salt Keta Lagoon to the east, and by various other “partly salt marshes” connected by creeks to the Volta for some distance inland. This whole landscape was undoubtedly accreted partly of sand from the sea and partly of clay and mud from the Volta, and its origin is probably not very old; … in a few places, f. ex. at Tebé [on the sandspit near Keta], Malfi and Agrafi [both on the river], a clay mass that hardens in the air is dug; otherwise the land is bare of stones, there at least is scarcely to be found any the size of an apple, except those lying scattered around buildings.78

75 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. 16–17. 76 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. 17–[18]. 77 According to Grove’s and Johansen’s map, p. 1375, the Ada Songo is the Songaw Lagoon, while the Augna Songo is the Keta Lagoon. 78 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. [18–19]. reports and reverberations 177

The landscape was everywhere so flat that when the air was clear after a rain, the inselbergs Adaklu and Agu (twenty-five miles from the coast, according to Thonning’s map) could be seen from Fort Prindsenssteen. The soil was so well mixed with mold, commencing ten or twelve miles from the coast, as to be the equal of the soils of Akuapem. The ground was moist, but the Volta’s floods, although they favored the growing of grains (the seed could be sowed directly in the mud left by the river), “make these regions in many places unsuited for various colonial and other products, f. ex. coffee, cotton, and others that cannot tolerate to stand in water for 5–6 weeks; even sugar loses significantly in quality thereby”.79 The vegetation along the beach was sparse except just on either side of the Volta, from Pute to Atokko, where there were woods, mainly of palm (Hyphaene) and mangrove (Avicennia). Farther up the river there were fine forests, among which were “inordinately tall” bombax and various palms, including “a new little Phoenix that yields uncommonly sweet palm wine”. The riverbanks were impenetrably overgrown, especially with mangrove, which reproduces itself with rooting shoots of several feet in length and 1–2 inches’ cross-section, which hang vertically and leafless down from even the highest branches. In this way a single plant can take in a large area, and it is quite a new and uncommon sight to see a whole wood where all the trees rest on roots several feet in height, as if the soil had moved away from under them. Thonning closed his description of this area with these guardedly optimistic words: As drab and uniform as the shore region is, so fair and pleasant is the situation around the Volta and in the inner land; especially sailing on the river affords views that simply cannot be overlooked; only it is a shame that the climate in this beautiful region is so dangerous to the Europeans’ health.80 Thonning quite scrupulously recorded the uses to which plants were put by the Africans. The land produced all life’s necessaries, and much else besides; Thonning named forty crops taken by the Africans. They cultivated in particular grains, beans, fruits, and starch roots. Yams were “the only plant the negroes cultivate with any care”, but they grew several varieties of maize, rice, millet, plantains and banana, cassava, sweet potato, beans, okra, various leafy vegetables, shallots, peppers, ginger,

79 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. [19]–20. 80 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. 20–[22]. 178 chapter five coconuts, papaya, guava, bitter orange, tamarind, pineapple, and watermelons, among other food plants. “Governor Wrisberg has seen to it that the seeds of many West Indian fruits have been brought here of late”, among them breadfruit and avocadoes. Calabashes were cultivated for household use, as well as tobacco and sugar cane “in a few places”.81 What Thonning called the Quitto-bean or calevancus (or garavance, a chickpea), was commonly cultivated by the Anlo people; “they are sold as cabin provisions to the ships”.82 Otherwise, almost no plants were cultivated for commerce. The tools employed were so short in the haft that the farmer always worked bent over and could obtain little leverage.83 The Africans used a brush knife for clearing, and an axe with such a narrow blade that Thon ning reckoned it to be of little use. The farmer sought out places with a great deal of brush, where the soil was usually good. When he had selected a place, he cleared the brush and dug up the grass. This was allowed to dry for a few days and then burned, so the soil was fertilized by the ashes. The farmer then made planting holes at appropriate intervals, and another person sowed the seed and trod it in. A clearing could be used for only a few years, because the Africans knew nothing of manuring, Thonning said; when a clearing was judged to be exhausted, it was abandoned. The fields were planted in April and August, and the harvests were taken in July—this was the main crop—and November.84 Without cultivation the land brings forth for profitable use: abundance of firewood, which costs only the trouble of cutting and transporting it. Joj-tjo [Black tamarind, Dialium guineense] grows everywhere in the fields, it provides good charcoal for the blacksmith. The “pulp of the fruit … soaked in water is a very medicinal drink for fever patients”.85 Vjye-tjo, a palm, provided excellent if rather short beams. For lack of tools with which to fell and split them, and because of the cost of transport, the wood was “as expensive as beams from Europe”. The fruits and seeds were also eaten, and the latter were regarded as an aphrodisiac;

81 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. 24–[26]; DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 28. 82 Schumacher, p. 340; Hepper, pp. 96–97. 83 Thonning attached three drawings of agricultural implements to his report, but these have not come to light. 84 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 28. 85 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, p. [27]; Hepper (viz., W.C. Worsdell’s translations of Thonning’s ethnographic notes as published in Schumacher), p. 35. reports and reverberations 179 the tree was common by the Volta and ten or fifteen miles up the Sacumo- nupa.86 Muteku, an avicennia, common along the rivers, yielded durable timbers for use both in the water and in the ground.87 Thonning identified nine other woods useful for cabinetry. Canoes were dug out of the silk- cotton tree’s “monstrous trunks”, he said, “and its wool is excellent for pad- ding”. Two unknown species of cotton yielded a white and a dark, nankeen-yellow cotton, assays with which had already been made in Manchester, Thonning reported. Baphia nitida gave an excellent red dyewood, and the Africans obtained blue dye from a Robinia. The oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) grows partly wild and partly cultivated near and in the mountains, it has almost no part not of use: the flesh of its fruit yields the well-known palm oil, which is an indispensable foodstuff for the natives; the seeds in its fruit give a thick, greasy oil that is also used; the refuse from the preparation of the oil makes a strong ash for soap; from the leaves are plaited mat bags for grain, fans, stiff, thick mats used to roof houses, enclose courtyard rooms, and much else; on the leaf stem is a brown down that is excellent tinder. The old trunks yield quite good beams and posts for the negro houses; and finally the oil palm provides the good-tasting palm wine.88 The fermentation is so vigorous that it bubbles more briskly than the best Champagne. The intoxication caused by its extravagant consumption seems to set the fantasy in greater activity than the usual spirituous drinks; on the other hand it is less lasting; a negro can become intoxicated and sleep it off 2-3 times a day. A Phoenix palm common near the Volta also yielded “an extremely sweet and delicious juice, which however is less strong than that of Elaeis guineensis”. String was made of the young leaves.89 “Many wild plants are used as kale, and among them a number are very good, especially there is an Amaranthus which is entirely as good as spin- ach”. There were many edible and indeed delicious wild fruits, some with medicinal effect. “Tahmi [Sysepalum dulcificum] is, because of its effect, a wonderful fruit”: it was almost tasteless, “but has the remarkable effect that everything one consumes thereafter has such a sweet taste that f. ex. a sour lemon tastes like an orange, wine vinegar like Mallaga wine; this

86 Possibly Jye-tjo; GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, p. [27]; Hepper, p. 155. 87 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, p. [27]; Hepper, p. 128. 88 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. [27]–28, Hepper pp. 84–85; see Thonning’s long description of the process by which palm wine and oil were obtained in Hepper, pp. 155–156. 89 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. 29–[30]; Hepper, pp. 156–157. 180 chapter five deception of the senses lasts for 3-4 hours and longer”. Purveyors of sour old palm wine (for palm wine turned quickly) used it to their advantage.90 Thonning took a particularly lively interest in the medicinal uses of plants, as any young natural historian of his day doubtless would. He was scientifically reserved but by no means dismissive of African medicine. In his description of a mint he wrote, The negroes use various leaves in most of their sicknesses; most of these are connected with fetish and work only by a superstitious faith; but some, and among them the present plant, have an effect, with true aromatic ingredi- ents. The most important use of this plant is in a malignant bile fever associated with jaundice, which is very prevalent by the Rio Volta after the river’s flood…. For sudden paroxysms or fainting without preceding symptoms the squeezed-out juice is dropped in the nose, the eyes, and the mouth to drive out the Sirsa (ghost) that is thought to have attacked the patient. Thonning had himself put the plant to efficacious use: “I have successfully healed old bone injuries and strongly suppurating eruptions or the so- called salt flux by the external use of a decoction of the unripe fruit of Hibiscus esculentus and this plant in conjunction with internal remedies”.91 The intimacy of Thonning’s and the Africans’ mutual understanding that is implied by his ethnobotanical notes bears emphasis once again: Thonning was taking the Africans’ words down from their own lips and not only observing their practices but employing them. His is an extraordinarily important cultural record for the place and the time.92 The leaves, roots, or bark of the plants might be employed, crushed or boiled or grated or otherwise prepared; the variety of the treatments is highly suggestive of mankind’s capacity for experimentation and observation, of the breadth and painfulness of the afflictions to which we are subject, and of the viability of local, orally transmitted ethnobotanical traditions. On the other hand, Thonning knew of some virtues of plants of which the Africans were ignorant: of a plumbago Thonning wrote, “the negroes are not familiar with this plant’s medicinal use as a vesicatory”.93 Thonning found thorn-apple, of the genus Datura, at the cotton plantation at Frederiksberg, near Christiansborg, where it had presumably been

90 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. [30]–32; Hepper, p. 117. 91 Schumacher, pp. 264–65; Hepper, p. 65 (Ocimum gratissimum). 92 Again, see Kea, Settlements, trade, and polities, p. 8, on the preservation of African history in European records, as well as Ascherson. 93 Schumacher, p. 89. reports and reverberations 181 introduced by Governor Wrisberg or some other Dane.94 This plant’s effects were so well known in Europe and America that Thomas Jefferson once wrote of it that during the French Revolution “every man of firmness carried it constantly in his pocket to anticipate the guillotine. It brings on the sleep of death as quietly as fatigue does the ordinary sleep, without the least struggle or motion”.95 According to Thonning’s ethnographic notes, “the negroes, because of its rarity, are not familiar with its poisonous qualities”.96 The funicle or seed stalk of the Atiá fruit was held to be very poisonous,97 but besides that, there are no particularly poisonous plants here that one could be tempted to unknowingly consume, such as the dangerous West Indian mancinelle [manchineel]; but I must still remark that it is not advisable to remain long under the sappy but otherwise beautiful and shady tree [Elaeophorbia drupifera], because the wind, by breaking a branch or a leaf, can easily carry a drop of its biting milk-white juice into the eye, which will rob one of one’s sight or at least give rise to a painful inflammation. It was used to stun fish.98 Thonning was at pains to learn the vernacular names of the plants he collected when he could, but an African name was not always forthcoming. Thonning’s instructions from the Chamber of Customs had required him to be alert for the economic potential of any of the natural productions of the territory, and he paid special attention to the indigoes: one promising species, although it grew widely, “is nowhere present in such quantity that it could without especial cultivation supply an indigo works”, and, he was obliged to note, I have not been able to discover that the negroes are aware of any medicinal or economic use of this plant; I have not even been able to learn its name, although it is a plant that grows in their towns; and the only use that is sometimes made of it is as a broom.99 A member of the Verbenaceae was used against eye inflammations: “The leaves are crushed between hot stones and are laid thus in a linen cloth,

94 Hopkins, “A poisonous plant of the genus Datura”. 95 The writings of Thomas Jefferson, A.A. Lipscomb and A.E. Bergh, eds. (Washington: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1903–1904), Vol. 13, pp. 310–311. 96 Schumacher, pp. 119–120; Hepper, p. 120. 97 Hepper, p. 115 (Blighia sapida). 98 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. 32–[33]; Hepper, pp. 55–56. 99 Schumacher, pp. 373–374; Hepper, pp. 93–94 (Indigo tinctoria). 182 chapter five from which the juice is squeezed into the eye”.100 The bark of another plant was boiled in a soup, “which they drink against dysentery; this is in addition one of the commonest fetish plants used by the negroes in their cleansing baths in sickness or other cases”.101 The leaves of another, “ground and mixed with lemon juice, are laid on swellings caused by the Guinea worm”.102 Yet another was used against gonorrhea; “For lack of string the negroes use the stem to tie up firewood and such with”.103 According to Thonning’s notes on Physalis angulata, Adampi girls who, without having observed the religious ceremonies, have been got with child, try to drive out the fetus with a decoction of this plant, which they both drink and wash the genitals with, and use as an enema. The leaves are also used against a scabies-like eruption and against mumps; they are crushed, and the body is rubbed with them.104 Other plants were used against “rheumatic pains”, against sores on the ears, as epispastics.105 The bark of the wild cashew (Blighia sapida) is grated with lemon juice and is used as a poultice, or is simply rubbed on swollen testicles”.106 Cassia occidentalis was used in cases of dysentery and ringworm and to ease abdominal pain. “The bark of the root has a bitter, slightly astringent taste, it is said to be recommended as a good substitute for Chinabark. The leaves have a narcotic smell that much resembles opium”.107 The crushed leaves of another plant were administered as a laxative: “for this purpose they have a bottle-shaped calabash, whose stem is inserted, whereupon the medicine is blown in with the mouth”.108 A lantana was employed in the case of snake bite: a preparation of it was smeared over the whole body, “so, as they say, the poison will not spread. The doctor also has some prepared medicine for internal use which I am not familiar with. The root of this bush is said to be mixed therein”.109 Tea brewed from the dried leaves of Waltheria indica resembled “in taste the flowers of verbascum and [has] the same effect” against scrofula.110

100 Schumacher, p. 15; Hepper, pp. 129–130 (Stachtarpheta angustifolia). 101 Schumacher, p. 17. 102 Schumacher, p. 81. 103 Schumacher, p. 96. 104 Schumacher, p. 124; Hepper, p. 120. 105 Schumacher, pp. 124, 127, 171. 106 Schumacher, pp. 190–191; Hepper, p. 115. 107 Schumacher, pp. 207–208; Hepper, p. 34. 108 Schumacher, p. 276; Hepper, p. 129 (Premna quadrifolia). 109 Schumacher, pp. 277–278; Hepper, p. 129 (Lantana camara). 110 Schumacher, p. 296; Hepper, pp. 123–124. reports and reverberations 183

Of Erythrina senegalensis he wrote, “a decoction of the bark is used by the negroes against dysentery and colic, similarly to ease difficult births”.111 Thonning recorded of Launaea taraxacifolia that “the Europeans use it as a salad under the name of endive. It has a bitterish taste and slightly narcotic smell; the negroes use the squeezed-out juice as an analgesic in fresh wounds”.112 The Africans used the balsam pear, which grew mainly around towns (it is apparently an East Asian plant), as a vermifuge: a couple of handfuls of the plant were crushed and put in water with the juice of four lemons; whereupon a hot stone was thrown into the mixture. When it cooled, drinking it promoted vomiting or movement of the bowels or both, whereby the worms were driven out. This remedy was also effective against constipation.113 “Besides this use it is one of the most important of the great fetish plants”; if an African came upon it, he would throw it about his neck, “with the thought that this will surely protect him against unfortunate events”. The line between physical maladies and afflictions ascrib- able to the supernatural appears to have been rather indistinct. Thonning wrote of another mint that “the whole plant has an exceedingly strong and rather pleasant odor; it is used by the negroes in different sicknesses, especially such as are attributed to sorcery and the departed”.114 The bark of the root of Allophylus spicatus is often used as fetish in the event of illness; one cuts a branch three feet long, scrapes off the bark, smears it with a white clay, winds the one end with bast string, which is smeared with a red dirt; the other end is set in the earth in the place the fetish priest or the doctor orders, commonly at a crossroads, often an egg or some other bagatelle is laid there, and often several sticks are set out as time goes by when the illness will not yield. The leaves are put in cold water, with which the patient must wash himself, after which the water is thrown out on the earth by the buried stake.115 Thonning related that one William Parker has assured me that he saw a negro take the leaves [of Byrsocarpus coccineus] together with some grains of paradise, chew them, and lay them on the bite of a poisonous snake, and that he later found him quite healthy; but he did not know of what species the snake was. Other negroes maintain that it was not the healing power of the plant that had been efficacious, but that it

111 Schumacher, p. 334; Hepper, p. 89. 112 Schumacher, p. 381; Hepper, pp. 42–43. 113 Schumacher, p. 425; Hepper, pp. 51–52 (Momordica charantia). 114 Schumacher, p. 267; Hepper, pp. 64–65 (Ocimum canum). 115 Schumacher, p. 187; Hepper, pp. 114–115. 184 chapter five

was a fetish cure that could help him, but no other, because the plant was his fetish.116 Many other plants besides these were used for medicinal purposes, and Thonning made similar notes on the culinary uses of a great number of others, both wild and cultivated, native and introduced. The spirit world occasionally governed what one ate, as well: of Jacquemontia ovalifolia Thonning wrote, “the negroes consider the leaves a good kale. The Ussu tribe’s fetish eats this kale, wherefore none of this tribe dares consume it, and violation of this commandment is regarded as a great crime”.117 A large number of other applications were found for plants in the Africans’ domestic industries. “The longest branches [of Ehretia corymbosa] are used for anker hoops. The negroes chew the wood together with the seeds of Sterculia verticillata, whereby is produced a red dye that is used for ‘fetisheries’, amulets, etc.”;118 lye was made with the ash of several different plants and used in dyeing and in the manufacture of palm-oil soap.119 The root of Millettia irvinei was “beaten out to a soft sponge”.120 The Africans made bags and soft sleeping mats from reeds.121 Fishermen collected great quantities of the leaves of a sanseveria, and by softening them in water and beating them, separate the fibrous and fleshy parts from one another; the first is a very good hemp, of which they manufacture the coarsest strings for their fishing nets. Adanson discusses the same use of this plant in Senegal. In the same way the negroes prepare from the leaves of pineapple a rather fine and long but somewhat stiff flax, from which they make all their thread and yarn for sewing, fishing nets, etc. There is also another plant that gives hemp that far exceeds the usual in strength.122 Thonning speculated that a rope fiber could be extracted from a hibiscus whose stem was very tough, “but the negroes do not use it”.123 The Hah-Tio, which was only shrub-sized near the sea, grew as large as a medium-sized oak inland. The wood was excellent for furniture-making,

116 Schumacher, p. 227; Hepper, pp. 44–45. 117 Schumacher, pp. 101–102; Hepper, p. 49. 118 Schumacher, p. 130; Hepper, p. 32 (where ankerbaand is rendered as “anchor bands”). 119 Schumacher, pp. 138, 300–301, 378–379. 120 Hepper, p. 95. 121 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. 32–[33]. 122 Schumacher, pp. 174–175; Hepper, p. 132 (Sansevieria liberica). Thonning was perhaps referring to Michel Adanson’s Histoire natural de Sénégal. Coquillages. Avec la relation abré- gée d’un voyage fait en ce pays, pendant les années 1749, 50, 51, 52 & 53 (Paris: C.-J.-B. Bauche, 1757). See Grove and Johansen, p. 1389. 123 Schumacher, p. 320; Hepper, pp. 69–70 (Hibiscus cannabinus). reports and reverberations 185 hard, strong, and heavy, and of a fairer yellow than boxwood, although it gradually lost its color. The wood was highly resinous and took a good polish; Thonning had never seen it attacked by worms. However, the trunks were twisted and bowed, and no planks larger than four feet by perhaps sixteen inches could be obtained. Poor people commonly made torches of this wood. Small printing blocks for decorating the skin were carved from the large thorns of older trees. The plant was also used to treat gout and toothache.124 The wood of another tree was “hard, fine, yellowish with reddish veins, and takes a very fine polish”.125 Camwood, not to be had in large pieces, was quite fine but not good enough for fine work; “for dyeing, on the other hand, it is very superior, as it is exceedingly rich in dye-stuff. It is much used by the negroes for fetish ceremonies and amulets; for this purpose it is crushed fine with water on a stone”.126 The fruit of Oncoba spinosa, cleaned out and fitted with a cork, was used as a snuffbox.127 The wood of a Vitex was favored for making drums.128 “The negroes grind the stems and leaves of Mucuna sloanei and dye leather black simply by smearing it with the squeezed-out juice and letting it dry in the air”.129 A decoction from a plant that now bears Thonning’s name, Thonningia sanguinea, “is used for washing out venereal sores …. It is also used for heightening the colour of parrots’ red tail feathers; the old feathers are pulled out and the sore place is rubbed with the finely grated plant. These feathers are in much use for finery in dress, and their value is fixed according to the colour”.130 Some distance inland grew the baobab. The natives in Asianté, Akim, Aquapim always bury their noble dead secretly and often in this tree, especially in wartime, when they fear that the enemy will discover the body and keep the bones on their drums as a sign of victory and the victim’s disgrace. The negroes assert that the body dries without decomposition in this tree; the trunk became hollow, and the body was lowered into it. The wood was so loose as to be useless even for firewood.131

124 Schumacher, pp. 433–35; Hepper, pp. 113–114 (Fagara zanthoxyloides). 125 Schumacher, p. 105; Hepper, p. 108 (Mitragyna inermis). 126 Schumacher, p. 203; Hepper, pp. 84–85 (Baphia nitida). 127 Schumacher, p. 232; Hepper, pp. 61–62. 128 Schumacher, p. 290; Hepper, p. 130 (Vitex doniana). 129 Schumacher, p. 344; Hepper, pp. 95–96. 130 Hepper, pp. 29–30; Schumacher, p. 432. See Letters on West Africa, p. 115. 131 Schumacher, pp. 300–301; Hepper, p. 31 (Adansonia digitata). 186 chapter five

A ficus, “for its fast growth and good shade, [is planted] in the largest streets and on the squares in the negro towns”.132 A Caesalpinia “blooms all year through. [It is] cultivated at the Danish establishments for the sake of its beautiful flowers”.133 Thonning said of Melia Angustifolia that “the seed first came from Elmina and, as I believe, was brought there from the West Indies. The flowers have a pleasant smell like lilacs”.134 Andropogon tectorum was “the most common grass, which occupies almost all fields from the shore until up towards the mountains”.135 The low-growing Alternanthera pungens “is a dangerous weed on footpaths and cultivated places, especially for the natives, who go barefoot”.136 Dichrostachys cinerea had the peculiarity that it exhausts the earth so, that where it grows no other plant can thrive, even if they are not overshadowed and choked by it. Because of its creeping roots it is difficult to eradicate. In the cotton plantation at Frederiksberg it has almost choked the cotton trees, which otherwise are content with poor soil.137 “Of the animal kingdom”, Thonning said, “the land has as great an abundance and variety as of the plant kingdom”. The domestic animals were cattle, sheep, goats, swine, dogs, cats, turkeys, Guinea fowl, chickens, pigeons, and ducks. No horses or donkeys were kept. The local ox was well- formed but smaller than the European and had “as a consequence of its free way of life a wild appearance and nature”. The meat was quite good, for an animal that received so little care and fodder. It was “almost entirely left to itself”, and in the dry season sometimes had to go many miles for water but always returned to its pens at nightfall. Cattle pens were so carelessly constructed that leopards and what Thonning called wolves (by which he presumably meant hyaenas) sometimes made off with calves and the occasional grown animal. The cattle were not milked (although that was the practice farther east on the Slave Coast), for these people consumed no cow’s milk; sheep and goats gave richer milk for less trouble, “and neither have the Europeans concerned themselves with taming the cows to milk them. The cattle are therefore so unaccustomed to people that when one wants to have one … slaughtered, one is obliged to shoot it”.

132 Schumacher, p. 25; Hepper, p. 79 (Ficus umbellata). 133 Schumacher, p. 210; Hepper, p. 33 (Caesalpinia pulcherrima). 134 Schumacher, pp. 214–215; Hepper, p. 74. 135 Schumacher, p. 49; Hepper, p. 143. 136 Hepper, pp. 20–21. 137 Schumacher, p. 327; Hepper, p. 76. reports and reverberations 187

Thonning had no doubt that if the animal were properly cared for it might become just as fine “as that in the West Indian islands”. Cattle-raising was of considerable importance east of the Volta.138 Sheep here on the Guinea Coast had straight hair, although the same animal, transported to Europe, would bear wool, and the reverse was true. With a little care, the meat was as good as European mutton. There were two races of goats, the larger of which was said to have been brought here from the Cape Verdes. The meat was just as good as the sheep’s, if “one took care, upon the slaughtering, immediately to skin it and cut off the testicles”. The Europeans used the rich milk in coffee. The goats and sheep foraged for themselves in the towns or were led out into the fields by children; they were penned up in household compounds at night. There were no large flocks, “but every family customarily has some few”.139 The pig was an introduced animal, a mixture of races from England, Holland, Denmark, and Portugal; for lack of proper care, it was usually quite a bit smaller than European pigs. They never left the towns, and therefore required more fodder than the other domestic animals, as what they can get for themselves by going freely about during the day in the towns and on the negroes’ latrine areas is insufficient to satisfy their greed. Every family that owns pigs has for them, in an out-of-the-way place in the town, a straw-thatched clay hut in which they are shut up at night, in part that they should not run away and in part to protect them against the leopard and the wolf, which last especially are bold enough to go around in the towns at night. The Africans preferred pork over all other meats, although “Many places the pig is not tolerated, as an animal that is loathsome to the fetish”.140 The dog was not commonly kept, and there were no purebred animals here, except those that had been brought directly from Europe. The climate had had no effect on its nature: it was the same animal that it was everywhere, friendly, alert, and so on. “But in general the negroes treat the dog with an indifference that [has an effect on] its whole nature and partly ruins its good qualities”. It was not employed as a watch dog or as a hunter. Nor was it eaten, on the other hand, “as is the case in some distant lands to the northeast and east”. Rabies was unknown, but dogs brought from Europe were very susceptible to the climate. Ships’ dogs, since they were always on board, were in no danger. The cat here was no different from the

138 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. 33–35; DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 31. 139 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. 35–37. 140 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. 37–[39]. 188 chapter five

European housecat, but a little smaller. It was eaten on some parts of the Guinea Coast but was kept as a mouser here in the Danish enclave, although it was still not entirely safe.141 Hunting provided a significant portion of the diet everywhere in the enclave, but especially in Akuapem, Akyem and Asante, where few domestic animals were kept. There was a great sufficiency of wild game: buffalo, wild pig, many kinds of antelope, hare, wild duck, snipe, and much other wild fowl. The Africans hunted with rifles, but they were not good shots: “they seek their advantage by waiting for the game in thickets by the watering places”. Meat that could not be consumed immediately was smoked or dried. A pleasantly aromatic honey was often to be found in the woods.142 The sea was a rich source of food.143 The people of the coast and the riverbanks fished with casting nets, with which they were very adept, and with lines on the Sinkesu Bank. The Anlo appear to have employed weirs, traps, stake nets, and seines. The surplus was cleaned, salted, and laid in the sun to dry; the fish were somewhat rotten before they were sufficiently dry, but “the negroes use this dried half-rotten fish in almost all their dishes, and it is the most important branch of trade with the interior nations for the shore negroes”. Unlike in the West Indies, none of the local fish were poisonous.144 The leopard was rather common and occasionally attacked human beings. The wolf, Thonning said, was very common, hunting either alone or in small packs; it often came into the towns at night and was dangerous to children. It was regarded with “holy deference” by the Africans and was therefore not persecuted. The wild pig occasionally damaged plantings of corn. There were crocodiles in the Sacumo-fjo, but seldom of such a size as to be dangerous out of the water. When the boa constrictor was hungry, Thonning related, it was said that a man could not outrun it. A three- or four-foot viper common near the coast was regarded by the Africans as rather dangerous, but Thonning knew of its inflicting no serious harm. A small grey viper, on the other hand, although rare, had killed a man while he was on the coast. Various kinds of scorpions were to be found in the open and in the houses; their bite was painful but not dangerous.

141 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. [39]–40. 142 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, p. 11.a; DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 29. 143 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, p. 11.a. 144 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 30. reports and reverberations 189

Thonning understood that a swarm of locusts had arrived in a dark cloud from the northeast at Ada sixteen years before and had within a few days swept west along the coast. “They cannot be regarded here as an actual pest”, he said Termites were very common near the coast, where one could at any time see fifty of their hills, eight to sixteen feet high. They quickly destroyed everything built of wood if they were not kept out of a structure, but did little harm to plantings. There was only one queen in each hill, and Thonning thought it would be easy to eradicate them by killing the queens. Old houses were full of ants, which were not really harmful; he thought arsenic or mercury mixed with honey would kill them. Cockroaches were to be combatted with cleanliness. Europeans slept under netting against mosquitoes, and the Africans drove them from their sleeping chambers with smoke.145 “The mineral kingdom is probably the poorest in varieties, although its products are far from being unimportant”. A sandstone was quarried in many places and was the most important building material. It was sometimes of such fine porosity as to be useful for filtering water. Gneiss was used for the flat roofs of the Europeans’ houses, “for which, though, it is not so very serviceable, as it does not bind itself tightly enough to mortar or cement”. Clay for roofing tiles and pottery could be found most places. The lagoons along the beach yielded sea salt. “Of lime and the other earths, of the flammable minerals, and of metals scarcely a trace is found, when iron and gold are excepted”. Gold was found where watercourses met the sea, but in such small quantities that the Africans did not trouble themselves to pan it. Iron presented itself in oxidized combinations in the soil.146 True to his education as a natural historian of the Linnaean school, Thonning also interested himself in the peoples of the enclave. The Gã, called by the Europeans Accras, were well formed people, he wrote, with in general “gentler features than most other negro nations; they are not disfigured with incised figures”. They were religious and proud; they “regard wealth with humility, age with deference; they believe themselves more enlightened and therefore regard other nations (Akim excepted) with contempt”. They were passionate, lazy, unconcerned about the future, selfish, excitable, quarrelsome, brave against an enemy their equal, loyal

145 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. 11.a–14.a. 146 GK II, Thonning’s Lit. C, pp. 15.a–16.a. 190 chapter five and devoted to their families and towns. The women were vain and given to gossip, he said.147 The Gã language was quite different from those to the north and west, but the Gã themselves regarded Gã and Adangme as dialects of the same language, although, Thonning said, the difference was great enough “that one can know the Gah language very well without being able to understand the Adampish. Their pithiest talk is similes”. Their words could not be written in normal Danish characters.148 The Africans’ way of life was simple and natural: The negro rises with the sun, drinks a warm decoction of malt, smokes a pipe of tobacco, and goes to his work, at 9 o’cl. he bathes, at 4 o’cl. he take his second meal; the meal consists for even the richest negro of a single dish that most often is fish or game, which is cooked with palm oil, Guinea pepper, dry fish, and the unripe fruit of hibiscus. In general the evening is passed, especially by moonlight, in social pleasures, when each sex gathers separately, and enjoys spirits, tobacco, dance, and music.149 Thonning described the men’s and women’s clothing and tonsorial practices at some length—their jewelry and perfumes, the figures they printed on their skin in white or blue. Sandals were rarely worn. Children wore only a chain of beads around their waists, and small children nothing at all.150 The Africans lived “in towns the size of medium-sized farm towns, but more densely built up”. The main streets were usually straight, with a few trees along them, but the side streets were irregular and “so narrow that two can scarcely go by one another; they are very unclean. Here and there outside the town are small areas, where the negroes relieve themselves”. All towns were ringed with thick hedges of “Cactus Tuna” or prickly-pear [an introduction from the Americas151], which protected them against enemies, “but to plant them with that in view: for that the negroes are too lazy and think too little of the future”; the hedges had started out as enclosures around small gardens, Thonning said. Every household head had a number of buildings surrounded and connected by walls, all built of clay kneaded with the feet and plastered up

147 ad GJS 271/1802, “Udkast”, § 3. See the anthropological discussion of the Gã in M.J. Field, Social organization of the Gã people (Great Britain: Crown Agents for the Colonies, on behalf of the Government of the Gold Coast, 1940). 148 ad GJS 271/1802, “Udkast”, § 4. 149 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, §15. 150 ad GJS 271/1802, “Udkast”, § 6. 151 Hepper, pp. 32–33. reports and reverberations 191 with the hands. The house walls were six feet high, on stone footings, and smeared inside and out with cow dung to protect them against the rain. The roofs were of thatch, with very deep eves; if there was a ceiling, it consisted of sticks and clay laid over the rafters. The floors were of clay, and the walls were painted in bands of white or red clay; the windows were small, with wooden shutters. Sometimes a whole wall was open.152 Thonning described the furnishings of the houses and typical personal possessions: some stools, a low table, a chest, a couple of jugs, a looking- glass, some brass basins, a parasol. A wealthy man might have a chair or two. The people slept on thick mats of reeds, brought out at night, with a small pillow or block of wood under their heads. In the kitchens there were a few small pots and pans, a couple of tin chests, a knife, a mortar; the people ate mostly with their fingers. A man had his weapons, agricultural implements, and musical instruments, and this was all he needed: “however few and clumsy these are, yet he takes no trouble to increase or improve them, and the Europeans’ manifold necessities are ridiculous in his eyes”.153 The Africans’ life was thoroughly suffused with spirituality, but the Gã, at any rate, had no interest in imposing their notions on others.154 All of the peoples of the enclave practiced the same religion, but with certain customs peculiar to each nation, circumcision, ceremonies that young men and girls must have subjected themselves to before closer intercourse between the sexes, and such. The negroes seldom carry on conversations about religion, and, as I believe, they scarcely think of this matter, but they were in the main agreed on the existence of a single creator, who did not follow the affairs of human beings from day to day and to whom, as a consequence, they paid little mind. The creator had delegated his interest in the human race to gimavong—“supernatural beings” with some sort of corporeal manifestation, “about like the Catholic angels and their statues. Certain things, which by an appropriate initiation are believed to have taken on a magical power to prevent sickness or other misfortune, and to call forth the opposite, are called by the negroes vong…. However great the distinction

152 ad GJS 271/1802, “Udkast”, § 7. 153 ad GJS 271/1802, “Udkast”, § 8. 154 See M.J. Field, Religion and medicine of the Gã people (London: Oxford University Press, 1937). Field, on p. 2, speaks of the Gã “habit of toleration and consideration for other people’s gods”. 192 chapter five

between vong and gimavong, the Europeans have always mixed them up under the name fetish. Each fetish [i.e., gimavong] had a residence, “either a miserable hut, or just a thicket”. Most of these beings were attended by a priest or priestess, and these offices were usually handed down within families. The power of these fetishes was enormous and pervasive, and they had constantly to be appealed to or appeased. The fetish was propitiated with gifts, with certain behaviors, or with abstentions, and the African’s “fear of offending the fetish is much greater than one would imagine; blasphemy is an unheard- of vice”; the conscience of anyone who had in any way failed in his obligations to a fetish would plague him unceasingly, he will regard every unfortunate event as the fetish’s revenge; and fear will shorten his days…. Sickness, death, or every unfortunate event the negroes almost always regard as a duly allotted punishment, and they will always find one or another reason for the fetish’s pique. A little food and drink was always spilled on the ground for the fetish at every meal. Every fetish of any account was honored with an annual celebration, and everyone nearby was obliged to attend and make sacrifices of ardent spirits, cowries, sheep, chickens, eggs, and the like. The poor man’s sacrifice was as well regarded as the rich man’s lavish gift; and “no one should without cause send another in his place”. These sacrificial feasts always ended with ritual baths in water rendered holy with certain leaves, and the fetish priest painted the participants’ faces and bodies with colored clays. The fetishes’ power was not limited to their own circles of believers, and it was a sensible precaution to sacrifice to neighboring fetishes, too, if possible, although in this case it was permissible to send a representative rather than go in person. Oaths were sworn on the fetishes, and they exacted various retributions for perjury. They were crucial in medicine and in divining, although, usually, “the fetish’s answer on such occasions is just as ambiguous as the oracle of antiquity”. The religion concerned itself mainly with the gimavong; relations with one’s neighbor were a civil matter. The religion lays no particular proscription on murder, theft, or such deprav- ities, but secular law avails itself of religion to discover the criminal or in certain ways to force the confession. When an humble man has a suit against a mighty, and he himself or the secular power is too weak to force the latter to appear before the court, he can entrust his case to a great fetish, the fear of which could be expected bring the dispute back into proper civil channels. “Marriage is a secular matter, unconnected to religion. A man can marry as many wives as his fortune permits”. reports and reverberations 193

A fetish sometimes possessed people, usually old women, and they would go mad, leaping about, dancing, crying out, and mumbling, and their utterances “are interpreted according to the circumstances…. While the fit lasts, those standing round play on instruments intended for this purpose and repeat in unison the words of the possessed”. There were household and family fetishes, and small split stakes, smeared with clay, with sacrificial objects jammed into the split end, were set down here and there along the paths and near planted fields to ward off thieves. The people armed themselves at all times with marvelous amulets, whose enormously varied modes of construction appear to have made quite an impression on Thonning. These might incorporate small calabashes containing burnt and pulverized bone, feathers or horn, hair from the tail of an elephant or a kind of squirrel, or blue beads, bound up with pineapple fiber and smeared with clay or blood. “The things used for amulets are just as manifold as the negroes’ superstitious imagination”. A sick person was “almost completely bedecked with these; infants and pregnant women must wear a monstrous number”. Amulets gathered strength as they were passed down through the generations, and “many an amulet, which has not the least true value, is often of inestimable value in the owner’s eye, and cannot be had at any price”. The Gã believed in an afterlife passed on the small islands in the mouth of the Volta, “and even have a vague conception of this life’s eternity”. The souls of the dead occasionally returned to possess the bodies of close living relatives, either to take a part in family counsels or to torment the survivors for some crime or omission. They could also be called forth through the intervention of “a very strong fetish”. “These vexing spirits are driven out by a small human figure of the same sex as the spirit and coated over with white clay” and by sprinkling water boiled with strong-smelling herbs all around the room and at the door. The dead were sworn by in serious and emotionally charged affairs. “Sickness and death, in the negroes’ thinking, never have any natural causes…. They ascribe to certain people, but especially to older women, the ability to lay curses on others”, and such women and their children risked being killed or sold out of the country.155 “The country consists of as many aristocratic-patriarchal republics as there are different towns”, whose free inhabitants were divided into classes by age and status. “The administration is lead by a supreme official (cabuceer or cumo), and a council that consists of the oldest and most

155 ad GJS 271/1802, “Udkast”, § 9; DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, §13. 194 chapter five distinguished men in the town”. Of these, the most important were the “mediator” (or ‘broker’) and the “speaker”. The head man could do nothing of importance without the consent of the council, and in most cases they are also obliged to accommodate themselves to the will of the multitude. If the cabuceer has wealth, many relatives and serfs, or particular personal merit, then he always maintains ascendancy over the council and the multitude, whereby he is capable of undertaking much without their consent. The offices of the caboceer and of some of the council members were “hereditary; the others are obtained through age, wealth, power, merit, or family”. None of them entailed any revenues besides fines and small regular payments from the Europeans. Besides this, every town was divided into several quarters, each with its own leaders, and there was often considerable strife, for trifling reasons, such as “young people’s satirical songs”, between neighborhoods. Even more than language and regime, the different nations are divided from one another by national hatred; this commonly has its cause in former wars and humiliating defeats; by enthusiastic tales this hate is impressed on the children and grows with age. Asante was hated by most of its neighbors out of envy and resentment, and Akwamu by all except its allies the Asante and Anlo. The Adangme and the Krobo hated and persecuted one another, and the Anlo and the people of Keta similarly. Gã and Lai envied and hated Osu, “because this Adampish family in the middle of the Gã land harvests the greatest profits of the main Danish fort and enjoys its particular protection”.156 Most laws are time-honored conventions and judgments formerly issued in cases of similar character, which have the power of law; new laws are decided upon by the cabuceer and the council, but if they are of importance for the whole, then they must be approved by the multitude. The laws are made known by proclamation and maintained by oral traditions. Legal disputes were argued publicly by the parties to the suit. Judgment was rendered by the caboceer and his council and in important cases required the approval of the commonality. The entire population was divided into two groups, the free and the slaves (or “serfs”). The status of the mother, regardless of that of the father, devolved upon the child, although the state of freedom could also be

156 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 12. reports and reverberations 195 attained to. The class of slaves constituted people born into that condition, prisoners of war, and people enslaved for debt or criminality or who in any other way, legal or not, had been deprived of their freedom. Their owners’ power over them and all they possessed was absolute. Many slaves were treated as family members, however, and their condition was not so desperate, Thonning said. Some individuals, while not slaves, were held as pawns, to guarantee one or another economic, social, or diplomatic obligation.157 The landscape of Gã, from the Sacumo-fjo to the Sacumo-nupa, a mile or so west of Tema, and fifteen miles into the country, Thonning wrote, alternates between heights, valleys, and plains; it is vegetated with coarse, widely spread grass over a man’s height and scattered bushes and trees, which get bigger and more common, the farther they are from the shore. Since the mountain chain Akvapim lies immediately to the north of this landscape and attracts the clouds to itself, Ga suffers lack of rain, depending on the distance to the hills; “water is therefore in general shortage, especially somewhat after the rainy season”, and “the shore negroes are then often obliged to fetch their water 8 to 12 miles deep in the field”. On the other hand, the valleys were rather swampy in the rainy season.158 The population amounts, with large and small without exception, to almost 6,000. They support themselves by fishing, agriculture, breeding small animals, salt trade, and the profits they have of the Europeans’ slave trade. Most inhabitants live in towns by the shore, and only those few who cultivate the earth live in the inner part of the land, but as these are far from able to produce the necessary supplies, Ga must buy the rest from Akvapim”.159 The coastal landscape between the Sacumo-nupa and the Volta was the home of the Adampi (or Adangme). There was little to distinguish its western portion, as far as Lai, from Gã farther west. From Lai to the Volta there were more trees and bush, and the land was subject to saltwater flooding from the estuary of the Volta. The soil by the river was a blue clay, and the

157 ad GJS 271/1802, “Udkast”, § 10. See Pawnship in Africa: debt bondage in historical perspective, Toyin Falola and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994). 158 See the map of ecological zones in this area in Kea, Settlements, trade, and polities, p. 3, and a map of the precipitation regimes of all of Africa in Glenn T. Trewartha, The earth’s problem climates, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981 [1961]), p. 108, showing the anomalous notch of aridity extending from the coast up through what should apparently be a forested zone in this particular stretch of the Guinea Coast, in the so-called Togo gap: Derek Hayward and Julius Oguntoyinbo, The climatology of West Africa (London: Century Hutchinson Ltd, 1987), pp. 88–89. See also Dickson, pp. 337–338. 159 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 16. 196 chapter five area was largely wooded, but there was not much useful timber. In marshy places there were impenetrable mangrove woods. “The marshy and wooded areas by the Volta fill the air with reek and hinder the passage of the wind, wherefore the climate here is very unhealthy especially after the Volta’s flood in October and November”. Contagious sickness was then widespread. It was always two or three degrees hotter by the Volta than elsewhere, according to the thermometer, “and the heat is often unbearable”. There were something approaching five thousand inhabitants in Adangme. The western Adampi live just like the Ga negroes, and since the fishery is their primary source of sustenance, they must purchase most products of the earth from Akvapim. The eastern Adampi live mainly by salt trade and fishing in the Volta and the small lakes and rivers west of same; they cultivate almost nothing besides cassava…. Salt, on which their actual welfare depends, they obtain merely for the trouble of carrying it home from Ada-Songo, ten or fifteen miles west of Ada. Water penetrated up into this low plain through numerous channels from the Volta, and when it flooded, it was possible to travel by canoe from Ada to Lai. “These Adampis buy products of the earth from Volta Krepé, which lies immediately north of them”.160 Augna, or Anlo, lay between the Volta and Point Auguja, extending ten or twelve miles inland, although it consisted in the main of the infertile, sandy and marshy strip of land between the sea and the Keta Lagoon. It was covered with bush and palms as far as Atokko, the first town east of the Volta. The country north of the Amu, if, indeed, it could be considered part of Anlo, was a very low plain of either mangrove or fertile marshland used mainly as cattle range. The sea “lays something to the land almost every year” in the bay between Cape St. Paul and Point Auguja, and Fort Prindsenssteen was now three hundred paces farther from the water than when it had been built.161 The population of Anlo was almost eight thousand people, who lived by fishery, mainly in the Amu and the Keta Lagoon; cattle-raising; trade in grain between Avenor and Prindsenssteen or passing ships; and a little farming. These were the only people in the Danish enclave who kept cattle in any numbers.

160 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 17; GK II, “Udkast til Beskrivelse udarbeidet i Guinea”, p. 13. 161 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 18; the process of accretion has since reversed itself: Akyeampong, pp. 105–106, 205–206. reports and reverberations 197

In Akuapem the highest mountains were Aburi and Larteh, which Thonning guessed might be as much as six thousand feet high. (They are nowhere near such a height.)162 As far as he had been able to determine, they were of granite and gneiss and some slate; he had seen no sign of minerals, although, according to the negroes, here and there in the valleys north of the mountains there is gold, but which the inhabitants’ religion forbids them to search for…. The whole landscape is overgrown with woods of extraordinary height, which are only cut through by a few footpaths, and here and there cleared for farming; the other parts of the woods are impenetrable. These woods opened up the more closely one approached the sea. “The soil is of a superior fertility almost everywhere; in most places it consists of a mold mixed with a little clay and gravel or sand”. Small streams flowed down out of the mountains and through the valleys and greatly augmented the fertility of the soil. “Even the shore negroes, despite their tendency to indolence, find it so much easier to cultivate their agricultural products here”, that they discounted the extra trouble of transporting the crops to their towns by the sea. The vegetation was supported by frequent rains and very heavy dew; especially in the cloudy months of April and May and again in August and September, the mountains are so enveloped in clouds, that a fog seems to prevail…. This accommodating climate and soil has the effect that there presents itself to the eye here an eternal summer, when the shore regions often are dried up and withered. Sixteen thousand people lived here, with their towns in the hills and their fields in the valleys. They supported themselves by agriculture and hunting and had few domestic animals. They sold surplus agricultural products to the peoples of the coast for fish and salt.163 Where Thonning’s accounts passed out of the range of his own direct experience, he was forthright about his uncertainty. Akwamu (Aquambo, or Akvambu), east northeast of Akuapem, was said to be a fertile plain, with some forests and hills. The population was ten thousand, of which most lived along the Volta or on its islands and sustained themselves by

162 K.B. Dickson, “Relief and drainage”, in Akwapim handbook, pp. 8–9. 163 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 19. Kwamena-Poh’s geographical introduction to Akuapem in the eighteenth century, pp. 1–3, relies largely on Isert’s account. 198 chapter five agriculture, hunting, and the slave trade, buying slaves in Krepe and selling them down the river to the Europeans.164 Thonning thought “Rio Volta Krepe” was the best appellation for the landscape along the river between Adangme and Akwamu. It was an endless wooded plain, dissected by many small tributaries of the Volta. It was “uncommonly” fertile because of the annual floods of the Volta, when almost the whole region was put under water. It rained more here than in Gã and Adangme but was extremely hot and unhealthy. Six thousand inhabitants lived on high ground along the Volta and traded agricultural products to Ada for salt.165 Avinno (or Avenor) lay north of Anlo between the Volta and the Keta Lagoon; it was a wooded plain, not so fertile as Volta Krepe, nor so liable to flooding. Three thousand people lived here, the families scattered on the land, farming, hunting, and raising cattle. They bought salt and fish from Anlo.166 Akim (or Akyem) was a very large country of hills and valleys and plains northwest of Akuapem. There were gold mines in the valleys, some of them quite rich, but the method of extracting the gold was “altogether too simple” and, indeed, there were religious strictures on mining it in many parts of the land. “Akim is almost as populous as all the aforementioned landscapes taken together; the inhabitants sustain themselves by agriculture and hunting, and only in some few places by gold-mining”.167 Of Kvahu (or Kwawu), north of Akwamu, very little was known.168 Thonning thought there might be ten thousand people there. Krepe proper was a very large country, populous and fertile.169 It was the birth- place of most of the slaves exported through Prindsenssteen, Kongenssteen, and Fredensborg, and of many of those sold at the forts at Accra. “The inhabitants live in towns, and almost the whole country is said to have been taken up for cultivation”. The Akotim (or Agotime) were a “little nation of Adampish origin who settled here in the southwestern part of Krepé”. There were perhaps three thousand of them.170

164 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 20. On Akwamu at an earlier period, see Wilks, Akwamu, 1640–1750. 165 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 21. 166 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 22. 167 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 23. On Akyem, see, for example, Wilks, Asante in the nineteenth century, pp. 51, 126. 168 Wilks, Asante in the nineteenth century, pp. 47–48, speaks of the “indeterminacy” of the political situation in some of these places. 169 See Wilks, Asante in the nineteenth century, p. 57. 170 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, §§ 24, 25, 26. reports and reverberations 199

Asante lay northwest of all the others, and its area and population were as large as all the others put together. The other nations were all more or less immediate vassals of the Asante king. “Their means of sustenance are slave trade with the other African nations, wars and raids in inner Africa, agriculture, and hunting”.171 Thonning also described the present state of industry among the inhabitants. So few needs as the negroes have, and so little desire to increase them, and so singular a procliv- ity to old customs are naturally no encouragement to the culture to make particular progress; it is therefore no wonder that one finds everything as if in its first childhood.172 The Africans’ crafts extended only to the “roughest and most indispensable work”; the smiths could make agricultural implements, battle axes, hinges, and nails. Narrow strips of cloth were woven of hand-spun cotton and sewed together into larger cloths. “The only thing that can attract notice is the negroes’ blue dyeing, for it is quite good”. By what Thonning thought was an original indigenous process, the Africans produced a blue as deep and as fast as indigo blue.173 Of trade Thonning said only that it mainly took the form of barter between the peoples of the coast and of the agricultural country inland. Itinerant merchants bartered European goods for slaves and sold them in turn to the Europeans.174 Gold was dug in only a few places in Akyem, mainly at the foot of the mountains.175 The Africans seldom went deeper than twenty-five to forty feet for it, digging large holes with sloping, stepped sides. They used no props, and the holes collapsed in the rainy season. Women washed the gold from the brick-red earth in streams nearby. Thonning also described briefly the Danish establishments themselves. Christiansborg on its rock on the beach at Osu was clumsily built but, properly armed and provisioned, quite able to withstand any attack the Africans might launch, or a fairly strong European force.176 There were

171 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 27. On Asante, see, in particular, Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”; Wilks, Asante in the nineteenth century; and Fynn. 172 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, Chapter 4, introductory paragraph. 173 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 32. 174 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 33. 175 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 34. See Wilks, Asante in the nineteenth century, pp. 435–436. 176 Thonning attached a ground plan of the fort to his report. A long key here in the report identifies all the buildings, cisterns, stairways, workshops, and storage spaces. 200 chapter five a small house and some slave quarters at Frederiksberg, the cotton plantation governor Wrisberg had established a mile from the fort. The little fort Augustaborg at Teshi was armed with nineteen three-pound cannons but was not yet complete. The foundations of another minor fort had been laid at Kpone, but construction had long since been abandoned. At Fort Fredensborg, at Ningo, thirty miles down the coast from Christiansborg, the area encompassed by an outer wall was large enough that the townspeople could take shelter within it in the case of an attack. Kongenssteen was still being built when Thonning left the coast. It had neither outer wall nor cisterns, and at most times of the year fresh water had to be brought to the fort from several miles up the river, “which is a significant shortcoming in a fort”. Thonning pointed out that by confusing his measures Isert had described both Kongenssteen and Prindsenssteen as four times larger than they actually were. Of Isert’s colony Frederiksnopel in Akuapem there was now scarcely a trace. Frederikssted, begun by Flindt on rented land in the valley at Dodowa, was now abandoned.177 The Danes and other Europeans on the coast could at present not be regarded as otherwise than tenants that the inhabitants tolerate because they find their advantage thereby. All Europeans reside here for the sake of the slave trade: this hitherto has been their only employment, and … for supporting it the inhabitants’ leaders enjoy a fixed payment, which also, in the event of disputes, obliges them to follow the banner of the nation to which they declare themselves…. To be sure, the negroes call the Europeans masters, and show them much respect, but … the dominion is only an empty sound, for the negroes are in this regard quite independent of the Europeans and obey only their own regimes and laws…. No European nation has territorial rights in Guinea, when I except Ammannopasso in Akvapim [i.e., the land on which Isert had established his plantation], which belongs to Denmark, although the inhabitants will surely make difficulties if this should again to be taken up for cultivation.178 Immediately upon his return from the coast, Thonning had asked the Chamber of Customs for instructions regarding the disposition of the plants and botanical descriptions he had brought with him from Africa. “If it might find the Chamber’s approval, I have also collected information towards a description of the nations and lands in the vicinity of the establishments”.179 The Chamber, making no reference to the broader

177 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 35. 178 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, § 36. 179 Uafgjorte Forestillinger, 1822–31, Thonning, Copenhagen, August 8, 1803 (GJ 392/1803). reports and reverberations 201 geographical description he offered to submit, merely referred him to his original instructions and required of him his report on “plants that could become articles of trade”.180 Thonning appears to have turned to, and, a few months later, he wrote to the Chamber, I have hereby the honor to submit to the Chamber the enclosed report on the Danish territory in Guinea particularly with regard to the present culture of Indian colonial products or suitability for same. I have assembled in brief everything that I think can have any bearing or influence hereupon.181 Thonning, having so much invested in his African adventure, clearly had no intention of making a report dealing exclusively with commodities, but he carefully tailored his essay for his official audience at the Chamber of Customs, rather than for a general or scientific readership. It was a wide- ranging but well-organized, carefully impartial, and altogether convincing essay. He attached to it another version of his map of the Danish possessions and ground plans of two of the forts.182 After a substantial but succinct discussion of the climate, the coast and the rivers, and the most important mountains; naturally-occurring products; the differences among “the nations”, the forms of government and law, religion, the people’s homes, clothing, way of life, agriculture, hunting, and fishing, Thonning concluded his report with the assessment of the potential for trade that the Chamber had particularly required of him. The exports from the coast, he said, had hitherto consisted of slaves, small amounts of gold and ivory, and provisions for slave ships. There were other products, to be sure, such as honey, wax, palm oil, leopardskins, ginger, rice, grains, and dyewood, but these were available in such insignificant quantities and at such high prices that they could as reasonably be imported from elsewhere as exported. Danish textiles, gunpowder, muskets, iron and copper bars, Bohemian and Dutch beads, pipes,

180 VI kopibog, to Thonning, August 16, 1803. 181 GJ(S) 434/1803, Thonning, [Copenhagen,] December 1803; DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”. 182 GJ 434/1803, Thonning, December, 1803. A modern annotation in the Guinea Journal reads: “Maps and report now lie in Department for Foreign Affairs, General Correspondance G. Guinea” [DfuA, GG, Box 272]. Two copies of Thonning’s map, both bearing annotations linking them to this report, and four fort plans were removed from this location, where they lay in immediate proximity to the report, to the Rigsarkiv’s Kort- og -Tegningssamling, where they are classified as DfuA U-samling Nos. 1–6. There are also fragments of a copy of the report among Schimmelmannske papirer vedk. Kommissionerne betræffende Guinea og Negerhandelen: see R.A. Kea, “Population and economy”, pp. 57–59. 202 chapter five

Brazilian roll-tobacco and rum were among the articles imported, but few of them could profitably be sent from Denmark to the Guinea Coast because of cut-throat competition, especially from the English. The slave trade was all that had brought Europeans to the coast, and there was now no reason to maintain the establishments unless the land could be put to the production of tropical export crops. In Thonning’s view, The country’s differing situations … give rise to equally great differences in climate, and the soil itself is subject to so much variation that the well- founded hope can justly be entertained that most intertropical products will find suitable soil and climate in one place or another.183 Cotton Thonning thought would do very well in the territories of the Gã and Adangme, for the land is high and dry and is constantly roamed through by the winds, whereby the cotton plant thrives better and gives more and better wool; it is another advantage that the rain is sparse and restricted to certain seasons of the year, whereby the cotton harvest, which occurs in the dry season, does not suffer from dampness, which otherwise so easily dirties and corrupts the wool; the soil, to be sure, especially in the vicinity of the shore, is quite poor, but the cotton tree not only is content therewith but even thrives very well in it, whereof the plantation Frederichsberg gives decisive proof; the trees here do better than I have seen them on St. Croix; they give a large quantity of wool, which is long, white, and fine…. Among the varieties of cotton that are cultivated and thrive best at Frederichsberg, that which v. Rohr calls white Siam184 deserves preference over all the others; it yields both longer and more wool than any of the other varieties…. the Gujana cotton, if I may judge from some few trees I found in Hr. Meyer’s garden, does not adapt itself to the shore regions, it gives here only a little and short wool; perhaps this variety would thrive better in the more damp climate deeper in the country. The planter Jansen, Thonning said, had been of the opinion that the soil in the dales of Gã would be “very well suited” to sugar cane, but he himself feared that it “will not be able to tolerate the altogether too dry climate”. Tobacco sown at the garden at Frederiksberg had spread like a weed, however, and indigo grew wild in the coastal areas;185 “it is thus reasonable that in cultivation it would thrive even better”.

183 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, introduction to Chapter 6. 184 He was presumably referring to von Rohr’s book on cotton, Anmerkungen über den Cattun Bau (Altona: P.G. Hensler, 1791–93). 185 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, §38. reports and reverberations 203

The soil and climate of the hills and valleys of Akuapem Thonning judged ideal for coffee, sugar cane, tobacco, “and other products of the Indies that require rich soil and periodic rain. Perhaps even spice-trees could be cultivated here to advantage”.186 He was particularly impressed by the success Meyer had had as soon as he had transplanted his coffee seedlings from the clayey and gravelly and perhaps rather salty soil in his garden near Christiansborg into different conditions at Jadosa. “When I left Guinea Hr. Meyer, encouraged by this fortunate little experiment, had concluded to start a plantation of some hundreds of trees at Jadosa, so as, by a larger experiment like this, to be able to determine the outcome”. The Africans grew sugar cane in Akuapem, but only to chew on the stalks. They planted it in damp spots, where it grew to great size, but it was not very sweet. Thonning had seen sugar cane grown closer to the beach, near Winneba, west of Christiansborg, that was the equal of St. Croix cane. He had also seen excellent tobacco grown by an Akuapem farmer. Volta Krepe and Avenor were on the whole as fertile as Akuapem, in Thonning’s assessment. Low-lying areas in Volta Krepe he thought might be especially suitable for rice. The landscapes in the vicinity of the Danish establishments thus display a notable suitability for colonial products, but to produce these in so raw a land, many difficulties yet present themselves; the most convenient way would be with plantation colonies ordered the same as those in the West Indies, but in order to begin such colonies many preparations must be undertaken, which all, for a long time, would be connected with significant costs, without bringing in any income.187 It would first be essential to obtain property rights to a suitable piece of land. To be sure, the law of nature prevails among the inhabitants, namely that the land belongs to him who first possesses himself of it by taking it up for cultivation; for since the population is so small in proportion to the size of the country, land can have no value, and it has not occurred to anyone to regard a piece of land as his property any longer than he cultivates it. But this form of property is only valid between the children of the country, and not for a foreigner. If Europeans tried to seize large extents of land “to establish plantations or colonies there, without the inhabitants receiving any profit thereby”, then

186 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, §39. 187 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, introduction to Chapter 7. 204 chapter five the Africans could be expected to defend their rights in the land by the force of arms. Thonning thought the land could easily be obtained for an initial sum followed by monthly payments, “so the negroes would not forget their commitment and regret the sale…. [N]aturally this tax would end of itself when the Europeans became powerful enough to take the peremptory part”. The purchase of the land would be an insignificant expense in comparison to the cost of land in the West Indies, but before the planter could practice his craft, he would need shelter, works, tools, materials, craftspeople, laborers, beasts of burden, and roads. Most building materials were available locally at little cost; oyster shells could be burned for lime, and the necessary firewood was to be had “for the trouble of collecting it”. Sandstone was quarried many places in the enclave, and where it was lacking there was plenty of clay and the fuel necessary for making bricks. The wood of several indigenous trees could be used for boards and small timbers; larger beams would have to be sent out from Europe, as would iron, glass, paint, and equipment for sugar works that could not be manufactured locally. It would be important to build with stone because termites were so common, although Thonning expected that these could be eradicated in time. The necessary craftspeople should if possible be sent over from the West Indies, as these would not suffer so much on account of the climate and better understand the building of the works necessary for Indian products. The officers sent out from Europe would have to be in triple numbers, for a third will within the first year fall prey to death, another part will very soon become discontented, and thus perhaps scarcely even the necessary number will be left; Isert’s plantation serves as proof hereof. The young naturalist stated blithely that the necessary field workers “cannot be got without re-opening the slave trade”; the free labor force would not suffice, and slaves purchased locally would simply run away.188 The necessary slaves should be purchased on the Upper Guinea Coast, and the language barrier and the sea voyage would “eliminate the hope of finding their home again”. A colony would also have to arrange with the local nations and fetish priests to return runaways. Draft animals would be needed, both for transportation and to provide the power to crush sugar cane inland, where the use of the windmills

188 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, §43. reports and reverberations 205 typical of the West Indies would not be feasible, for the lack of steadily prevailing winds. The local ox would have to be tamed and broken to the yoke before it could be used and was in any case rather small. Horses were sometimes brought from the interior of Africa, but these were small animals of not much strength, and very expensive. The best place to obtain donkeys, horses, and mules was the Cape Verde Islands. Every ship sailing to the coast from Europe passed these islands, and, since the sea was usually fairly calm between the islands and the Guinea Coast, it would be rather a simple matter to transport the animals to the coast on deck. Significant numbers of mules, in particular, were transported from St. Jago to Suriname every year, Thonning pointed out. It would be important to build proper roads, but this would be difficult and expensive, especially in the valleys, which were veritable bogs in the rainy season. When the Europeans, by establishing plantations, begin to increase their power, they will soon become suspect to the inhabitants, who would perhaps even venture to take the decision to stop the colony before it became too powerful for them; in part, it would be unavoidable that now and then disputes would arise, which could give rise to strife. The greatest danger would come from the powerful, proud, and envious Asianté nation, who hitherto regarded the Danes as peaceful merchants, whom it furthermore could not attack inside their fortifications, and whom the profits of the trade even might convince it to protect; this would perhaps now rise up over the loss it had suffered by the abolished slave trade, and, accustomed to raiding and brigandage in inner Africa, it would now take advantage of this easy and profitable opportunity to plunder a defenseless colony. To prepare for such eventualities, every plantation would have to be fortified to some degree. This need not be a matter of much expense, as several plantations could be laid out at one time and protected by a common fortification; “[i]n time this fortification would only be necessary on the borders”. (In using such a word, Thonning was indeed projecting his thought far into the unknown.) Plantations in Suriname, he understood, lacked such provision, and were subject to attack by the “bush negroes”; word had it also that plantations in Sierra Leone had in the last year been overrun and many colonists killed.189 Private entrepreneurs could not be expected to expose themselves to these risks and costs, Thonning

189 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, §45. 206 chapter five concluded: the undertaking would have to be underwritten by the government. The Africans themselves, he thought, would not take up the difficult cultivation of crops for export, particularly not sugar and indigo, which required substantial works, without the example of European planters. It would be almost as difficult to introduce even small-scale cultivation of coffee and cotton and other crops among the Africans, for their cultivation here would have to struggle against indolence and prejudice against everything new, two main traits in the negroes’ character, which it will scarcely be possible to undo before the Europeans get more influence on their moral and political way of thinking; perhaps a closer intercourse with the Europeans will in time give them a taste for European conveniences and thereby elicit an unknown want that will force them to work to fulfill their wishes; but this already presupposes the land’s settlement and cultivation by the Europeans. For the present, since the negro has so very few needs, since he aspires to none further, and since he can obtain these with little and accustomed work, I am quite convinced that all instruction and encouragement would be wasted. For example, Thonning said, the Africans bought expensive imported tobacco when tobacco grew practically wild all around them, but if asked why, they would answer: ‘my fathers did not concern themselves with it and yet were happy, and would I be happier than they by making more trouble for myself?’ But may we not entirely excuse the negroes in this regard, when even the enlightened Europeans do just the same; how long, for example, was it before the potato was commonly accepted?190 This was not a careless aside: Thonning was here arguing, with some historical and geographical finesse (for the potato was of course originally domesticated by the Indians of South America and brought to the Old World by the Spanish) that the Danish government should take a very long colonial view. The most fertile land for plantations would be fifteen or twenty-five miles from the sea, and transportation overland would be a significant expense; it would only in a few places be possible to take advantage of waterways, Thonning said. Plantation products would have to be shipped as soon as they arrived at the beach, because the establishments’ warehouses were so damp and salty. The transfer of the colonial products through the surf to ships lying a mile or more offshore, relying on African

190 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, §46. reports and reverberations 207 canoes and their skilled crews, would also be difficult and expensive. The canoes often capsized or filled with seawater, and in either case the goods were damaged or lost. “Very seldom is it possible that wares can be brought out dry”. Decked lighters of significant draft could only be used at the mouth of the Volta, which was itself difficult of navigation. There was no harbor at all on the Danish stretch of the coast, and the anchorages were rocky and treacherous. Ships working these warm waters had to be cop- perclad and well equipped. It was a long journey from Europe to West Africa and back again, and most provisions for the entire voyage usually had to be brought out from Europe. “All these circumstances together increase costs and risk”: goods exported would have to be produced very cheaply or would have to be “of such character that they could be obtained nowhere else”, as, indeed, had been the case until Denmark had banned the Atlantic traffic in slaves. There Thonning’s report to the Chamber ended.191 There is no direct indication that anyone at the Chamber of Customs had troubled themselves to read Thonning’s preliminary “Draft of a historical and geographical description of the allied provinces of the Danish possessions on the coast of Guinea”, when it had come in from the coast in the summer of 1802, but notice was assuredly taken of this final report on the Danish establishments and their economic potential that he submitted at the end of 1803. A note in the Guinea Journal indicates that Niels Tønder Lund had taken the report to his office, and a copy of it was made and sent to the Slave-trade Commission.192 Ernst Schimmelmann was sufficiently impressed as to ask Thonning to prepare a report on the how the African establishments, now that the Danish slave trade was at an end, “could be of the greatest use to the state, and whether the country was suitable for colonial agriculture”.193 The young naturalist had thus managed to project his name and his work rather deep into the counsels of the state. He now began work on a long “proposal for the planting of a colony in the Danish possessions in Guinea”; almost two years passed before he completed it. Thonning’s African work appears to have created something of a sensation in scientific circles, as well. Thonning declared in his résumé of 1809194 that he had brought back with him from Africa a

191 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, §48. 192 GJ 434/1803, January 28, 1804. 193 Rtk. 2214.86, P. Thonning, Copenhagen, December 20, 1809. 194 Rtk. 2214.86, P. Thonning, Copenhagen, December 20, 1809. 208 chapter five

significant collection of naturalia, especially of plants and insects; of the insects, I provided the 7 most significant collections here in the city with a share, an exemplar of each species. I provided 9 of the best public and private herbaria with plants, which like the insects were for the most part of unknown species, and even then retained a number more than double that, which were intended for important foreign herbaria after I had myself published my plant descriptions, which merely needed to be augmented with descriptions of a number of plants that circumstances had not permitted me to describe in Guinea.195 In December, 1803, he sent what he called a “little collection of plants” to one of his contemporaries at the Natural History Society, Niels Hofman (Bang), at whose country estate the natural historians of the day used to forgather.196 It emerges, in a letter to Hofman (Bang) from another member of this circle, J.W. Hornemann, lecturer at the Botanical Garden, that Thonning may have provided each of them with almost 300 new herbarium specimens.197 In an article on new plant genera printed in the Natural History Society’s Skrivter for 1810 but written in 1803 or 1804, Martin Vahl honored Thon ning’s work on the Guinea Coast by bestowing the name Thonningia sanguinea (Balanophoraceae), which still holds, on one of his plants.198 Vahl praised the “many treasures” Thonning had brought home, the excellence of his descriptions, “made on the spot”, his notes on the plants’ medicinal and economic uses, his collection of insects, and his reliable report on the country itself. All this I hope he will soon himself publish, and it will then be seen how suitable the Chamber of Customs’s choice was and how much Hr. Thonning’s name deserves for all time to be remembered by botanists. However, Thonning was very slow to assemble his material for publication, perhaps because Schimmelmann’s charge to him was more pressing. It is an indication of his scientific standing that he was involved in the posthumous publication of a couple of Vahl’s works: the great botanist died suddenly in 1804, when he had scarcely begun publishing his

195 On Thonning’s specimens in foreign collections, see Hepper, pp. 9–10, 188–214. 196 An important collection of Hofman (Bang)’s correspondence is preserved at the Botanical Central Library [BCB] in Copenhagen: Thonning, Copenhagen, December 28, 1803, to Hofman (Bang), No. 2; also Hofman (Bang), Hofmansgave, [January 29], 1804, to Martin Vahl, No. 9; Carl Christensen, Vol. 1, pp. 225–26. 197 BCB, Hornemann, November 22, 1803, to Hofman (Bang), No. 2. 198 M. Vahl, “Beskrivelse over nye planteslægter”, Skrivter af Naturhistorie-Selskabet, Vol. 6, 1810, pp. 84–128, on p. 124; Hepper, pp. 29–30 and Plate 3 (b). reports and reverberations 209

Enumeratio plantarum, a huge expansion and revision of Linnaeus’s system.199 Niels Tønder Lund saw to it that the crown purchased Vahl’s herbarium, library, and manuscripts for the Botanical Garden, reserving to Vahl’s widow the right to publish the manuscripts.200 Tønder Lund, Hornemann, and Thonning saw the second volume of the Enumeratio through the press,201 but the project was abandoned there. Of Thonning’s African plants, the first two Linnaean classes and the first order of the third—a matter of two dozen plants—were described in the Enumeratio.202 Thonning also had a hand in the publication of the last fascicle of Vahl’s Eclogae americanae; which appeared in 1807,203 but he let his own plants lie. In a “review of the state and progress of botany in this century” in 1822, Hornemann lamented that very little of the Danish work that had been done on the Guinea Coast since Isert’s day in the 1780s had yet been published.204 In a review of J.F. Schouw’s well-known Grundtræk til en almin delig Plantegeographie (Outline of a general plant geography), 1822, the reader was warned that, although the author had used every imaginable published source, there remained many important gaps in the literature. The reviewer (doubtless Hornemann) wrote a little pointedly that the sources “consist not only of printed writings but also of manuscripts and herbaria”.205 Schouw apparently took no notice, and two years later, in his atlas of plant geography,206 he indicated that the botany of the Danish stretch of the Guinea Coast was still not sufficiently known to be mapped, even in the highly schematic manner he adapted. Thonning’s African flora was not published until 1827, and then it was with his teacher Schumacher’s name on the title page.207 Schumacher

199 Martin Vahl, Enumeratio plantarum (Copenhagen: published by the author, printed by N. Møller og Søn, 1804–05); “Vahl, Martin Hendriksen”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 2nd. ed. 200 FJ 262/1805, Tønder Lund, January 22, 1805; see further FJ 459/1805 and FJ 859/1805. 201 Carl Christensen, Vol. 1, p. 171, Vol. 2, pp. 87–88. 202 Schumacher, p. 5; Junghans, p. 315. 203 Carl Christensen, Vol. 2, p. 87; J.W. Hornemann, review of Eclogæ americanae in Kjøbenhavnske lærde Efterretninger, 1808, No. 47, pp. 737–747 and No. 49, pp. 769–772, on p. 742. 204 J.W. Hornemann and J.F. Schouw, “Oversigt af botanikens fremskridt og tilstand i dette aarhundrede”, Tidsskrift for naturvidenskaberne, Vol. 1, 1822, pp. 127–191, on pp. 140–41. 205 Anonymous review, attributed by Carl Christensen (Vol. 2, pp. 127–128, 167) to Hornemann, of Joakim Frederik Schouw, Grundtræk til en almindelig plantegeographie, 1822, in Dansk Litteratur-Tidende, 1823, pp. 324–362 and 369–373, on pp. 339–340; Hopkins, “Danish natural history and African colonialism”, p. 401. 206 J.F. Schouw, Plantegeographisk atlas (Copenhagen: published by the author, printed by Jens Hostrup Schultz, 1824). 207 Schumacher, Beskrivelse af guineiske planter. 210 chapter five states in his short introduction that “when other tasks occupied him, [Thonning] turned his manuscripts over to me”.208 It appears that Schumacher completed the book between 1813 and 1816 but had difficulty finding a publisher; he finally laid the manuscript before the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, which published it in its Skrifter in 1828 and 1829 and in a special offprint dated 1827.209 There is no indication that Thonning took any direct part in Schumacher’s work with his plants. His fine feel for the geography of the Danish possessions on the coast was given little play: in Schumacher’s introduction, there are a few sentences on the rivers, on the “submarine” lagoons along the beach, on the hills (none of them so high but that palms flourished to their tops), on the “impenetrable” woods, and on the influence of the salt sea breeze, which “choked” the vegetation near the coast.210 Thonning’s economic and ethnographic notes on the plants were reproduced, but the sustained geographical and ecological exposition to be found in his manuscripts is absent here. The book was reviewed for a general readership by the indefatigable J.W. Hornemann.211 The “most interesting” contribution of this list of plants, he wrote, was to the appreciation of the degree to which the differences in plant forms, the incidence of the families, the numbers of species in which these manifest themselves, etc., are dependent on climate, soil, elevation over the sea, and other factors, and he speculated that material from Thonning’s African journal would have provided a more complete idea of the overall botanical character of the landscape. Hornemann wrote that the notes with which Hr. Councillor of State Thonning enriched the work regarding the medicinal and economic uses of the Guinean plants among the negroes, are not unimportant…, and it is not improbable that several of the plants of these nations’ materia medica could be introduced as efficacious medica- ments in Europe; Hornemann was disappointed that while the formal descriptions and diagnoses were in Latin, the international language of science, the

208 Schumacher, p. 5. 209 Hornemann and Schouw, p. 141; Carl Christensen, Vol. 1, p. 223; Hepper, p. 11, discusses the discrepancy in publication dates, which may have some bearing on the nomenclatural priority of some of Thonning’s plant names. 210 These quotations are from Hepper, pp. 18–24. 211 J.W. Hornemann, review of Schumacher’s Beskrivelse af guineiske planter, in Maanedsskrift for litteratur, Vol. 1, 1827, pp. 315–22. reports and reverberations 211 economic notes were in Danish, which he feared would limit the book’s usefulness for foreign readers. The work described 505 plants, which, Hornemann said, was not many for a tropical region, but the list included a remarkable number of new species. Schumacher presented 370 of the plants as new, of which Hornemann thought seventy might only be varieties; still, he said, three fifths of the list was new to science. However, it was too late for a number of Thonning’s specimens: Hornemann feared that some of the new genera Schumacher had named—and rather sketchily described—would fall by the way, having already been described by others.212 Thonning’s species descriptions Hornemann praised as “complete and exact”, but he felt that Schumacher had been a little too willing to proclaim new species, including some which Thonning himself, and Vahl in his Enumeratio plantarum, “must thus have overlooked”. The French botanist De Candolle had also by this time worked with some of Thonning’s plants, Hornemann related, and had in some cases reached other conclusions than had Schumacher. Nevertheless, the cabinets containing the stacks of Thonning’s herbarium sheets at the Botanic Museum in Copenhagen today are shot through with the bright red folders of types, the original specimens by which the plants became known to western science.213 Schumacher’s Guineiske planter was also reviewed in France, in the Revue encyclopédique:214 The book did not limit itself, the reviewer said, “to an arid nomenclature; … there are also keen observations on the use that the natives of the country make of a number of these plants”. If some of these could be adopted in European medicine, the anonymous reviewer wrote, echoing Hornemann’s Danish review, “it would not be the first time that we would have learned useful lessons from the savages”. The review ends: The enlightened enthusiasm of M. Thonning is deserving of our praise, and it would be desirable if all those who frequent remote countries possessed

212 See Hepper’s appendices III and IV, pp. 177–87; Junghans, pp. 317–18. 213 I am grateful to Bertel Hansen, of the Botanisk Museum, for showing me the collection. 214 Review of Schumacher’s Beskrivelse af guineiske planter, in Revue Encyclopédique, Paris, Tome XLIV, October-December 1829, pp. 137–38. The review can doubtless be attributed to P.A. Heiberg, who had been exiled for his criticisms of the Danish state and now made it his business to keep Parisian readers abreast of literary developments in his native Denmark: “Heiberg (Peter Andreas)”, in Thomas Hansen Erslew, Almindeligt forfatter- lexicon for Kongeriget Danmark med tilhørende bilande fra 1814 til 1840 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1962–1963 [1843–1853]). 212 chapter five

such wide knowledge and employed it with the same ardor for the advancement of science. For all that, in a narrow society such as that of the Danish capital, the number of positions suitable for a man of Thonning’s experience and scientific stature upon his return from Africa had been rather limited,215 and Danish science was unable to make a permanent place for him. It appears that he aspired to a lectureship at the Botanical Garden in 1805, but nothing came of this.216 At the end of 1805, Hans Severin Holten, the curator of the natural history collections of Prince Christian Frederik (Christian VIII) and tutor in the natural sciences to Christian’s younger brother Frederik Ferdinand, died suddenly.217 Another of the prince’s tutors, Morten Sommer, charged with finding a suitable replacement, sought the advice of C.F. Schumacher218 and reported at the end of January, 1806, to High Steward Frederik von Blücher, who had supervision of Prince Ferdinand’s education, that Schumacher recommended strongly a young man, Peder Tonning, about 26 or 28 years old, not only as a capable and talented man of science, although he apparently is not at all what one would call learned, which is not needed, either, to be a child’s tutor; but he is, I was told, a man of sound knowledge and also— of this Prof. Schumacher assured me—an honest and respectable character. The Professor has already spoken to H.H. Prince Christian about this man and affirms that he knows him well. Tonning is likewise known by H. Excellence Count Schimmelmann and others in the Finance Depart ment, to which he delivered a precise scientific report of a voyage he made to the coast of Guinea with natural historical and economic objects in view. His way of thinking and character Prof. Schumacher knows to be especially sound.219

215 The Chamber of Customs provided him with an allowance for at least a time: GJ 439/1804, expedited March 24, 1804; Thonning’s application for these funds is in Uafgjorte Forestillinger, 1822–31, ad GJ439/1804, Thonning, Copenhagen, March 13, 1804. 216 BCB, Hornemann, November 12, 1805, to N. Hofman (Bang), No. 10; Carl Christensen, Vol. 1, p. 195. 217 Hopkins, “Peter Thonning and the natural historical collections of Denmark’s Prince Christian”. 218 Dansk hof- og statscalender for aar 1806, Hans Henrich Frost, ed. (Copenhagen: by the editor, 1806), column 52; Kongehusets arkiv, Frederik VI, Box 27, Rapporter om prins Frederik Ferdinands opdragelse, 1805–06, Blüchers Rapporter, 1805–6, Sommer, Copenhagen, January 4, 1806. 219 Blüchers Rapporter, Sommer, January 31, 1806, to Blücher. reports and reverberations 213

Thonning was still without a regular living,220 and the royal family’s interest in him was presumably very welcome. He took up his duties as Prince Ferdinand’s tutor in February, 1806, and Sommer was pleased to report a week later: “This man’s aspect cannot otherwise than inspire interest and respect in the prince”. Weekly reports on Prince Ferdinand’s education are preserved, and it appears that although the prince was not a model pupil, Thonning acquitted himself well.221 In the autumn of 1806, the prince’s new governor, Johan Frederik Bardenfleth, reviewed the substance and manner of Frederik Ferdinand’s instruction and reported to the regent, Crown Prince Frederik: Hr. Thonning’s cheerful but firm method I cannot praise enough. If he should have any fault, it would perhaps be that he at one time went a little too fast…. According to the plan still followed from the late Holten’s time, physics and natural history were jumbled together and fragmented. It seemed to me that too much weight was laid on natural history proper, especially botany. I spoke with Hr. Thonning about this and he entered with the most forthcoming good will into my reasoning. We soon agreed that physics and especially mechanics was the main thing and that botany should be limited to knowledge of the most important domestic agricultural and commercial plants.222 The supervision of Prince Christian’s collections, which was developing into an important assemblage of specimens, was not an insignificant scientific charge. A series of letters from Thonning to the prince, preserved among the papers of the royal house, casts a fleeting light on the prince’s activity on the market in natural history specimens in 1806 and 1807. Acting as Christian’s adviser and agent, Thonning significantly augmented the prince’s entomological and mineralogical collections.223 This direct and familiar connection between the bold young African sojourner and the royal family is worthy of note. Thonning had behind him a scientific achievement of the utmost respectability, but he also had tales to tell of wildly exotic and beautiful tropical landscapes; of peoples

220 Rtk. 2214.86, P. Thonning, Copenhagen, December 20, 1809. 221 Kongehusets arkiv, Frederik VI, Boxes 27–29, Rapporter om prins Frederik Ferdinands opdragelse, 1805–1810. 222 Kongehusetsarkiv, Frederik VI, Box 27, Rapporter om prins Frederik Ferdinands opdragelse, 1805–1806, Bardenfleth’s Rapporter, 1806, Bardenfleth, Sorgenfri, October 13, 1806, to the Crown Prince (Frederik VI), “Kort Udsigt over enhver af Hans Høihed Prinds Ferdinands Lærers Methode”. 223 Hopkins, “Peter Thonning and the natural historical collections of Denmark’s Prince Christian”. 214 chapter five and lives inconceivably foreign to the experience of metropolitan Danes; of deadly tropical fevers and vast floods on huge rivers the like of which do not exist in Scandinavia; of medicines prepared, in houses of sticks and mud and palm fronds, from the very plants he was gathering for the cabinets of some of Denmark’s most polished gentlemen; of dinner companions who kept chained in their compounds inventories of slaves, whose warehouses were stacked with the tusks of elephants, for which they had traded Danish rifles and rolls of sweet Brazilian tobacco and textiles of every stripe and from every corner of the world. It was a commonplace of the rhetoric of natural history at the end of the eighteenth century that the “book of nature” itself was the natural historian’s primary text;224 Peter Thonning had read more widely therein than most. This was the man the young Prince Christian relied on to act as his eyes and ears in the market for natural historical specimens, and who botanized with the lazy Prince Ferdinand in the woods and fields around one of the royal residences in the countryside north of Copenhagen.225 It was, for Thonning, an extremely important social endorsement; the significance of the connection for Denmark’s colonial policy in Africa will be seen.

224 For example, Henrik Steffens, “Botanikens skæbne i Danmark”, in Carl Ludwig Wildenow, Udkast til en lærebog i botaniken, Henrik Steffens, trans. (Copenhagen: C.L. Buch’s Forlag, 1794), p. 349; Sten Lindroth, “The two faces of nature”, in Linnaeus, the man and his work, rev. reprint, Tore Frängsmyr, ed. (Canton, Mass: Science History Publications/ USA, 1994 [1983, by the University of California Press]), pp. 1–62, on pp. 3 ff. 225 Rapporter om prins Frederik Ferdinands opdragelse, 1805–1810. CHAPTER SIX

THE ATLANTIC TRIANGLE STOOD ON ITS HEAD: AFRICAN UNDERTAKINGS AFTER THE CESSATION OF THE DANISH SLAVE TRADE IN 1803

On the day before Christmas, 1803, the merchant Peder Meyer, in Osu Town, under the walls of Fort Christiansborg, once again addressed himself to the Danish ministry of finance.1 “I know that it is His Majesty’s most gracious wish: that agriculture and the establishment of colonies in Africa shall be encouraged and worked at, when sensible and suitable [means] are at hand”. He officiously referred the Finance Collegium to its own instructions of July 10, 1788, to Isert, which he had perhaps read in the edition of official African colonial documents that Frederik Thaarup had published a few years earlier. He was sure that Isert’s endeavor would not have been “so altogether fruitless” had he lived, although the place he had chosen was unsuitable and the craftspeople he had brought with him had been men of intemperate habits and thus vulnerable to the climate.2 From Isert’s instructions Meyer had “learned His Majesty’s intention, and dear, utmost dear it would be to me if I, with my 25 full years’ experience in Africa could contribute anything to fulfill the royal intention and the common good”. A capital of two hundred thousand rigsdaler would suffice, Meyer calculated; the money should be lent without interest to planters, who would mortgage their properties to the state. He thought the work in the fields could best be done by pawns held on three- to six-year contracts. Experi enced West Indian workers would be needed to instruct the African laborers in the proper methods of cultivation and the use of the necessary machines. It would be desirable if European colonists from the West Indies also came to Africa. He thought it best to make a start in the vicinity of his

1 ad FJS 2129/1805, Peder Meyer, Ussue, December 24, 1803, duplicate, with attached statement by the Council on the coast, February 2, 1804. 2 In a note accompanying this missive, Meyer took occasion to remark that “the late Captain Isert says that he bought the whole land of Aqvapim. After the strictest investigation by the Government here it has been established and proved that Mr. Isert only bought a little part thereof, namely a mountain called Amanopasso”: FJS 2129/1805, Meyer, Ussue, June 21, 1804, copy. 216 chapter six own plantation in Akuapem, where the soil was rich and the air healthy. He had by this time five hundred healthy young coffee plants and four thousand more beans sowed out in a nursery. Experiments with ginger here had succeeded “beyond his expectations”, but the soil was too rich for cotton and indigo, which should be planted closer to the sea. Sugar cane and rice were already grown by the Africans. A good copper-clad ship should be placed at the colony’s disposal for at least a time to bring out European provisions, lumber, tools, and household goods a couple of times a year, all on credit for the first three years, and to carry colonial produce home to Denmark. Freight and insurance charges should be absorbed by the royal treasury. Meyer offered to personally take charge of such a colony. A council consisting of the colony’s leaders and the Danish administration on the coast should be responsible for all the colony’s dealings with the Africans; it was important that no precedents be set by individuals entering into contracts. “As all useful establishments should be founded on knowledge and religion”, the colony would need sensible and well-informed teachers, who could perhaps be supplied from among the Moravian brethren in the West Indies. The colony would need doctors and a supply of medicines, an accountant, six masons, two smiths, three carpenters, a brickmaker capable of constructing his own brickkiln, and two shoemakers who knew the art of tanning, for hides were available at advantageous prices here. “Similarly, it would be useful to send out 10 or indeed more young people from the foster home or other public institutions, who are confirmed and can more or less write and figure. These could easily be shaped into serviceable subjects in time”. Meyer emphasized that these should be young people: “Sorrowful experience has taught us that the older seldom enjoy good health”. It would be essential for the necessary capital to be made available right at the outset, he said. Shelter would have to be erected and laborers obtained before there could be any thought of agriculture, and the colonists and their labor force would have to be supported after their arrival, for food would not spring up out of the ground of itself. Meyer submitted this proposal to the Council on the coast before sending it to Copenhagen, and the Council’s statement was attached to his plan.3 The Council (Wrisberg, Flindt, Schiønning, and Holm, the commandants of the four forts) declared that Meyer’s plan appeared to conform to

3 ad FJS 2129/1805, the Council on the coast’s statement of February 2, 1804, attached to Peder Meyer’s proposal of December 24, 1803. the atlantic triangle stood on its head 217 statements of policy issued by Schimmelmann and Brandt regarding African cultivation. They doubted that Meyer could manage this business alone, however, and urged that two men knowledgeable in West Indian plantation agriculture be engaged to serve with him on a colonial council. Otherwise, Meyer’s death might halt the project. The Council disagreed with Meyer’s suggestion that the undertaking should rely on pawns; the debtor was always free to redeem his pawn if he could, and it was to be feared that the colony would constantly be losing trained workers in this way. It would be better to import slaves to the enclave from some distant place in Africa, they said. Finally, the Council did not think it a good idea to bring orphans to the colony until it was solidly established. These seem rather minor objections to rather an ambitious scheme. The Council appears to have been taking the state’s commitment to colonization in West Africa quite for granted; the policy had been a fairly well-established matter of record, as they read it, for fifteen years. The development of profitable plantations of coffee, sugar, and cotton, especially if these were supported by a large influx of government funds and license to trade in slaves along the coast, was an attractive prospect. This is not all there was to the matter, however. Although the edict of March 16, 1792, had come into effect on the first day of 1803, the Council was by no means yet ready to abandon the Atlantic slave trade, and it found a way to link Meyer’s proposal, which it appears to have thought the central administration might support, to the continuation of the trade. At precisely the same time that it took up Meyer’s colonial proposal, in January, 1804, the Council urged the home government to suspend the ban for a time: the four free traders in the possessions would be ruined and many other people distressed if slaves could no longer be exported, they said. The Chamber of Customs was begged to consider “how heavy it is for so many people to lose their living”.4 Early in the summer of 1804, the Council on the coast sent a fresh copy of Meyer’s proposal to Copenhagen. The Council reported that Meyer now had twelve hundred coffee plants on his plantation in Akuapem.5 The Council had at royal expense employed privately-owned and inventory slaves to clear a path from Christiansborg up to the foot of the mountains. The Council intended to start a coffee nursery at a place, apparently not

4 GJ 501/1804, Council on Coast, January 25, 1804; See Nørregård, Danish settlements, pp. 183–184. 5 GJ 502/1804, Council on Coast, May 2, 1804; see FJ 2430/1804. See Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 309–310. 218 chapter six far from Meyer’s plantation, whose name a colonial office clerk read as Bimbiasch (presumably Bibease, or Bibiase),6 for which fifteen slaves would have to be purchased at royal expense. A regular payment for the land would be made, Isert’s treaty notwithstanding: “The negroes will not sell the land, but permit the Danes to live there, make plantations, and build fortifications for the promised douceur”. It was essential to retain their good will. Indeed, the Council argued, returning to its earlier criticism of the royal edict of 1792, the ban on the slave trade was the main obstacle to the execution of Meyer’s colonial plan: Trade is the most important mainspring for the negroes’ tolerating the Europeans among them, the negroes’ interest in the Europeans is founded on the profits of the trade; if the trade ends, the negroes’ friendship will also end; they will then resort to neighboring forts, where they would be encouraged by other European slave traders to lay every possible obstacle in the way of the establishment of plantations. The Danish forts “must either be abandoned or the trade continue until plantation colonies are brought to completion”. To attempt to end the trade would be to set lives, property, the plantations they had been ordered to support, Denmark’s standing with the Africans and the other European nations on the coast, and the establishments themselves at risk. The Council therefore recommended that the ban be lifted for a further ten years. In fact, Chamber of Customs’s scribe recorded, “the Council has thus been unable to put the edict on the cessation of the slave trade into effect”. Here the Council had gone too far, and at the end of September the Chamber of Customs curtly demanded further report on this failure to enact the royal command. On the same day, the Chamber forwarded Meyer’s colonial plan and the Council’s defiant missives about the inadvis- ability of ending the slave trade before a plantation colony was on its feet to the Slave-trade Commission.7 In August, 1805, the Council submissively reported that no Danish subject was in fact still exporting slaves.8 The Chamber’s reaction to this statement, as recorded in the Guinea Journal, was that this was “Very well”. It is not likely that the Council would have been so bold if it had not known that similar representations had been made from other, more influential quarters. In the summer of 1802, half a year before the ban was

6 See Bredwa-Mensah, “Slavery and plantation life at the Danish plantation site of Bibease”. 7 GJ 502/1804; VI kopibog, September 29, 1804, No. 757, to the Council on the coast. 8 GJ 706/1805, the Council on the coast, August 5, 1805. the atlantic triangle stood on its head 219 to take effect, the planters of the Danish West Indies had petitioned the crown for a postponement, arguing that they had been prevented by bad harvests and various other circumstances from importing significant numbers of slaves in three of the ten years allowed for in the edict.9 This application was laid before the Slave-trade Commission, which, in April, 1803, sent it back to the Chamber of Customs with the suggestion that any discussion of the matter should be postponed until fresh statistics about the demographic structure of the islands’ slave populations became available.10 There the affair was allowed to rest for a time. Peter Thonning returned from Africa in the autumn of 1803, and his report on the economic potential of the African establishments was laid before the Slave-trade Commission early in 1804. In April, 1804, the Slave- trade Commission notified the Chamber of Customs that, having studied the matter further, it remained unanimously opposed to any suspension of the royal prohibition of the slave trade.11 The commission feared that one postponement would lead to another and tend to reinforce the prevailing idea in the islands that the law could not possibly hold. Nevertheless, the commission acknowledged that the ban might occasion something of an economic crisis in the Danish West Indies, at least for a time, and that it might be advisable for the administration to take steps to “avoid any difficulty that might be expected as a result”. Count Schimmelmann had therefore drawn up a plan calling for the establishment of a “colonial institute” of model plantations in the Danish West Indies, to be run at royal expense. Schimmelmann’s plan is nowhere to be found among any of the archives relevant to the Slave-trade Commission’s work, but, among papers assembled by the Guinea Commission thirty years later and now filed elsewhere in the Chamber of Customs’s archives, there is an undated and unsigned document, which Thonning in the 1830s annotated across the top in pencil:

9 Loftin, pp. 228–229; Vibæk, p. 186; GTK, Negerhandelens Afskaffelse betræffende. (Korrespondance med Kommissioner etc.) 1788–1847, a duplicate of VJS 140/1803, the West Indian administration, September 30, 1802, conveying the planters’ petition; GTK, Vestindiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, No. 15, representation May 15, 1804, resolution May 25, 1804, “Angaaende en Ansøgning fra nogle Plantere paa St. Croix, om Forlængelse af Tilladelsen til Negres Indførsel”. 10 Loftin, pp. 232–233; Negerhandelens Afskaffelse betræffende, the Slave-trade Commission, April 5, 1803, to the Chamber of Customs, sending back the planters’ petition; the Chamber’s Forestilling (No. 15) of May 15, 1804. 11 Loftin, pp. 233–234; Negerhandelens Afskaffelse betræffende, the Slave-trade Commission, April 9, 1804, to the Chamber of Customs, original. 220 chapter six

Removed from the papers regarding the abolition of the slave trade. This document contains the idea for a so-called colonial institute in the West Indian colonies, which was to serve to maintain the negro population, and is in that regard inapplicable in Guinea, but pag. 32-43 incl. deal with a colonization plan for Guinea, which contains many useful ideas. This was in fact the first of the documents extracted from the Chamber of Customs’s colonial archives that Thonning laid before the Guinea Commission.12 The slave system could not be preserved unchanged, Schimmelmann argued. The consequence of cultivating the West Indian colonies with slaves brought from Africa cannot be reckoned by simply considering the products in goods and money that flow from this cultivation. The markets in Africa, where human beings are offered for sale, are in several areas already fewer; the transport of the slaves bought in Africa is dearer than before; in St. Doming [sic] in the West Indies we have the example of a frightful slave revolt; only with great trouble has it been possible in many colonies to prevent a general insurrection; and the signs of either open or secret ferment among the negroes have appeared in almost all colonies. It can thus presumably not be denied that the hitherto prevailing arrangement, cultivating the earth with purchased negroes from Africa, is connected with dangers even for those who should profit by it.

12 GJS 226/1836, an unsigned and undated 82-page document (Designation I, No. 1). It is apparently a contemporary Danish translation of Schimmelmann’s plan, the original of which appears to have been written in German: Negerhandelens Afskaffelse betræffende, Walterstorff, Copenhagen, April 21, 1804, to the Slave-trade Commission, with quotes in German from Schimmelmann’s plan. None of the historians who have discussed the Danish ban on the slave trade appears to have known of this document’s existence except indirectly. Loftin, for example, drew his paraphrase of Schimmelmann’s plan from the account published in 1819 by Thaarup, who appears to have consulted the Chamber of Customs’s representation of May 15, 1804, rather than Schimmelmann’s plan: pp. 235–238, quote on p. 238; Thaarup, Udførlig vejledning, Vol. 6, pp. 683–689. An annotation on a copy of the resolution of May 25, 1804, conveyed to the Slave-trade Commission on June 2, 1804 (also in Negerhandelens Afskaffelse betræffende), indicates that the attachments mentioned in the Chamber’s representation, including this plan for a colonial institute, were retained by Frederik Moltke, the head of the Chamber of Customs; Schimmelmann’s German original may thus have been permanently incorporated among Moltke’s personal papers; its whereabouts, if it has survived, are unknown. This Danish translation of it, having passed through the Guinea Commission’s mill, was essentially beyond those historians’ reasonably recovering it. It appears to have been assumed that Schimmelmann’s plan for a colonial institute was based on a proposal submitted from the West Indies in 1791 by Hans West, who is best-known for his Bidrag til Beskrivelse over Ste Croix, published in 1793. There is a great deal in Schimmelmann’s plan, however, that is not touched on in West’s proposal: Negerhandelens Afskaffelse betræffende, ad VJ 730/1791 (the West Indian government, August 26, 1791), West, “Plan til ved et enkelt Forsøg at befordre Mark-Negernes Oplysning og Formildelse i Kaar m. v. paa Eilandet St. Croix”. See Gøbel, Gøbel, Det danske slavehandelsforbud 1792, pp. 125–128. the atlantic triangle stood on its head 221

If the planters of St. Croix were permitted to import more slaves, in Schimmelmann’s view, sugar production would simply be increased and greater strain would be placed on the slave population; mortality among the slaves would then increase the demand for fresh imports from Africa. This in turn would increase the risk of rebellion. Ever greater amounts of provisions would be needed, and this would increase the islands’ dependence on foreign suppliers. More and more capital would be required at a time when slave rebellions were ruining some planters and limiting the credit available to them all. Some new tack had to be taken. Schimmelmann’s colonial institute would be founded on existing West Indian plantations purchased by the state for the purpose. Its goals would be to promote the natural growth and civic domestication of the slave population through amelioration of their working lives, the encouragement of marriages, and Christian teaching. The acreage in cane might be reduced somewhat, but production could actually be increased by the use of improved methods, and more land could be devoted to provision crops.13 Beyond that, however, the colonial institute was to have an important African element, and it was this section of the document that Thonning found useful for the purposes of the Guinea Commission: If the colonial institute were founded by the king in the West Indies, it would also be in accordance with His Majesty’s royal objects to employ all means to make it possible that there be established a colony in Africa that based itself on agriculture…. To answer the king’s objects, it should be very different from the European states’ usual colonizing, carried out by favored adventurers and speculators, for the main purpose of the colony in Africa would be to form a civilized society in another continent, which, as a part of the Danish state, was connected to the mother country and the West Indian colonies…. The colony should be begun in a region of Africa where there was a sufficient area of good cultivable soil to sustain a numerous, steadily increasing population…. The place where the first residence was erected should be exposed as little as possible to the African climate’s harmful influence on Europeans. This place should be sought out and selected on heights, where the effect of the vertical rays of the sun is less severe, where there were to be found springs and fresh water; where there were woods and pasture in the vicinity, … far from morasses that diffuse unhealthy vapors.

13 Thaarup, Udførlig vejledning, Vol. 6, pp. 690–691. 222 chapter six

The colony should also be so located as to be able to defend itself from attack, and it should “not be too far from a navigable river” or from the Danish forts on the coast. The “terrain” obtained by Isert from the rulers of Akuapem appeared suitable. (Schimmelmann’s impression was that this territory, of perhaps 180 square miles, stretched to the east almost to the Volta. Peter Thonning, in an annotation on the document, expressed some surprise at this figure.) There are springs there, an incomparably milder climate than in more northerly regions, air balmed by the exhalations of flowering plants, a fertile soil among tall woods; the neighboring people are peaceful and of mild ways. But whether this place might not lack other significant things necessary for the establishment of a colony there in time, whether the connection to the coast and to the Rio Volta is not too difficult; whether the entire terrain, which extends up into the mountains, is not covered by impenetrable woods, whether it would not be too expensive to clear these woods to win cultivable ground—these and other questions cannot be answered here. Nevertheless, Schimmelmann reminded the Slave-trade Commission, With particularly limited means, Isert in a short time cleared, with the assistance of some free negroes, a road six miles through the woods to a place where he built the first residence and planted the Danish flag. He had already put down the seed of European garden plants, which succeeded excellently, around these residences, and made a beginning with planting tobacco and cotton, when his death … brought everything to a halt. Schimmelmann entered in some detail into some of the concrete steps that would have to be taken to re-establish this colony but broke off mid- way: a mature and practicable plan, he said, “would require a far more thorough elaboration”, and it can be thought that he was here preparing the ground for the colonial plan that Peter Thonning was at that time in the midst of drafting. When a West Indian colonial institute had been established, Schim melmann went on, it could be hoped that the slave population in the islands would increase naturally. This would take years, however, and in the meantime it might be necessary to bring in what he called “settlers and workers from Africa”. It might be argued, Schimmelmann was aware, that this would simply be to reopen the slave trade, but, as he envisaged it, Africans would not be purchased but freed from the hands of slave traders, “to transfer them to a civilized society, without completely cutting them off from the possibility of returning emancipated to Africa”, for “farther in the future the Danish West Indian islands could in turn provide workers to cultivate the colony that would be founded in Africa”. the atlantic triangle stood on its head 223

Great difficulties would have to be overcome in founding an African colony, Schimmelmann was careful to acknowledge, and he wondered “whether the colonization there might not best take place from the West Indies, with the negroes civilized in the colonial institute, who already … were hardened by heavy work under the burning sun”. He concluded with the argument that the costs of an African colony would be offset by sales of Denmark’s own products: the necessary national investment would stimulate “commerce, shipping, agriculture, and industry”. The other members of the Slave-trade Commission “completely endorsed” Schimmelmann’s plan, and it was sent to the Chamber of Customs for its consideration and further action.14 It was quite a ticklish business that the commission thus laid before the Chamber, which was most unwilling to allow the slave trade to be reopened for any reason. In May, 1804, the Chamber argued before the crown prince that the ban on the slave trade should remain in force, incorporating at some length in its representation its own interpretation of Schimmelmann’s plan for a West Indian colonial institute with a connection to a fresh undertaking in West Africa:15 when the proposed plantations on the coast of Guinea have got a start, the population in the West Indies, if it were necessary, could be supplemented with workers from [these Africa plantations], who had there become accustomed to work, to domesticity and order. On the other hand, negroes from the plantations in the West Indies, who were practiced in various branches of cultivation suitable for Guinea, could be furnished to Guinea. The Chamber expressed itself to have no doubt at all of the feasibility of plantations on the Guinea Coast, “from reports thereon that it has obtained from [Peter] Thonning”.

14 Negerhandelens Afskaffelse betræffende, the Slave-trade Commission, April 9, 1804, to the Chamber of Customs. 15 Vestindiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, representation May 15, 1804, resolution May 25, 1804 (No. 15), “Angaaende en Ansøgning fra nogle Plantere paa St. Croix, om Forlængelse af Tilladelsen til Negres Indførsel”; see also drafts of the representation in Negerhandelens Afskaffelse betræffende. The African colonial aspects of Schimmelmann’s plan, as abstracted in the Chamber’s representation, which has all along been easily accessible to Danish scholars, and in Thaarup’s Udførlig vejledning (Vol. 6, pp. 683–689), have been either dismissed or all but ignored by historians of the Danish abolition of the slave trade: Trier (p. 495) contented himself with saying that the “institute was to have a connection to a similar establishment in Guinea (on the model of the Sierra Leone company), to which superfluous negroes in the West Indies could later be transported”; Loftin (pp. 235– 238) found the whole idea bafflingly “far-fetched”; Vibæk (p. 187) characterized Schimmelmann’s colonial institute as “negro stud farms” and made no mention at all of the African colonial project, and Green-Pedersen (“Economic considerations”, p. 410) relied on Vibæk’s account. 224 chapter six

The Chamber of Customs summed up its representation by asking the crown, in decidedly tentative terms, whether a number of plantations in the West Indian Islands may be purchased and administered on the public account so as to introduce a better treatment of the negroes and suitably adapted cultivation …, and if the agricultural projects in Your Majesty’s possessions in Guinea may be expanded in some connection therewith. The Chamber proposed that the details of both undertakings, if the plan was approved by the regent, should be worked out in due time by the Slave-trade Commission: the main question to be decided at present, however, was whether to grant the planters’ petition to reopen the slave trade. The crown prince dodged nimbly, after what appears to have been a strenuous debate in the Council of State (for there was considerable sentiment in favor of reopening the trade at least temporarily.)16 The royal resolution of the matter on May 25, 1804, ordered the Chamber of Customs to obtain more detailed information regarding the current slave populations of the Danish West Indies and the numbers that would be required to maintain sugar production before a judgment could be rendered regarding the “alleged need for more negroes”. In the meantime, the regent ordered that “investigation of the purchase of plantations on the public account and the means of their administration, and related matters, is to be postponed”.17 The matter thus remained open. In 1805 and 1806, the Danish reading public was able to follow the stirring debates on the slave trade in the English parliament quite closely in the pages of Minerva, in particular,18 but before the matter could again be brought to the crown prince’s adjudi- cation, King George III of England, on March 25, 1807, had himself signed legislation banning the slave trade.19 It would thereafter have been unthinkable, if indeed Crown Prince Frederik had ever seriously contemplated it, to rescind his edict of March 16, 1792. In June, 1804, the Council on the coast reported to the Chamber of Customs that it had on its own initiative made Peder Meyer a loan of two thousand rigsdaler against the security of his plantation and slaves.20

16 Loftin, p. 260; Trier, pp. 501–502; Axel Linvald, Kronprins Frederik og hans regering 1797–1807, Vol. 1 (Copenhagen: Selskabet for Udgivelse af Kilder til Dansk Historie, 1978 [1923]), p. 327. 17 Negerhandelens Afskaffelse betræffende, royal resolution of May 25, 1804; VJ 591/1804. 18 See Thaarup, Udførlig Vejledning, Vol. 6, pp. 697–698. 19 Loftin, pp. 278–279; Trier, pp. 506–508. 20 GJ 503/1804, Council on the coast, June 14, 1804. the atlantic triangle stood on its head 225

With the same mail, Jens Flindt, who as a member of the Council had read Meyer’s 200,000-rigsdaler colonial proposition, sent a long letter to the Finance Collegium, with a copy to the Chamber of Customs, applying for a further loan of five thousand rigsdaler for his own plantation project.21 As he had intended when last he had reported, in August of 1803, he had embarked on a new plantation at Eibo, “a stretch of woods along the sea- shore by the river Rio Volta, where I with hired free negroes, to date, already have cleared a piece of woodland 1,150 feet long and 384 feet wide”. He had traveled in Governor Wrisberg’s cutter to Principe, whence, after a journey of three months, he had returned with “a significant portion of good coffee plants and some hundreds of cinnamon plants alive and fresh to this country, as well as other useful products of that land”. (Regardless of whether Flindt had obtained true cinnamon, which is native to Ceylon; or cassia, which comes from various places in the far east; or West Indian wild cinnamon, he was here an agent in rather a far-flung dispersion.22) Wrisberg had been kind enough to allow him free passage and space in the ship for the plants, and had given his skipper special orders regarding these plants’ requirements during the voyage. In the ground cleared at Eibo, Flindt had planted three thousand coffee plants, three thousand more coffee beans, and a hundred and twenty-five cinnamon plants. He had also brought back a number of yellow dye roots to plant; he had been informed by the Portuguese that this was an easier and more profitable crop than either coffee or cotton. He had also planted seed for five thousand cotton plants. Most of these plants were doing well. The largest portion of the land Flindt had cleared, however, was planted to maize, and this provided shade for his plantation crops and for other exotic plants he had brought from Principe, including mangoes and oranges. He had also planted some ginger provided him by Wrisberg, bananas, and coconuts, also brought from Principe. As I find the area of soil on the Eibo stretch of land along the land side (where an arm of the River Volta runs in, which mostly divides the Eibo country from the mainland) very much in conformity with the land cultivated for sugar culture in Cayenne, I have, by letting a small pc. of land be raised with earth from ditches dug around same, let a little experiment be made with sugar cane.

21 FJS 2429/1804, Flindt, Christiansborg, June 22, 1804; GJ 524/1804. See Kea, “Ashanti- Danish relations”, pp. 310–311. 22 “Cassia”, “Cinnamon”, in Davidson. 226 chapter six

Eibo belonged to the Ada people, and Flindt had made arrangements to purchase the land; Wrisberg had promised to send one or two well- respected Danish officers down to Kongenssteen to lend their prestige to a formal contract, which Flindt considered crucial to the security of his colony and its inhabitants in the future. Fresh water was another vital concern, and Flindt reported that before he had ever begun to plant at Eibo he had drilled in several places with a borer he had brought out with him from Denmark and had found adequate water within twenty feet of the surface; furthermore, the water in the Volta and its arms was fresh six months out of the year. There are fish there in great numbers, if only the negroes thereabouts cared to take the trouble. Of wild buffaloes, wild swine, and monkeys there are a great number in the Eibo woods, but these animals shun all the places where people live. His capital was now all but expended: he had purchased equipment with which to grind sugar cane and boil the juice, a still, and great quantities of tools and provisions; he had also had the expense of hiring three hundred laborers to clear the land at Eibo and the cost of passage to the coast and wages for the five Europeans he had brought with him. His still supplied the customary daily tot of spirits for the workers, but no further profit had yet been realized from its operation. Flindt was committing his own resources to the project, “but now that the slave trade and export in Danish ships has ceased, I, especially, feel the loss of the profit made thereby before—and I could not possibly continue the progress of my plantation, if I was not supported by Hr. Governor Maj. Wrisberg”. Flindt therefore hoped that new state funds could be advanced him. In particular, he wished to purchase slaves for his plantation, for hired labor had not proved reliable. The Finance Collegium appears to have taken no action whatever on this petition. The Chamber of Customs passed both Flindt’s and Meyer’s applications off to the Slave-trade Commission,23 which also appears not to have pursued the matter. Late in 1804,24 Governor Wrisberg reported that he had himself planted two thousand coffee trees from Principe at Frederiksberg, the garden not far from Fort Christiansborg. He had ordered another four or five

23 GJ 524/1804. 24 GJS 596/1805, Wrisberg, November 12, 1804. the atlantic triangle stood on its head 227 thousand plants and hoped to plant them at both Frederiksberg and at Bibease during the rainy months of May and June. I cannot describe what a great relief the great road into the land is for the negroes hereabouts, especially as no beasts of burden are known on this part of the coast, therefore the negroes must themselves carry their grain down from the field and their great thoughtlessness and ignorance gave the old road so many roundabout ways that they now use only 1/3 of the time they used before to get their foodstuffs down”. He regretted having to announce the death of a young Brandenburger named Hein, who, he said, had cleared a great deal of land for cotton near Fort Fredensborg.25 In April, 1805, Jens Flindt sent in further report of his plantation at Eibo to both the Finance Collegium and the Chamber of Customs.26 He had harvested some cotton, “but a great pity it is that we have none of the simple ginning machines so useful in the West Indies here”—his workers were cleaning the cotton with their fingers. His sugar cane had been four feet high when the floods had come; the cane had been immersed in two feet of water for a month but had come through it and the succeeding dry period well, from which he had arrived at the conclusion that “sugar cane can not only tolerate but even thrives by standing [in] water in the flood season”. His sister had dyed some cotton, and the yarn she had spun of it “is much praised by the inhabitants of the land”. He sent in a little sample of the yarn. He had had some trouble with his red dye-plants but expected that this commodity would in time become important both in the local trade and on the Danish market. The processing of this red dye and of his yellow dye-root for shipment were simple matters, requiring “neither machines nor art”. He and his sister had been living in a tent off and on for eight months, while a dwelling was constructed for them. They had distilled some palm wine and cooked from it a sweet syrup, of which he intended to send home a little sample for study, “as I have found here that it is a very good remedy for consumption”. His coffee plants had suffered greatly from drought, but he had saved eight hundred of them by transplanting them into more shade. He had five thousand bearing cotton plants and had cleared ground for three thousand more. Only one of the Danes at Christiansborg, a clerk named Clasen, had visited his plantation, so Flindt was unable to supply a formal

25 See GJ 225/1802, royal resolution, May 19, 1802, appointing Hein to the Guinea forces. 26 FJS 2095/1805, Flindt, April 29, 1805, and attachments; GJ(S) 650/1805, Flindt, April 29, [1805], filed at GJS 171/1836; copy in Dok. vedrørende Kommissionen for Negerhandelen, I. 228 chapter six appraisal, which he was sure would be a matter of some interest to both the Finance Collegium and the Chamber of Customs. He nevertheless sent copies of a statement he had obtained from Clasen and a short note from Henry Hamilton, the governor of Ouidah, who had also visited the place. Clasen27 wrote that during my stay at the plantation Ejbo, I saw where the coffee plants, cotton trees, the sugar planting, as well as various other plants and fruits stand in excellent good growth, the soil is very good and the diligence with which it is run will surely, if there were enough negroes, in time become a great profit to the establishments. The main house was provided with a “well planted kitchen garden which is also arranged as a nursery for the raising of foreign plants”. It was no more than a mile to the sea on the one hand and to a tributary of the Volta on the other, and ships could provision there. Governor Hamilton wrote,28 These are to certify to all whom it doth, or may concern, that I have surveyed Eiboe Plantation, and am of Opinion, from the thriving condition of the Coffee Plants, Sugar Cane, & Cotton Trees; as well as from the Quality of the Soil, the conveniences of a good & substantial Dwelling-House (supplied abundantly with good Water) & fitted up in a workmanlike Manner with a Distillery, commodious Warehouses, & Pumps, that it may ere 3 Years be productive of great Advantages to the Danish Gouvernment, provided Govr. Flint can obtain a sufficient Number of Slaves to assist in putting his Plans in Execution. In an undated memorandum addressed to Count Schimmelmann that appears to have been sent in this same packet of mail,29 Flindt assured his patron, “who from the beginning of agricultural operations in Guinea always, by high representation, has encouraged its carrying out”, that no land here by the Danish establishments in Guinea can be found better suited or more convenient for agriculture than this so-named Eibo country—no hostilities in the country (when once it is established and set in defensible state) can hinder imports and exports from there by sea, and this is a main concern that, especially with the planting of a colony here in this land, must be attended to,

27 FJS 2095/1805, Clasen, Christiansborg, April 30, 1805. 28 FJS 2095/1805, Henry Hamilton, Governor of Williams Fort at Whydah, Addah Port, April 18, 1805, in English, his signature attested to by Johan Wrisberg, Christiansborg, May 2, 1805. 29 FJS 2095/1805, Flindt, undated, to Schimmelmann. the atlantic triangle stood on its head 229 for of what use was a colony if goods could not be brought in and out without hindrance? When this new word from Flindt arrived in Copenhagen, the Chamber of Customs immediately forwarded it to Peter Thonning for his opinion.30 In his response,31 Thonning referred the Chamber to the map he had sent in with his report in 1803, on which Eibo (or Ejbo) was marked on the wooded peninsula on the west side of the estuary of the Volta. This whole area, for ten or fifteen miles west of the river and as far inland, and for another eighty miles east of the Volta, has for an unthinkable time been built up by the sea; not by any revolution in nature, but because there annually is thrown up a quantity of sand on the beach, and because Volta similarly extends its mouth farther and farther out into the ocean to the SE with the clayey mud it carries with it. The character of the land itself reveals this origin, for it is everywhere a horizontal plain, which consists of beach sand, in the vicinity of Volta mixed with blue clay, and in a few places, where the vegetation has been lushest, covered with a thin crust of plant mold. Native rocks that are larger than can be thrown up by the ocean are not to be found anywhere at all, although, to be sure, there occur petrified clays here and there. The Eibo spit consists entirely of beach sand, which closer to Volta is mixed more and more with blue clay. Because of its situation between the river and the ocean, the ground has been able to attract to itself a certain amount of moisture that has here sustained the vegetation, which gradually has covered the land with some few inches of plant mold, in which at the present time stands a stretch of woods almost four miles long and 1 to 2 miles wide that is bounded by the ocean, the river Volta, and the little river Fitej [or Fitoj]. The woods consisted mainly of palms and mangrove and low bush. Regarding the land’s fitness for agriculture, it is suitable for annual plants to bring forth a good harvest a single time, provided that the land does not suffer too much from drought, which, unfortunately, because of its low situation, is a normal occurrence, as the not very distant Akvapim Mountains attract the clouds. Plants that need recurrent rain can scarcely thrive here. In the higher places sugar will not be able to stand the dry season, and that which is cultivated in the marshes is naturally of poor quality; for all marshy areas in the vicinity are richer in sea salt than the ocean itself; the heat and the dampness, to be sure, drive the cane to a significant height, but it also

30 VI kopibog, August 22, 1805, to Thonning. 31 GJ(S) 656/1805, Thonning, [Copenhagen,] August 27, 1805, copy; the original, marked by the Guinea Commission Designation III, Letter B, is filed at GJS 1697/1818. 230 chapter six

takes up a quantity of sea salt in its sap, which causes the juice to granulate slightly and the sugar to constantly flow away as molasses. With regard to perennializing plants, f. ex. coffee and cotton, it much depends on the nature of these; as long as the coffee plant is young, and can pull its nourishment from the uppermost crust of mold, and also can be helped by watering, it can doubtless thrive, but as it grows, when the roots must fasten and nourish themselves in the sand, I doubt any success. The cotton bush, on the other hand, which can stand more drought than most other plants, and also can thrive in thin soil, can perhaps succeed well enough. This sober assessment of Flindt’s chances at Eibo was sent, with Flindt’s report of April 29, to the Slave-trade commission.32 The Finance Collegium also reacted rather sharply to Flindt’s new request for funds; the Collegium wrote to the Chamber of Customs to learn if the Chamber was in possession of any documents that would help them to “with certainty judge the value of this undertaking”.33 The Chamber of Customs sent a copy of Thonning’s remark’s on Eibo to the Finance Collegium with a note regarding Thonning’s expertise34 but informed the Collegium that all other reports it had received regarding colonial efforts on the coast had been forwarded to the Slave-trade Commission. The Chamber went out of its way to commend Flindt, however: that he had traveled to Principe “to bring over coffee and other plants to cultivate in Guinea and has apparently also supplied others therewith deserves remark”. Peder Meyer also wrote to the Finance Collegium in April, 1805, and again in May, to urge the Collegium to make a representation to the crown regarding his colonial plan.35 He reported that there had been considerable trouble between the Akuapem and other groups, which had threatened his plantation, but he expected to be able to carry on nevertheless. The Collegium apparently wanted nothing to do with Meyer, having invested sufficiently in Flindt, and forwarded these communications to the Chamber of Customs, “as information was to be found therein belonging under same’s purview”.36 Clearly the two departments’ jurisdictions,

32 Dok. vedrørende Kommissionen for Negerhandelen, I, Chamber of Customs, September 5, 1805; GJ 656/1805. 33 FJ 2095/1805, Flindt, April 29, 1805, annotation September 19, 1805; GJ 668/1805, Finance Collegium, September 19, 1805, filed at GJS 171/1836. 34 GJ 668/1805; a draft of the Chamber’s response, September 21, 1805, is preserved at GJS 171/1836. 35 FJ 2012/1805, Peder Meyer, Ussu, April 15, 1805; FJ(S) 2129/1805, Meyer, Ussu, May 1, 1805. 36 GJ 669/1805, Finance Collegium, September 14, 1805; FJ 2129/1805. the atlantic triangle stood on its head 231 and that of the Slave-trade Commission, whose members included officers in both agencies, had yet to be definitively sorted out. In August, Meyer wrote again to the Finance Collegium, and now, having apparently abandoned his grander colonial project, he asked for an advance of twelve thousand rigsdaler in support of his efforts to raise coffee and other export crops on his own plantation.37 “To complete and maintain this the plantation I have commenced my fortune is not sufficient”. He proposed to defend his plantation with a small defensive work and a dozen cannons, and he needed a small ship with which to fetch building supplies, draft animals, and other necessaries from Europe, the West Indies, and the Cape Verdes. With the same mail, Governor Wrisberg was pleased to report38 that “the young coffee plants at the plantation Fridrichsberg are flourishing and several are already full of berries. The cotton does very well and is full of bolls, so it promises a rich harvest”. He endorsed Peder Meyer’s undertaking: Meyer had a “significant number of coffee trees” on his plantation and was “truly a very hard-working and energetic man”. The governor had now set his sights on quite another colonial enterprise, however. “I cannot deny that the land around our possessions is very well suited to raise all the crops that a warm latitude produces”, he wrote, but he did not believe that the inhabitants would ever take to intensive agriculture: “they are still too raw and too much given to sloth and an idle life”. Wrisberg feared that the cost of defending a successful and expanding colony against an envious and resentful populace “would greatly exceed the profit one could expect thereof”. The two Portuguese islands Principe and São Tomé, Wrisberg wrote, and particularly the first, would be much better suited for a new Danish colonial establishment. He reckoned the islands to be of little use to Portugal, which had at its disposal an enormous tropical territory in Brazil. If the regime could get the first-named island, namely Principe, which is a lovely country and provided with a good harbor, is about 28 miles long and in places 12 miles wide, it would be a grand Acquisition; there one could colonize with success and be able to keep the workers under control, which could not happen on the mainland. Furthermore, he suggested, a provisioning station at Principe would be useful to Denmark’s trading connections to the Far East.

37 ad FJ(S) 2158/1806, P. Meyer, Ussu, August 4, 1805. 38 GJ(S) 728/1806, Wrisberg, [Christiansborg], August 5, 1805. 232 chapter six

Wrisberg was himself an islander. Principe, as he described it, was of somewhat the same dimensions as St. Croix, and, for that matter, of some of the most productive islands in Denmark itself: the scale of what he proposed was very much in keeping with Danish economic and geographic norms. Wrisberg’s idea was to trade the easternmost forts in the Danish enclave, which among the three of them controlled the old slave routes down the Volta, for Principe; “these forts are of no use to H.M., and by getting rid of them, some 15,000 [rigsdaler] that these forts cost in maintenance would be saved annually”. The Danish prohibition on the slave trade meant nothing to the Portuguese, and Wrisberg was suggesting that Portugal might be eager to trade Principe, a bagatelle in comparison, for the advantages of a new enclave controlling this important slave route on the Slave Coast. Fort Christiansborg should be retained by the Danish state, “in order in this place to deal for the workers for the new colony on Principe”. It is remarkable that Wrisberg, who had lately been chastised by his superiors in Copenhagen for his failure to enforce the royal ban on the Atlantic slave trade, was still willing to imply in a communication to the Chamber of Customs that the ban did not apply to transports to these islands so close under the African coast: the effects and implications of the social and economic transformation set in motion in 1792 had still not made themselves fully manifest to the government’s senior representative on the coast. Wrisberg was surrounded by slaves and slavers at Accra—his world had always revolved around the slave trade—and the nice political distinction that the Danish state had found itself obliged to draw between the Atlantic trade and slavery itself was doubtless widely regarded with skepticism in this world: “sophistry”, a prominent Danish West Indian planter called it in the pages of Minerva.39 Wrisberg also asked for permission to travel to Denmark to reconstitute his health and expressed himself eager when he arrived to provide further information about what he had learned in his visits to Principe. This communication, also, the Chamber of Customs forwarded to the Slave-trade Commission.40 In October, the Finance Collegium communicated Thonning’s damning opinion of Eibo to Flindt (without, however, identifying its author),41 and

39 P.L. Oxholm, “Nogle anmærkninger over en afhandling om negerhandelens ophæv- else udi maanedsskriftet Minerva af Februarii 1805”, Ny Minerva, May, 1806, pp. 129–160, on p. 130. 40 VI kopibog, January 28, 1806, to the Slave-trade Commission; Dok. vedrørende Kommissionen for Negerhandelen, II. 41 Finants-Collegiet, Missiv Protokol, October 19, 1805, to Flindt. the atlantic triangle stood on its head 233 he was promised that “if longer experience should prove the land’s fitness, an effort will be made to obtain further support for him”. The words were perhaps not entirely hollow, the authority of Thonning’s assessment notwithstanding: the Collegium, in its indecision, and no doubt feeling itself pressed by Count Schimmelmann’s interest in the affair, asked the Chamber of Customs to procure a formal appraisal of Flindt’s plantation from the Council on the coast, and hope was held out to Flindt that there could thereafter be further discussion of his application.42 In December, 1805, Peter Thonning submitted a plan for the establishment of a plantation colony in the Danish possessions on the Guinea Coast to the Chamber of Customs.43 The document is now lost, but in his cover letter, referring once again to the original instructions with which he had been sent out to the coast in 1799, Thonning wrote that he had not limited his inquiry to the study of natural history but had striven to possess himself of a real knowledge of the country especially with regard to such circumstances as could contribute to an advantageous use of same after the slave trade was ended; with that in mind I collected and investigated not just what relates to the natural history of the country, but I often traveled through and investigated the different landscapes [and] obtained a real knowledge of the nations. He again directed the Chamber’s attention to the map he had made of the territory: “as I found all, even the newest English sea charts for 1801, full of errors, even for the coasts, I compiled a complete large-scale map, based on observations of latitude and bearings to the places from all sides”. He was convinced that “the small plantations, like those that have hitherto been attempted in Guinea”, could never repay their disproportionate costs. He had pointed this out in his final report on his research in Guinea in 1803, he said, but had not presumed to present a more ambitious proposal for a state undertaking at that time. He reminded the Chamber that his report had been sent to Finance Minister Schimmelmann, however, who “in that connection had me called in and asked me to [submit] a plan for a plantation colony in Guinea”. Understanding the importance of the project, “and how little I dared count on being equal to it, I tried to avoid this challenge”, but when he learned that the former acting governor

42 FJ 2401/1805 (Chamber of Customs, September 21, 1805), annotation October 19, 1805; GJ(S) 687/1805, Finance Collegium, October 19, 1805, filed at GJS 171/1836, and an annotation regarding the Chamber’s letter to the Council on the coast, October 24, 1805. 43 GJ(S) 726/1806, Thonning, Copenhagen, December 12, 1805. 234 chapter six

Ahnholm and Christian Schiønning had also been asked about the matter, he had proceeded to write the “accompanying plan for the planting of a colony in Guinea”. Thonning’s plan “was judged very kindly”, as he himself wrote a few years later.44 The Chamber of Customs forwarded it to the Slave-trade Commission, asking that it be returned,45 but no further archival trace of it has been found. In the early 1870s, a biographer of Frederik Moltke, the head of the Chamber of Customs in the first decade of the nineteenth century, reported that the document, which he had seen among Moltke family papers, had been added to and revised at various times between 1806 and 1809, although he did not indicate by whom.46 It has since apparently been lost.47 If Thonning kept a copy for himself, it did not find its way into the archives of the Guinea Commission in the 1830s, although the elements of this plan were undoubtedly adopted in the Commission’s report. In April, 1806, Jens Flindt sent a packet of documents to the Finance Collegium. The Collegium’s communication of October 19, 1805, had arrived with the ship Nicoline, Captain Mortensen Ishøy, in February;48 Flindt was sending back his response back with the same vessel. Flindt took little trouble to conceal his dismay and indignation. “Thank you for the great trust with which the High-Royal Finance Collegium most graciously has encouraged the modest industry I have here displayed”. As he read the Collegium’s missive, funds had been denied him solely because of the unfavorable report on Eibo that it had received from the Chamber of Customs. He expressed himself thankful that the Finance Collegium and the Chamber of Customs would now “see the enclosed appraisal proceeding, by impartial men here, which shows not only the opposite of this false report, but the truth of my plantation’s progress, with obvious proofs of the depth of the soil and the soil types on this Eibo land”. Every word in it, he said, confirmed the truth of his earlier reports and of Clasen’s and Hamilton’s declarations.

44 Rtk. 2214.86, P. Thonning, Copenhagen, December 20, 1809. 45 VI kopibog, January 28, 1806, to the Slave-trade Commission; Dok. vedrørende Kommissionen for Negerhandelen, II: only the Chamber’s cover letter remains in this context. 46 Ludv. J.F. Moltke, “Bidrag til Geheimraad Frederik Moltkes levnetsbeskrivelse”, Historisk Tidsskrift, 4th Series, Vol. 2, 1870–72, pp. 1–128, on pp. 46, note 44, and 48. 47 I am very grateful to Poul Holstein for this information, which was communicated to me by Erik Gøbel, September 12, 1996. 48 ad FJ 2157/1806, Flindt, Kongenssteen, April 14, 1806. the atlantic triangle stood on its head 235

O! how regrettable is it not that so noble and just a Danish regime, whose highest wish is: to improve the well-being of the state and the subjects’ advancement and true happiness—by means of such base, malicious, and false reports, that cannot be made by any other than an old Dane long familiar here in Africa, indeed perhaps a trusted official, who has had the effron- tery to dare venture with meditated falseness to deceive the high regime, in order to ruin so noble a Danish government’s highest aim. (Flindt here apparently waxed so wroth that he failed to bring his sentence to a grammatical conclusion.)

In the 20 years I have been here in Africa, there is not a single Dane, except the undersigned, who can come forward and claim to have traveled Eibo’s woods and inner stretches of land, except in so far as they have gone across Eibo Land to the so-called port Council’s Harbor, to which the late Lieutenant Colonel Kiøge, because of the Augna war against the Ada negroes, was the first who had a way cut through this Eibo Land to the sea, where all the fort’s guns and building materials for the fort were transported. In every other place, along or across through Eibo’s wood, it is impossible for any European to pass, mainly because of its thickly overgrown underbrush, without first cutting a path for himself.

Flindt himself could not claim to have traveled through the whole area, and he would not offer to judge the quality of all of its soils, “as that falsifier that has never traveled through any of it has done”. He and his slaves had cut a way perhaps two miles through the woods west of his plantation, and he found the soil there “varied, just as is reported on my plantation and the cleared land”. “Upon beginning my plantation on Eiboe, I was much concerned to first investigate the stretch of earth I wished to have cleared for agriculture”. He had put the house and its gardens on the worst of it, for small areas could always be improved, but the field crops, which were demanding, had to have good soil to begin with. The area near the beach,

that almost resembles nothing but sand, …. has nevertheless a kind of fatness in it, for the whole stretch of land from the wood to the sea, all the way from Rio Volta on the sea side to Futhe, is overgrown with an impenetrable undergrowth of short-stemmed trees about the height of two men, and closer to the sea, the brush is shorter, but more thickly grown together, so they stand altogether like a high boxwood hedge. Cotton plants did well in this soil, meager as it was, and indeed produced finer and whiter cotton than could be obtained in the better soil in the wooded part of the peninsula, where the plants, although larger, brought fewer bolls to maturity and were more subject to the attacks of insects. 236 chapter six

Peder Meyer had provided him with some cottonseed from Guiana, Flindt said: the two men were thus carrying on similar agricultural experiments in each their environment, Meyer having moved his efforts away from the coast and the Volta to the foothills of Akuapem, and Flindt having abandoned Akuapem for the convenience of a situation almost on the beach; they were both working with the same plants, and in some cases with the same stock. Flindt had had a very simple gin built by Fort Kongenssteen’s craftsmen, with which he believed thirty pounds of cotton could be cleaned daily, with two workers to feed the machine and remove the cleaned cotton and a third to work the mechanism. Flindt had taken care to plant his coffee in the richest land at Eibo; in one part of the planting he had set the coffee plants in among the palms, in another he had removed some of the trees, and in a third he had cleared the land completely. The plants in the shade were doing better than any coffee of similar age that he had ever seen in Danish Guinea, and most of them were bearing fruit; “the largest of these coffee trees is about forty inches tall, has 22 branches and bears 176 pcs. coffee berries”. Some of the trees planted in sun had died, but those that had survived were in good health and putting forth shoots. Thus he had learned not only that young coffee trees needed shade and air, but that an inordinate amount of trouble in clearing the land from the Volta to Futhe, where there were countless palms, could be spared; “the richest soil areas of the land now can keep their enchanting appearance, and are thereby freed from the sun’s burning heat, which makes it tolerable for any European to work the whole day through”. The Council on the coast had been ordered to appraise Flindt’s plantation in light of what he called “this unsigned or nameless report” on Eibo’s suitability for agriculture; according to Flindt’s account, In the Council assembly of Governor Major Wrisberg, Commandant Schiøn ning, and Commandant Richter, as well as the undersigned, the [Chamber of Customs’s] communication was laid forth to be read—whereupon Governor Major Wrisberg asked me what I said about that? My answer was naturally that this report could not have been made by anyone but a base-thinking and false person, who on the whole must be quite ignorant of Eiboe Land and even more of what agricultural operations it is suited for. It had then been arranged that two junior officers, Clasen and Truelsen, should conduct a formal appraisal. Since it was the lasting agricultural potential of Eibo that was in question, rather than current production, Flindt had tried to impress on the appraisers the importance of the quality and depth of the soil on and around his plantation; he reported that they had even investigated the soil at the very point of the tongue of land, down the atlantic triangle stood on its head 237 by the Volta, where there was a grassy plain and a few palms, and whose usefulness Flindt himself was still uncertain of. Soil samples were also taken in the low-lying area where he had planted sugar cane, near the Fitej River. “It is in this stretch of earth that the falsifier in his report says that the soil, which he, here where the sugar is planted, calls marshy areas, is richer in sea salt than the ocean itself”. Flindt suggested that whoever had written the analysis had presumed that Eibo and the land around the western arms of the Volta estuary were comparable to the area on the other side of the river, where the rivers were salt most of the year. On the Eibo side, Flindt said, when the river was high it was also fresh and enriched the grassy plains it flooded with silt; when it was salt, at low water, it did not flood over the land. Farther up the river, in what he called the Tubrekue Islands, where the people of Ada had their origins, the land was “rich in black mold and heavily overgrown with woods”. Although the area was very wet at high water, and even after heavy rains, he thought thousands of people could sustain themselves by agriculture here. The Ada people lived so well on the salt trade that they did little else, but the streams were full of fish, and there were game and wildfowl in great quantity. It was an advantage to the Danes that all this area belonged to the Ada, and so no one else needed be dealt with. Flindt regretted that he had brought so little land under cultivation at Eibo in two years, but construction work at Kongenssteen had taken most of his time, and little agricultural work was accomplished except under his direct supervision. The difficulty and frustration of the colonial correspondence was felt at both ends. Flindt ended his letter, O! how dearly had I not wished, now with this Danish ship, after my most humble application, to have been allowed to go home, in order myself, personally and orally, to be able to put forward the important matters that here in Africa hold back the practice of agriculture—as well as also to myself have been able to accept the capital that might most graciously have been granted me by His Majesty the king. The Finance Collegium sent a copy of Flindt’s letter to the Chamber of Customs, and Thonning found it in the Chamber’s correspondence files almost thirty years later and circulated it among the members of the Guinea Commission.49 On the last page of Flindt’s long letter, below the signature, Thonning wrote:

49 ad GJ 806/1806, filed at GJS 1697/1818, marked ad [FJ] 2157/1806, with the original of Thonning’s statement on Eibo of August 27, 1805 (GJ 656/1805). Together, these were examined by the Guinea Commission as Designation 3, Letter B. 238 chapter six

I have not seen this attack on my statement in Attachment B before the present occasion, and have only to add to Comd. Flindt’s very angry utterances against me the wish that Flindt’s tirelessly employed energy in that landscape had been rewarded with a result that could in practical fact prove that the opinion I delivered was in error…. Nothing more is really needed than Flindt’s artless description of Eibo Land’s natural vegetation to recognize its infertility for plantations, which demand deep and good soil, and its situation altogether too near the shore and the influence of the sea breeze. Clasen and Truelsen had apparently not felt very comfortable with their unaccustomed task: they undertook to describe Flindt’s plantation “so far as our knowledge and the evidence of our eyes extends—But to evaluate same we cannot take it upon ourselves, for want of knowledge of the cotton enterprise”.50 They took ten soil samples at various carefully identified locations along compass bearings from the main building at depths of between fourteen and thirty-two inches in the soil. They gathered cotton from the plant nearest one of these holes in the middle of Flindt’s cotton planting. They counted thirty-eight coffee trees bearing fruit. A garden of coconut palms on the land side of the house appeared to be doing uncommonly well. They measured the sugar cane and described the distillery. There were three wells, in one of which there was “very good water”. They went back a half year later and took more soil samples. The Council was reminded that the samples were taken at different depths, but Clasen and Truelsen on the whole found that the soil was better near the surface and sandier and more clayey deeper in the ground. There survives also a short note signed by Clasen alone:51 The undersigned attests hereby, at Herr Commandant Flindt’s request, to have taken 2 soil samples in his presence on said Herr Commandant’s sugar plantation at Eiboe (one from the uppermost soil crust, and one 1 1/2 feet deep in the soil), stirred same samples up in fresh water, and after it had stood stirred together for an hour so as to settle, there was still not the least salty to taste in the water. In a separate note, Flindt’s fellow members of the Council on the coast reported that neither they nor Clasen or Truelsen were really in a position to evaluate Flindt’s plantation. They were able to conclude nevertheless that “the soil’s physical nature, the situation of the place, the temperature,

50 ad FJ 2157/1806, Truelsen and Clasen, Addah, April 3, 1806, addressed to the Council on the coast, copy. The Chamber of Customs forwarded this document and the soil samples to the Finance Collegium: FJ 2284/1806, the Chamber of Customs, September 13, 1806; GJ 786/1806. 51 ad FJ 2157/1806, Clasen, Kongenssteen, April 14, 1806. the atlantic triangle stood on its head 239 the disposition of the inhabitants, and [other] things will unmistakably lay significant obstacles in the way of Herr Commandant Flindt’s undaunted application”.52 At this same place in the Finance Collegium’s files, there is another letter of April 14, 1806, from Flindt, directed to Count Schimmelmann himself.53 Again he bitterly attacked whoever had provided the Chamber of Customs with such a false and unfounded report on the character of the land at Eibo, who, he said, “never investigated or had the least local knowledge of Eiboe Land”. He wanted it proposed to the King: “That if this or these falsifiers from whom this report came should now be here on the coast (for no one at home or a newly arrived European here can have made this report), to have him rooted out”. He was either dissembling or had utterly forgotten Peter Thonning. In truth, Flindt seems to have been as much interested in the situation of his plantation—right at the mouth of the Volta—as in its potential to produce export crops: if it succeeded, he assured Schimmelmann, “then every ship will hereafter gladly call at Eiboe Plantation, especially since every schooner and larger vessels can in safety go in and out of the Rio Volta mouth, where there is 15 feet of water over the highest sand banks”. The Council Harbor, according to Thonning’s map, was four or five miles up the west bank of the estuary from the mouth. Flindt himself kept a “schooner boat” on the river to fetch stone for Fort Kongenssteen down the river from Mlefi, he said. He had taken soundings on his way up and down, and had nowhere found less than two and a half fathoms of water. He had once allowed an English schooner in distress to enter the river and repair its rudder at Kongenssteen, making use of local timber. It was a short gun- shot from the banks to the islands, and it would be easy to control traffic at the mouth of the river; Flindt recommended putting a battery on the eastern point at the mouth. He and Clasen had gone over to Crown Princess Island, just off the river side of the Eibo peninsula, and had found plenty of water all around it. Finally, Flindt included in this packet of correspondence a letter directly to Crown Prince Frederik,54 in which he asked to be given direct authority to carry out the royal aim of establishing plantations near the Volta. His report regarding Eibo and the navigability of the river would soon be laid

52 GJS 786/1806, the Council on the coast, April 9, 1806, filed at GJS 171/1836. 53 ad FJ 2157/1806, Flindt, Kongenssteen, April 14, 1806, to Schimmelmann himself. 54 ad GJ 835/1806, Flindt, Kongenssteen, April 14, 1806, to the crown prince, copy, filed at GJS 806/1806. 240 chapter six before His Royal Highness by his government, Flindt was sure, and he hoped the prince would appreciate his arguments. Peder Meyer also took this opportunity to write to the Finance Colle gium, pressing his own application for funds.55 He was sending in almost three hundred pounds of cleaned cotton from his plantation and regretted not having been able, for lack of machines, to clean more fiber to send with this ship. His limited fortune did not permit him to work his plantation as hard as he wished, “as I must by trade seek what I and mine need for our daily keep, which is no little, since I have daily over fifty [slaves] to maintain and clothe, who are all my property”; he often had to leave the plantation to the supervision of his slaves. Without a loan he would be unable to maintain what he had already accomplished, let alone expand production. Although he had invested substantial sums to maintain peaceful relations with the mountain people, disturbances between the peoples of the coast and the hills had recently brought his work to a halt. Without the resources to fortify his plantation, there was nothing to protect it from “roving parties (which is what one on such occasions has to fear)”. He reminded the Finance Collegium that he had undertaken to practice agriculture in response to the royal exhortation publicly proclaimed in 1797 and had only applied for support when his efforts had produced convincing evidence of the feasibility of growing coffee in the Danish territory. I will most humbly put it to the High Collegium’s gracious judgment whether it would not be altogether too hard on me if I, after having sacrificed the greatest part of what I in the previous 28 years residence in a land like this have earned, solely so I could thereby accomplish something for the benefit of my dear fatherland, were obliged to leave the plantation I have begun, which is already brought so far, solely for lack of sufficient support. The success of his example was likely to encourage both his countrymen and the Africans to take up plantation agriculture, he argued. Indeed, when he had moved to Osu from Ada and had planted local crops in 1795, all the inhabitants thought and said that [it] was a useless work to plant corn, etc., here so near the sea’s edge, but when the harvest came they were to their greatest surprise convinced that here, also, corn and other products of this land could be planted, and with almost just as good profit as higher in the country; this had the desirable effect that all the coast dwellers the next

55 FJ(S) 2158/1806, Meyer, Ussu, April, 10, 1806. the atlantic triangle stood on its head 241

year thereafter were very busy cultivating the earth, and since that time they have remained at same. In October, 1806, Meyer, like Flindt, pressed the matter in a letter addressed directly to the crown prince.56 He was almost insistent that the royal will, which was demonstrably that land in the Danish African enclave should be brought under cultivation, was simply not being executed: he, Meyer, for all his exertions, was not being given his due by His Majesty’s government. The success of his undertaking will most graciously be learned from the enclosed testimonial, from impartial and unenvious men who, at my request, have inspected my plantation. Although I can show coffee and cotton trees in fullest growth and bowed with fruit, still I must with pain learn that Governor and Major Wrisberg seeks with every opportunity to disparage my work and diligence. He can have no other cause for this than envy of my plantation’s good progress, since he, although he has thrown away considerable capital on a small plantation 1 mile from mine in Aqvapim, has accomplished nothing, wherefore he also gave same up. What can one expect of a man who has only trade and profit as his sole goal? I wonder if he has the time and the desire to busy himself with the more useful plantation enterprise? Besides, as long as the slave trade remains in operation as it has been to date here at the Danish establishments, then it is only few who will seriously take up the more useful and humane cultivating; if on the other hand the most gracious decree that is said to have been issued (but is not yet proclaimed) in regard to the ending of the slave trade were with just strictness brought into effect, most would surely with eagerness make a point of planting. Meyer wrote these words almost four years after the ban had come into effect and more than a year after the Council on the coast had assured the central administration that Danes there were no longer exporting slaves. The forts’ priest, Hans Chr. Monrad, who had arrived on the coast in 1805, and two other officers supported Meyer in the strongest terms:57 “To any person who wishes that time hastened forth when the for so long retarded Africa should be a cultivated land and its inhabitants, degraded to beasts of burden, a more cultured people, Hr. Merchant Peder Meyer’s three agricultural plots open the most pleasant prospects for the future”. The most distant of Meyer’s plantations was at Jadosa, where he had coffee, oranges and lemons, and coconut palms. He had more coffee at Legon,

56 Meyer, Christiansborg, October 1, 1806, to the crown prince, marked “triplicate”, and, by the Guinea Commission, ad Designation IV, Letter E, but bearing no Guinea Journal number, filed at GJS 144/1828. 57 ad Designation IV, Letter E, Monrad, Erhard, and Krog, Christiansborg, September 23, 1806, copy, similarly without a Guinea Journal number, filed at GJS 144/1828. 242 chapter six nearer Christiansborg, and a cotton plantation in the vicinity of the fort; in a garden here Meyer had several thousand more young coffee plants ready to transplant and had sowed ten thousand fresh coffee beans. There was a large cistern in this garden, “from which the whole negro town of Ussu is supplied with water in the dry season”, and there was no lack of water at the other two plantations, either. He who with impartial eyes has beheld these plantations, will not for an instant be able to doubt that indeed the land is entirely suited to produce, in the greatest abundance, all the crops of a hot climate. This is a truth, which even they who most oppose the cultivation of the country must admit. That one place is more productive than another follows of itself, and it cannot be denied that the soil’s goodness increases in proportion to the greater distance from the seacoast. Farther into the land one breathes also a cleaner and healthier air, something that doubtless deserves the greatest attention in view of the sending out of colonists; and if one admits, what presumably no one sensible questions, that fair surroundings help to sweeten life, where will one rather want to live than on Aqvapim’s cloud-high mountains, or in its fertile blooming valleys? One might perhaps object, ‘Let the soil be never so good, the air tolerable, the area lovely, it must nevertheless be feared that when the colony was brought to any degree of completeness, it would be disturbed by the negroes! There is nothing that can wake this assumption, for who can verifiably point to a single European colony that in these regions has been destroyed by the negroes? and without being able to do that, it would certainly be unjust to cast such a suspicion on them. Besides, presumably, conventions for the safeguarding of security would have to be entered into with the negro towns bordering the colony, some small fortifications erected, and such a number of military forces kept as was sufficient to maintain order and enforce the obligations entered into. When this occurred, there would be little or nothing to fear from that side. If the negroes were only shown prospects for common profit in the colony, the diligent encouraged with suitable rewards, if they were treated at all with fairness, without oppressive disdain and with as little severity as was possible, if one tried to set limits on the destructive drinking of spirits, worked to free them of prejudice and superstition and on the contrary impart to them worthy religious and ethical concepts, if the Europeans set them good examples—in short, if one cared more about the person in the negro, then the time would assuredly one day come, when Africa no longer would be called a desert and the Africans barbarians. It appears that before these missives reached Copenhagen, however, the Finance Collegium had taken a decision. In November, 1806, the Collegium wrote to Meyer, thanking him for his communications since June, 1804:58

58 Financekollegiet, kopibog, to Meyer, November 11, 1806; draft at FJS 2158/1806. the atlantic triangle stood on its head 243

We cannot be otherwise than very obliged to you for the communication of the information contained in these reports, and it is wished that you henceforth will continue the successfully begun agricultural experiments, since the question of whether your plan for a plantation colony might advantageously be brought to fulfillment can only be decided when the experience of several years might have shown that the soil and the climate are favorable for plantations and that the negroes, both as the owners of the land and as those without whom no large-scale agricultural work can be undertaken, will not lay obstacles in the way of the progress of cultivation. Economic conjunctures would at any rate not at present allow any loan to be made him, the Collegium wrote, and “then there is the hindrance that the area on which you have laid out your plantation does not properly belong to you, and that it, according to the facts cited in your latest report, could also be subject to being destroyed by negroes”. Flindt fared no better. On the same day, in a long report to the crown prince, who was then at Kiel,59 the Finance Collegium recapitulated its dealings with Flindt since August, 1800, when the crown had advanced him six thousand rigsdaler, with the terms of repayment left open. Although the report was quite detailed, little enough of the monarch’s African realm or of Flindt’s expansive colonial dreams shone through between the lines of this sober administrative exercise. On the whole, rather an optimistic impression of the progress of Flindt’s various efforts was at first conveyed, but, the Collegium admitted, Peter Thonning’s appraisal of the soils at Eibo had given them considerable pause. They had notified Flindt of their reservations and asked the Chamber of Customs to have his plantation formally appraised. This appraisal contains merely a loose overview of the state of the plantation. The cotton plantation contained 2640 pcs. fruit-bearing trees, and the coffee plantation 289 pcs., whereof, however, only those that stood in the shade were doing well; Flindt’s sugar plantings appeared to be in fairly good health. Flindt’s angry rebuttal of Thonning’s opinion had also now come in from the coast, the Collegium went on, and they scarcely knew where to turn for a resolution of these conflicting reports. They had solicited Captain Ishøy’s opinion of the matter upon his arrival in Denmark a few days since, and he had reported that the excellent Eibo climate and the fertile ground “will hasten the development of any suitable plant almost

59 Financekollegiet, kopibog, November 11, 1806, to his Royal Highness Crown Prince Frederik. 244 chapter six without trouble, but it is to be feared that the negroes’ untamable avarice, which cannot be restrained except by force”, might tempt them into an aggressive stance; if their demands were not met, the work of ten years might be destroyed in a night. Just as the appraisal sent in does not contain such information that the objections made to the land’s suitability for agriculture discussed above can be considered annulled, and the soil samples sent here, even if they were chemically analyzed, would presumably scarcely give any sure guidance, neither does Captain Ishøy’s explication provide any prospect of employing greater sums of money on Flindt’s plantation with security. The Finance Collegium’s unwillingness to invest further in his enterprise was communicated to Flindt cloaked in words of encouragement.60 The Collegium “much wishes that you henceforth will continue the agricultural experiments you have begun and thereby [prove] yourself deserving of further support”, but before more funds could be made available, longer experience is required than that it has hitherto, in the time you have conducted the experiments, been possible to get, so as by the progress of these to be able to judge the question that is of the most interest to the state, and to whose resolution uninterrupted continuation of your experiment could provide guidance, whether, namely, the climate and the soil are favorable for starting plantations on a large scale, just as it is considered necessary for the security of the roy’l. treasury, before the help applied for can be further entered upon, that you seek to obtain full ownership of the area you have chosen for your plantations. A week later, from his military headquarters at Kiel,61 the crown prince approved the Finance Collegium’s decision, but he seems not to have been pleased that his government had found no way at all to support Flindt’s efforts: On the contrary, these plantations’ unmistakable usefulness and the diligence he has employed on them presumably deserve there being striven as far as possible … to ease his obtaining ownership of the land brought under cultivation by him…. I leave it altogether to the Collegium to take the most appropriate measures in that regard. The royal perspective on the agricultural colonization of a new territory in another continent can be thought to have been rather different from that of the auditors and accountants in his ministry of finance.

60 Financekollegiet, kopibog, to Flindt, November 11, 1806; the Finance Collegium sent a copy of the letter to the Chamber of Customs: ad GJ 835/1806, filed at GJS 171/1836. 61 FJ(S) 2942/1806, Crown Prince Frederik, Kiel, November 11, 1806. the atlantic triangle stood on its head 245

Flindt, absolutely undaunted, responded to the Finance Collegium’s missive at some length in April, 1807.62 Apart from his unwillingness to accept the Collegium’s rejection, some semantic confusion had arisen: where the Collegium had expressed some doubt about whether the climate of Eibo was suitable for a plantation project, Flindt immediately thought of disease, rather than of temperature and precipitation. The climate here by the Volta was no worse than anywhere else along the Guinea Coast, he said. All of the commandants at Fort Kongenssteen, and he named six incumbents, had enjoyed “tolerably” good health. Eibo was in fact even healthier, for the fort, at Ada, was regularly surrounded by flood waters, which Eibo was spared. His brewer Hans Christophersen had lived at Eibo for five years and had never been sick a day. Flindt also wished to drew attention to longer and broader perspectives, however, and he seized on the Collegium’s own turn of phrase to do so: In regard to the establishment of plantations on a large scale, the so-named Eibo Land will not in the future be sufficient but, with the colonists’ increase, [is] to be regarded as a colonial capital, and nature could have formed no more convenient places thereto than this Eiboe Land is blessed with. (Indeed, the town of Ada, or Little Ada, or Ada Beach, is now located on the Eibo peninsula.) No hostile local force could deny it access to the sea, and it would be a good place to put warehouses for agricultural products grown farther up the Volta and on its islands, which Flindt said were only flooded every seventh year or so. It had sources of fresh water at some depth in the soil “that no ship in the driest season of the year can exhaust. It is everywhere overgrown with a wood of wild coconut trees that are very useful for household carpentry and planks”, and also as a “shield against the sun’s harmful and burning heat, both for new plantations, especially coffee, as well also as for the Europeans themselves, wherefore these trees must absolutely not be cleared for any agriculture”. On the land side the spit was overgrown with a tree, the Mattokue tree, “which for all kinds of domestic use and building timbers is just as durable as our European oak”. The arm of the Volta there was full of fish at all times of year, “so that every plantation negro can himself in a 1/4 hour catch as much fish as he needs for a meal for himself and family”.

62 GTK, Dokumenter o. l. vedr. Guinea, Flindt, Christiansborg, April 6, 1807, to the Finance Collegium, forwarded to the Chamber of Customs August 8, 1807 (ad GJ 903/1807). 246 chapter six

Denmark controlled the Volta, he reminded the Finance Collegium, and the people at least as far up the river as Mlefi were subject to Danish administration. Ownership of the land itself could easily be contracted for. “And where then are to be found more suitable regions for agriculture in Guinea than the regions of the Volta River are?” Commodities could move without hindrance down the river to “the main storage place” in vessels built for the purpose. It might be imagined that colonial agriculture was not feasible in Africa because no property could with security be held against the Africans, but, Flindt pointed out, the same was true of Europe, except perhaps on islands, if a society did not take measures to protect itself against attack. The power of the negroes “is on account of the trade cast in a false light! for if force was employed the trade would be driven elsewhere”, but this need not concern an agricultural colony so much. There was nothing to fear from distant nations; it was only the neighboring peoples that might be tempted to unjustifiable measures, but the people of the Volta were surrounded by so many more powerful groups that their independence was at all times threatened: they could therefore be relied upon to cooperate with the Danes. Besides the great prospects of this agricultural activity at Eiboe Land, and the region by the Volta River under our Danish jurisdiction, there are yet the most promising hopes for a lasting and flourishing trade of European wares [for] trade products such as salt, of which the Ada negroes have an inexhaustible mine, as Flindt put it. (This salt was of course actually produced in salt pans.) The River Volta is navigable and borders the mainland of Aqvamboe, which nation has a significant ivory trade, and these in turn stand in commerce and connection with the mighty nation the Assianthes, where, by the application thereon of industry, a way to an inexhaustible mine of gold and elephant teeth could be opened. He thought the trade up the river in Ada salt, which presently was effected at second- and third-hand and was hampered by the middlemen’s fear of enslavement in distant regions, could be rendered more secure. Flindt in closing reported with sorrow that his good sister, who to achieve the noble goals of agriculture again last time went out with me here to Guinea, has after a long illness been rewarded by providence with a calm and blessed death the 10 Desembr., [1806.] This for me irremediable loss almost had the effect that I had followed after her, but now I am God be praised as healthy and well as the first day I came to Guinea—and shall with utmost strength and all my fortune employ all on agriculture’s fuller continuation and advancement. the atlantic triangle stood on its head 247

A few weeks later, Flindt sent home some cotton, on which the Chamber of Customs waived the normal duties; Johan Wrisberg, who left the coast in March, 1807, leaving Christian Schiønning in charge, also took home with him six bales of cleaned cotton grown at Frederiksberg.63 Flindt also sent home a few barrels of Ada salt, as good, he said, as the best Spanish salt, and of which whole shiploads could easily be exported every year. All the towns around the Danish establishments “and indeed the populous nations Ashianthe, Aqvambue, and Agothim” could be supplied with salt meat and fish from the area around Ada. Early in September, 1807, when a Franco-Russian compact threatened to deliver Denmark’s fleet into Napoleon’s hands, English forces bom- barded Copenhagen, destroying a large part of the heart of the city. In a fateful reaction, Crown Prince Frederik threw Denmark’s lot in with France’s. The Danish economy was devastated by the war, and the state’s interest in African colonial ventures for a time evaporated; the Danish West Indies were themselves occupied by an English force. The colonial plan Thonning had submitted at Ernst Schimmelmann’s request, and which they both had doubtless hoped might be put into execution, could not now be a matter of much interest: as Thonning wrote in his résumé in 1809, “since that time Europe’s political situation has required every state to exert all its energies to sustain itself, and any endeavor to expand would have weakened this more necessary effort”.64

63 GJ(S) 967/1808, Flindt, Prindsensteen, April 30, 1807; GJ 868/1807, Wrisberg, Copenhagen, July 29, 1807; Larsen, p. 137. 64 Rtk. 2214.86, P. Thonning, 1809, Copenhagen, December 20, 1809.

PART THREE

COLONIAL DEVELOPMENTS DURING THE NAPOLEONIC WARS AND THE ENSUING DEPRESSION

CHAPTER SEVEN

“FOR COLONIZATION, A MORE DESIRABLE COUNTRY CANNOT BE FOUND”: PLANTATION EXPERIMENTS DURING THE WAR YEARS

Christian Schiønning held the lonely post of acting governor of the Danish establishments on the Guinea Coast for the long duration of the Napoleonic War and for some years thereafter.1 The war reduced communications between Copenhagen and the coast to a trickle of mail, but in letters to both the Finance Collegium and the Chamber of Customs in October, 1808, Schiønning notified the administration that he had begun to cultivate coffee on his own account.2 He had purchased a piece of land up the country near the Akuapem hills, about fifteen miles from Christiansborg, and had there “laid out a plantation, where now grow 26,700 coffee trees, all planted in regular lines, in well cultivated and excellent good soil”. He had sown another eighty thousand beans in a nursery, to be planted out the following year. The plantation was about a half a mile by a mile. There is thus room for many thousand trees yet…. All this I am working with my own negroes and about 20 of the royal inventories, which I have made use of as a loan because they could easily be spared from other work, against paying them wages out of my own means. He had built a house for himself and three dozen structures for his laborers. Through the plantation flows a brook which always yields the fairest water. The earth’s fertility promises the richest harvest, and I hope in time to enjoy the fairest reward for my work. Not only the Chamber of Customs but especially the Finance Collegium have in part sought to encourage, in part commanded the Council here to urge agriculture on in Africa. This combined

1 Larsen, p. 137; Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 190. 2 GJ 1030/1809, Schiønning, October 15, 1808. Schiønning’s letter was examined by the Guinea Commission as Designation IV, Letter F, and is to be found in GK II; another copy of it is filed with other Designation IV material at GJS 144/1828, and there is a duplicate at GJS 1346/1813. Schiønning enclosed copies of this letter with a number of reports during the war years and at least one of them was sent back and forth between the Chamber of Customs and the Finance Collegium, so it is also recorded in the Guinea Journal at GJ 1309 and 1341/1814 and in the Finance Collegium Journal at FJ 936/1809, FJ 2251/1809, and FJ 3319/1813. See Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 310, 337 (note 3). 252 chapter seven

with the profit that obviously can be reaped thereby is the cause of my beginning my attempt. I believe I have thereby fulfilled the administration’s wish.3 He had done it all with his own resources, he said, without asking for any support, for the outcome was, after all, uncertain, but he wished to put into their minds in the administration in Copenhagen that modest loans in support of such enterprises might be advisable. The Finance Collegium filed this report away, however, and the Chamber of Customs contented itself with admonishing Schiønning to scrupulously respect the crown’s rights in the slaves he had borrowed to work his plantation.4 In February, 1809, Schiønning was pleased to report that when last he had been up to his plantation, the coffee plants were blooming and bearing fruit.5 “With a feeling of heartfelt delight I can say: That my plantation is succeeding and time will show the inevitable fruits of my exertions”. He promised to send in at the next opportunity “a legal appraisal and a copy of the [deed] I have to my property…. I ask that note be taken that my plantation is fruitful a full year before a new coffee plantation in the West Indies”, where, he understood, three years would normally elapse. The soil here was clearly rich enough, he said. “When I say 3 years, I base it on … various writings … in various languages, of which I have translated fragments that I still possess and make profitable use of. I myself have never been in any of the Indies”. It is a pity that Schiønning did not think to but- tress his argument with the titles of the works he had consulted, but the officers’ quarters in the forts and the drawing rooms of privately established traders at Accra were full of books.6 I hate boastfulness, [he went on,] and despise self-praise; the future will show whether I have been effective, whether my work can be regarded as of public utility—NB if same was encouraged in such a way that others can take part in this fair cause—and whether I myself can reap profit thereof. The noble idea that a fertile Africa can in time make up the loss of the West Indian colonies is one of the goals I as a born Danish man have cherished and shall strive to contribute to the fulfillment of pro parte virile.7

3 See G.E. Metcalfe, Great Britain and Ghana: documents of Ghana History, 1807–1957 (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, for the University of Ghana, 1964), p. 21. In a plate cap- tion, C.C. Reindorf called Schiønning “the pioneer of civilization”: The history of the Gold Coast and Asante, 2nd. ed. (Accra: Ghana Universities Press, 1966 [1895]), facing p. 144. 4 FJ 936/1809; GJ 1030/1809. 5 GJ(S) 1081/1809, Schiønning, February 4, 1809. 6 Hopkins, “Books, geography and Denmark’s colonial undertaking in West Africa”. 7 Or pro virili parte: ‘manfully’. An English force had occupied the Danish West Indies in 1807, and, for all Schiønning knew, the islands were lost to Denmark forever: Vibæk, pp. 230–31. plantation experiments during the war years 253

Schiønning reported with this same mail8 that he had it in an official communication from the new governor at Cape Coast Castle that the English government was sending a deputation to West Africa with the goal of investigating whether these regions of Africa are serviceable for colonization or not and in such case choose the necessary measures. Several English forts are to be shut down and, if necessary for the colonies, others built. Three warships provided with transports and the necessary apparatus of colonization accompany the deputation and the investigations begin first at Sierra Leone thereafter along the coast to Accra, which shall be the last place.9 The Chamber of Customs forwarded this information to the Department for Foreign Affairs and the Finance Collegium, which latter, at any rate, filed it away without remark.10 At the end of 1809, Schiønning reported that he had considerably expanded his plantings since February.11 I have procured more workers, built comfortable residences, warehouses, and platforms to dry and clean coffee on, acquired greater knowledge of the method of cultivation and the necessary machineries to improve the coffee and process it with less trouble and fewer people. The total of my planted out trees amounts to some 40,000 besides nearly 100,000 plants in a well ordered nursery. He was also growing provision crops. I have had a relatively good harvest of excellent fine coffee and the plantation is now again in full flowers and promises rich harvest. My neighbor Herr Peter Meyer also has good prospects of fine fruits of his application. Two merchants, resident in Ursue Town beneath Christiansborg, messieurs Truelsen & Jacobsen have also purchased pieces of land in my neighborhood and planted out coffee trees, which look very promising. So that there now are 4 plantations in one stretch. But these farms have been expensive, and cost something daily to maintain until we can think of reaping profit…. The cultivation of cotton is also the object of several’s attention. More than one have begun to establish plantations nearer the coast and many thousand pounds have been harvested, which no one knows how to transform and clean for lack of cleaning machine[s]. But I hope soon to be able to make up this lack with a machine I have bought for 80 pounds sterling and which I just in the last days have received news of having arrived on the

8 GJ(S) 1083/1809, Schiønning, February 3, 1809. 9 See Martin, pp. 153–154; Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 183. 10 FJ 2292/1809, Chamber of Customs, September 16, 1809. 11 GJS 1124/1810, Schiønning, December 26, 1809. 254 chapter seven

Upper Coast. As soon as I see that it answers the purpose I intend to start a cotton plantation about 2 miles from here. In commending myself and other participants in the plantation enterprise to the Collegium’s gracious protection, I guarantee that I shall make it the object of all my efforts, with diligence and exertion to work toward this so publicly beneficial goal, and show the world that this part of Africa can be cultivated with profit, and become, if properly supported, a significant colony for the mother land. This report is recorded in the Guinea Journal to have been “filed among pending cases” a fluid and miscellaneous file from which various unresolved matters never escaped and where they remain to this day. The Danish government, whatever its inclinations might have been, was simply in no position to support this promising colonial development on the coast.12 News of Schiønning’s agricultural endeavor appears to have spread up and down the coast and across the Atlantic: Samuel Swan, an American skipper, wrote to a brother from mid-Atlantic in November, 1810, “It is my opinion the Coffee trade to st Thomas and princes may be made very lucrative. Conciderable quantities may be got at Danish Accra where the governor told me he had 80,000 bearing trees & as many more that would shortly come on”. On the islands, a great deal of the crop was lost to waste: “A certain and regular opportunity to ship it would encourage more attention to it”.13 Events demonstrated the precariousness of Schiønning’s agricultural undertakings in an African territory not controlled by European military might. In March, 1811, the governor reported to the Chamber of Customs14 that an Asante army had come down to the coast and that communications with Commandant Flindt at Kongenssteen had been cut off; rumor had it that the fort had been attacked. The paths into the interior were closed, trade was at a standstill, and the prices of all necessaries were extremely high because of it, but also because of draught and crop failure. He took the occasion to say that

12 Schiønning took care to inform the Chamber that, at Count Schimmelmann’s exhortation, he had sent similar reports to the Finance Collegium, where they were also simply filed away: FJ 2251/1809, Schiønning, October 15, 1808, and Febr. 4, 1809. 13 New England merchants in Africa, p. 43. 14 GJS 1221/1811, Schiønning, March 15, 1811, and, filed at this same place, GJS 1165/1811, Schiønning, June 5, 1811, copy. This latter is translated at length in R.A. Kea, “More Danish accounts of the 1811 Asante expedition”, Asantesem: the Asante Collective Biography Project Bulletin, Vol. 11, 1979, pp. 60–71, on pp. 68–69; see also Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 354–356. plantation experiments during the war years 255

No black in Africa, be he free or unfree, loves or respects any white a moment longer than he either has profit or with security knows that he in a short time can come to win by him. With due respect for all that the newer phi- losophers may say about the unpolluted good African children of nature, I say that obstinacy {?}, avarice, and indolence are the main characteristics of the negroes here. In 24 years I have come to know them. On October 16, 1811, Johan Wrisberg, in Copenhagen, wrote to the Chamber of Customs that he had had word from Commandant Johan Richter, at Fort Fredensborg, that the Asante had kidnapped Jens Flindt at Kongenssteen and that Schiønning’s, Meyer’s, and Truelsen’s plantations had been destroyed. The forts were running out of powder, Wrisberg reported, and (as the Guinea Journal succinctly abstracts his letter) “if help is not received from home it is all up with the establishments”.15 There was nothing to be done, however: Denmark’s shipping was paralyzed by the war.16 Flindt had been obliged to accompany the Asante army up the Volta to Mlefi and thence to Krobo and the Shai mountains, but his abduction had been a fairly polite affair:17 indeed, his report on the matter laid considerable stress on “what useful discovery the same entailed for Rio Volta’s splendors and the establishments’ interests”.18 A year later, in the summer of 1812, Flindt traveled back up the river as far as Mafee and Bato in search of useful timber.19 Having explained his errand to the caboceer, the grandees, and the fetish-man, he had been assured, he reported to Schiøn ning, that the Danes, to whom these people of the river towns expressed fealty, were welcome to as much wood as they cared to extract, and that laborers, for a wage, would be provided them. A man from Bato had guided him to large woods of what Flindt called a “red Portuguese tree” that particularly interested him along creeks running into the Volta; similarly, at Mafee, the fetish priest had shown him woods of the same tree stretching twenty-five miles into the land of the Krepe. Flindt acknowledged that

15 GJ(S) 1208/1811, Johan Wrisberg, October 16, 1811, filed at 1218/1811. 16 See Erik Gøbel, “Volume and structure of Danish shipping to the Caribbean and Guinea, 1671–1838”, International Journal of Maritime History, Vol. 2, No. 2, December, 1990, pp. 103–131, on pp. 111–112. 17 Meredith, p. 232. 18 GJ(S) 1350/1814, Flindt, March 20, 1813, to both the Finance Collegium and the Chamber of Customs, copy, and enclosure: Flindt, Christiansborg, October 24, 1811, to Schiønning. Kea provided a long extract from Flindt’s letter to Schiønning in “Ashanti- Danish relations”, pp. 363–366, and published a fuller version in his “More Danish accounts of the 1811 Asante expedition”, pp. 65–68. 19 ad GJ 1350/1814, Flindt, Kongenssteen, to Schiønning, August 6, 1812, copy, filed at GJS 1697/1818. 256 chapter seven

Denmark had no political claim to this territory but said that from there “one with ease can bring these trees down with vessels and prams”. Their trunks were up to forty feet tall, and Flindt reckoned that beams twenty inches square could be cut from them. He thought the wood would be useful “furniture wood, and perhaps in time upon closer investigation an important trade article for Denmark”. He had seen fit to distribute suitable gifts and had on the governor’s behalf made promises of regular gratuities in the future to the leading men, including the fetish priests, of Mlefi, Blappa, Mafee, and Bato. Schiønning replied20 that while he agreed with Flindt about the economic potential of what he had found, there were no funds available for further exploration. He pointed out that there was no legal basis in the establishments’ standing instructions for regular gifts to local fetish men, but he agreed to cover the outlay this one time. Flindt wrote back21 that the payments would amount to thirty-one rigsdaler a year, and that the woods he had seen were so extensive that whole ships’ cargoes of lumber could be exported. He was having some boards sawn and would send them along for the governor’s inspection as soon as possible. This was annotated by Peter Thonning in the 1830s, when the exchange was dug out of the archives by the Guinea Commission: “To my knowledge there are doubtless good woods for furniture and joinery work, but actually the red tree discussed here, of which I can present samples, falls short of mahogany, because it is brittle and warps easily. Th.” In 1812, Henry Meredith, the British commandant at Fort Anomabu, published An account of the Gold Coast of Africa.22 (On the title-page of the copy now in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, Commandant Richter’s son by an African mother, Henrik Richter, inscribed his name in Accra in 1814; he also annotated the text here and there. Scrawled over Richter’s name, in red pencil, is the name “Thonning”, and Peter Thonning’s notes on Meredith’s book are to be found among the Guinea Commission’s archives.23) Meredith’s information was quite current. Jens Flindt, he

20 ad GJ 1350/1814, Schiønning, Christiansborg, August 8, 1812, to Flindt, copy, on same sheet as Flindt’s missive of August 6, filed at GJS 1697/1818. 21 ad GJ 1350/1814, Flindt, Kongenssteen, August 13, 1812, to Schiønning, copy, filed at GJS 1697/1818. 22 Meredith was killed that same year in a confrontation with the Africans: Martin, p. 153. 23 GK V, Udkast til betænkningen afsluttet 26. februar 1847, Diverse notater ang. forskellige udkast til betænkning (ca. 1846–47?), 1/4 46, Endvidere Observanda i Betænk., Thonning’s notes on Meredith. plantation experiments during the war years 257 reported, had lately been set at liberty after five months as a hostage in the hands of an Asante army.24 Meredith informed his English readers that although the Danish government was presently prevented by war in Europe from supplying its Guinea establishments, the Danes were the first to abolish the Slave-trade, and consequently were before all Europeans in the introduction of planting and agriculture. Not only the governor-in-chief, but other gentlemen in the service and out of it, have their respective plantations. At Schiønning’s extensive plantation about fifteen miles inland, … coffee, cotton, and other productions have till lately promised an abundant increase, and clearly exemplified the capabilities of the country, if once exerted by enterprise joined with persevering industry. The flattering prospects this gentleman’s industry exhibited, were suddenly blasted by the disturbances in this country.25 Security in the properties was the only great difficulty: “let this impedi- ment be removed, and cultivation may be carried on to any extent, and, no doubt, with success and advantage”. Meredith had spoken with people who had visited Schiønning’s plantation, and they “agreed in all their reports as to the fertility of the soil, and the vigorous condition of its productions”. Cotton appeared to be the most profitable crop closer to the coast; “cabbages, peas, turnips, carrots, cucumbers, melons, different sal- ads, and other esculents for the table, can be produced in any quantity inland”.26 Schiønning had begun to plant coffee in October, 1808, and now had 36,500 healthy coffee-trees of various ages; Meredith quotes Schiønning (who had presumably written to him in English): “ ‘Last year I had a nice crop; and I am sure, that I should have had from sixteen to twenty thousand pounds weight of coffee this year’ ” had not the troubles broken out. Schiønning reckoned that a four-year-old tree could yield a pound and a half of beans and that one laborer could tend a thousand trees.27 Akuapem, Meredith related, was “enriched with every thing which the hand of nature, apparently, could bestow upon it”, including numberless springs of good water. Again he quoted Schiønning:

24 Meredith, p. 176. 25 Meredith, pp. 198–199. 26 Meredith, pp. 211–212. 27 Meredith, pp. 219–220, note. 258 chapter seven

‘I have been almost over the whole country,’ says he; ‘and as to beauty of prospect, pleasing variety, and local advantages, I never saw anything equal; … in short, you may compare it to what poets describe when they depict nature in all her elegance’. Meredith agreeably did so, quoting Milton in a note (as perhaps Schiønning had also in his letter): “ ‘Nature here/ Wanton’d as in her prime, and play’d at will,/ her virgin fancies pouring forth more sweet,/ Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss’ ”.28 “This country is capable of every kind of cultivation”, Meredith went on; “in short, for colonization, a more desirable country cannot be found”.29 Schiønning thought that even wheat might grow well here. The climate was healthy for Europeans; the “country abounds moreover with medicinal herbs and plants”. Schiønning was reported to be impressed both by the Africans’ skill with healing plants and by their acknowledgment of the limitations of their medical knowledge. “Their manner of selecting different roots and herbs, and their choice of them, discover no mean knowledge in botany: there is scarcely a plant without its peculiar virtue among them”. It was the women, especially, who cultivated this art.30 Meredith was not so well informed of the geography of the Danish enclave that he was able to properly describe the location of the town of Keta relative to the Volta (the map with which he illustrated his book was, especially in comparison with Thonning’s maps, a sketchy affair), but he understood that there were many rivers in the area, which he thought could be “readily” connected, “forming an extensive inland navigation”. He knew of Peter Thonning’s botanical work and of his map, although it seems unlikely that he had himself perused it.31 The commissioners who have been lately appointed by government, to examine the state of [the Gold Coast] and the British settlements in it, will doubtless satisfy the public mind as to the condition of the country, and the advantages which are likely to ensue, in consequence of more attention being paid to it.32 Thonning incorporated Meredith’s opinions in the Guinea Commission’s report thirty-five years later. Meredith, he pointed out, had

28 Meredith, pp. 226–227, note p. 227; see John Milton, Paradise lost, Richard Bentley, ed. (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1976 [1732], pp. 157–158 (book 5, lines 294–297). 29 Meredith, pp. 227–228. 30 Meredith, pp. 228–229, 233. 31 Meredith, pp. 203, 210, 219 (note). 32 Meredith, p. 206. plantation experiments during the war years 259

for many years lived on the Gold Coast, he was a member of the council and governor at an English fort, and his work is the best and most trustworthy description of the Gold Coast. In his introduction he says, ‘Those who are acquainted with the soil and climate of the Gold-coast, and who have an equal knowledge of the West-Indies, will, doubtless, readily agree in this opinion, that the Gold-coast has the advantage of the West-India islands, not only in soil and climate, but likewise in seasons’. Thonning also translated this passage in Meredith’s book into the Commission’s report: ‘There is a variety of soil to be observed along the coast, from a light sandy and gravelly kind, to a fine black mold and loamy clay: as we advance a little into the country, the soil assumes a more uniform, and in general a more favorable appearance; and if we continue to advance, it will be found rich in the extreme, and in general fit for every purpose. About the distance of six or eight miles from the sea, the soil partakes of such happy variety, that it is capable of every sort of cultivation’.33 For all that, the African establishments assuredly remained among the most distant of the Danish government’s concerns at this time. Early in 1813, Denmark approached the nadir of the economic difficulties occasioned by the war, when the government acknowledged that its paper currency was without sufficient backing in silver. This was the so-called state bankruptcy.34 In the fall of that year, another packet of mail from acting governor Schiønning arrived in Copenhagen. In one of two letters dated March 20, 1813,35 he reported that the Danish planters had been driven from their inland plantations by strife, involving the people of Accra, the Fante, the Akyem, and the Asante, seven or eight months previous; the atmosphere remained decidedly charged.36 Schiønning, Meyer, and Truelsen had taken their plantations back into possession and had found that their buildings had all been put to the torch, after the doors and windows and

33 GK, Betænkning, pp. 35–37; Meredith, pp. iii–iv, 3–4. 34 Ole Feldbæk, Danmarks økonomiske historie 1500–1840 (Herning: Forlaget Systime A/S, 1993) pp. 193–194, 162–163; Poul Olsen, “Finansforvaltningen 184–1848”, in Stat, forvaltning og samfund, fra middelalderen til 1901, Vol. 1 of Dansk forvaltningshistorie, Leon Jespersen and E. Ladewig Petersen, eds. (Copenhagen: Jurist- og Økonomforbundets Forlag, 2000), pp. [405]–430, on pp. 406–407. 35 GJ 1346/1814, March 20, 1813, identified as a duplicate of GJ 1309/1813, where, however, the entry in the Journal gives other dates. There is another copy of the letter, marked ad 1309/1813, at GJS 1697/1818; this copy was lightly annotated, mostly in the form of underlining, by Peter Thonning, in the course of the Guinea Commission’s research. There is yet another copy at GJS 1751/1819. 36 See Kwamena-Poh, pp. 87–88, and Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 355–363. 260 chapter seven iron fittings had been stolen. The plantings themselves were unscathed. Word had then come from local leaders that the Danes were not to send any of their slaves beyond Legon Hill, six or seven miles inland from Christiansborg. Schiønning and Truelsen and Meyer were thus again cut off from their plantations, and Schiønning reported that people from Osu had gone to the plantations and stolen both the Danes’ and their laborers’ provisions: “We then had permission to purchase [what was] our own”. Coffee that had ripened in September and October had been taken and sold to the European merchants; what couldn’t be moved had been allowed to rot, so the whole harvest of three plantations had been lost. Schiønning himself had lost more than twenty thousand pounds of coffee. The following October’s harvest could also be written off: “In January the coffee flowers and if [the soil] is not cleaned completely under and around the trees before the flowering begins, they bear no flowers—consequently no fruit”. The people of Osu, Schiønning lamented, had been more than usually intractable since the slave trade had ended and especially so since cargoes of trade goods had stopped coming down to the coast from Denmark upon the outbreak of war in 1807. The trees in the handsome allée to Frederiksberg planted by Governor Wrisberg had been cut down or severely pruned for fencing or firewood. “Both of Fridrichsberg’s well fenced gardens cannot be protected in any way”. Holes were broken in the fences, and the crops were scarcely allowed to ripen before they were stolen. The thieves threatened the laborers with murderous weapons in broad daylight. In November of 1812, a band of Osu had broken down the door of the plantation house and plundered everything in it, including even cooked food. Truelsen’s well-established cotton plantation not far from the fort had also been destroyed in the disturbances. In another letter of the same date,37 Schiønning wrote that he was sure the Chamber of Customs would appreciate “how far and in what a short time I have produced a flowering plantation in a wild place, where nothing else grew but thick woods, altogether impenetrable, because of thorns and parasites” (i. e., parasitic vines). He enclosed a fresh copy of his letter of October, 1808, in which had stressed that he had undertaken his plantings in response to the administration’s express command to promote and encourage horticulture and agriculture in Africa and regarding which the High Royal Collegia,

37 GJ 1346/1814, Schiønning, Christiansborg, a second letter of March 20, 1813, duplicate. plantation experiments during the war years 261

Finance as well as the Chamber of Customs, have repeatedly given express orders to the Council here, and indeed permitted the Council to employ 6000 [rigsdaler] in support of he, or they, who displayed industry and demonstrably made such progress as could in time assure the state a generally beneficial branch of commerce. This I have by my own exertions proved to be possible. Schiønning also enclosed a copy of the deed he had obtained for his plantation property, which “shows that I in the most ceremonious way, with every exclusive right, bought the land”. Everyone on the coast was doubtless well aware of the central administration’s admonitions to Flindt and Meyer, although it is not known that any of the other planters went to such lengths to document the security of their claims as Schiønning did here. The Danes were dealing, after all, with a pre-literate society, whose understandings regarding the ownership and transfer of land were assuredly quite different from their own.38 According to Schiønning’s deed, to which Danes and Africans alike affixed their marks,39 the parties to the transaction had assembled at Bibease, just south of the western Akuapem Hills. The land was described to have been partially cleared at the time of the transaction. Schiønning’s right to both the tall woods and the understory plants were affirmed: every palm tree, all “the earth’s products the buyer can utilize or extirpate at his pleasure”. All of it was his to sell, rent, mortgage, or otherwise dispose of. The bounds of the land were identified by the landmarks at hand:

the extent of this land is calculated from some large trees, called Sjadjo [the baobab40], which stand a little east of Bibiase, and goes to the north to the top of the nearest mountain, to the east to Dacubi brook, encompassing the Dacubi valley, which runs to the north, as far as same valley goes and the buyer wishes to make use of it, to the south along the Dacubi to the place near Jadosa where the well-known 10 [possibly 16] orange trees grow and thence to the west in a straight line to the boundary of an adjoining property. Schiønning had been shown over the property by the seller in the company of a number of other

38 See Polly Hill, The migrant cocoa-farmers of southern Ghana (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1963), on, for example, pp. 75–76, 109–111. 39 GK-II, Den Isertske Tractat m. m., Designation IV, Letter G, copy of Schønning’s deed to the plantation, dated Bibiase, October 2, 1807, marked ad GJ 1309/1813. Another copy is filed at GJS 144/1828, similarly marked with the Guinea Commission’s numbers and also with the Finance Collegium’s reference, ad FJ 3319/1813, because Schiønning, to save shipping charges, had addressed the same communications to both the Collegium and the Chamber. 40 Hepper, pp. 31, 169. 262 chapter seven distinguished local personages, who both determined and demarcated the boundaries; Fort Christiansborg’s and Peder Meyer’s interpreters were among the many witnesses.41 “After this was done, a straw was broken between buyer and seller, which according to the custom of the country is a sign of the transaction’s completeness and that the purchase could as little be changed as the straw put together again”. Oaths were sworn to scrupulously observe the terms of the transaction. (The deed dates to 1807—some of the signatures to 1813—but it appears that Schiønning had started work on his plantation, or perhaps on another in this same vicinity,42 considerably earlier. In a memoir published in 1833, C.H. Bonne, a retired sea-captain, reported that in August of 1803, having injured himself aboard ship, he had applied to Commandant Schiønning at Fort Prindsenssteen for help; Schiønning had treated his injury as best he could and had more than once taken him up to his coffee plantation at Dacubi.43) Various Britons [Schiønning’s letter went on], some of whom have been plantation owners themselves, some settled for many years in the West Indian islands, have unanimously said: that my plantation’s profusion sur- passes, when the short time is taken into consideration, anything they have seen in the West Indies, as well as Surinam[e] and Demerara. The coffee is in flavor and appearance entirely equal that which grows on Isle de Bourbon and Isle de France and has the advantage that it is drinkable as soon as it is harvested. Schiønning also enclosed an appraisal of his plantation44 made in 1811 by Meyer, Truelsen, Lauritz Krog, and Matthias Thonning (Peter Thonning’s brother, who had followed him into the African service);45 the plantation,

41 On such individuals as these interpreters, intermediaries between the two worlds, see Berlin, pp. 254–255; Monrad, Bidrag til en skildring, p. 327, note. 42 See Jeppesen, pp. 57–60, 80–82; DeCorse, pp. 161–165; Monrad, Bidrag til en skildring, pp. 320–327; and A Danish Jew in West Africa, Wulff Joseph Wulff, biography and letters 1836– 1842, Selena Axelrod Winsnes, ed. (Trondheim: Department of History, Norwegian University of Science and Technology – NTNU, 2004), p. 136. 43 C.H. Bonne, Søreiser paa Europas kyster og kysten af Guinea (Thisted: by the author, 1833), pp. 64–73, 80–81. 44 Dated Christiansborg, January 31, 1811: copy at GJS 1309/1813; GJS 144/1828, marked by the Guinea Commission Designation IV, Letter H; see the Green Books pp. 123 ff. 45 In 1805, Matthias Thonning had applied to the Chamber of Customs for a position on the coast. The success with which my older brother got through the difficulty of the climate in Guinea has waked in me the desire to try my luck there in that land. My age and constitution are, according to my brother’s assurance, suitable for the climate. I have spent my career in trade and office service: GJ(S) 636/1805, Matthias Thonning, Copenhagen, July 15, 1805; GJ 653/1805. plantation experiments during the war years 263 if it was the same one, was here called Pompo.46 The document described the main residence, which was apparently of six rooms, fourteen feet deep and of various widths, all aligned east and west; three of these served as what were described as “warehouses” and the others as living quarters. Part of the building had a flat stone balustraded roof on which coffee could be dried, and part of it was thatched. There was a cellar under two of the rooms, a graceful set of masonry stairs up to the main door, and a comfortable, hard-surfaced verandah with a “well equipped bath house” beneath it. Another building consisted of two storerooms and a kitchen with a masonry “hearth” and two ovens, with a flat platform roof. There were a thatch-roofed masonry gatehouse and another less substantial thatched building of three rooms for the house slaves; another such sheltered domestic creatures, of which geese, ducks, chickens, and turkeys were mentioned. There was a pigsty. All of these structures were equipped with good iron-shod doors and shutters. The woodwork was described as responsibly painted or tarred. The workers’ quarters were built of wood and clay, with thatched roofs. In the dale below the buildings there was a kitchen garden and nursery, “enclosed on three sides by thick lemon hedges and on the 4th side by the stream Dacubie”. The garden was divided in “4 quarters cut through by straight walks and provided with edible garden plants, both European and domestic”. There were useful “shrubs and fruit trees, among which are found sapodilla tree, guavas, Surinam cherries, oranges, [and] sweet lemons (a most rare fruit)”. (Some of these, of course, are neither European nor African, but American. It is not certain how or when they came here.) The Dacubie ran through the plantation, and in the garden there was a spring, which was said to seldom run dry, besides two excellent wells.47 Provision crops of various kinds were grown off to one side of the plantation proper.48 According to the journal that Gov. Schiønning has kept of the growth of his plantation, [the appraisal stated,] we have seen that he year by year has planted out 52,869 coffee trees; that he in the year 1809 had a mortality of over 15,600 young plants, because of unusually long absence of rain, and that there according to a correct tally in Novemb. 1810 remained 36,000 healthy and strong coffee trees of various age and growth.

46 See Lawrence, pp. 86–89. 47 See Monrad, Bidrag til en skildring, p. 325, and Jeppesen, pp. 59, 81. 48 GK V, Udkast til betænkningen afsluttet 26. februar 1847, Diverse notater ang. forskellige udkast til betænkning (ca. 1846–47?), 1/4 46, Endvidere Observanda i Betænk., Thonning’s notes on this appraisal’s statements about the stream and wells. 264 chapter seven

The governor had specifically asked that the appraisal address the plan tation’s potential, and Meyer and his compeers found that the “soil under these skies is so suitable for agriculture and the climate so healthy that there is no doubt of a fruitful outcome, when proper diligence and attention are employed”. Schiønning’s second letter of March 20, 1813, went on: To prove the character of the climate I will merely state this: many Europeans, countrymen as well as foreigners, who had lost all health on the coasts, traveled to my plantation and by a short stay got health and strength without doctor and apothecaries: the climate thus agrees with Europeans and experts declare that Aquapim is healthier than anyplace in the West Indies. My intention in detailing this at such length is: to make the administration aware: that in Africa lies an inestimable treasure,49 which with time can become a substitute for West Indian colonies…. Here, then, is a climate just as good or better, a better soil, and beneath the mountains regular rain the year through. Finance Minister Herr Count Schimmelmann has more than once laid it upon me to keep this goal before my eye, when he with so much eagerness encouraged me to cultivate West Indian plants in Aquapim. Herr Captain Isert’s hasty death prevented that bold man from producing anything significant in Africa. The second expedition, of which Herr Lieutenant Colonel von Rohr was appointed as leader, was never really carried out, because he did not arrive here and those who should have worked toward this goal under him were not themselves equipped with means of their own, and did not get forceful support from the Council for lack of sufficient orders. The obstacles to colonization here in this land that it might at present be possible to mention will all fall away with time, if the administration will attack the matter with energy; that is, employ both people and money enough. That this cannot happen at the present epoch I realize, to be sure, but this evil will presumably come to an end. Mars and Bellona will then yield to Apollo and Ceres. Neither are these ruptures that now prevail here in this country insurmountable; the lack of money on the part of the Europeans is the main cause, and with money and well chosen measures on the administration’s side, a more normal state of affairs could quickly be restored. As for the “enclosed survey proceeding” he went on, “it is no longer valid, specially regarding the dwellings”. He had hoped that the plantation would be spared in the war between the Asante and the Akuapem, since the Danes were not involved, “but I was mistaken…. All my new, faithfully

49 Kjerstin Lagesen Berg picked this phrase out for the title of her thesis: “ ‘… i Africa ligger en ubetalelig Skat …’ Danmark-Norges plantasjeanlegg på Gullkysten 1788–1811”, (thesis in history, Trondheim: Norges Teknisk-Naturvitenskapelige Universitet, 1997). I am grateful to Per Hernæs for providing me with a copy of it. plantation experiments during the war years 265 built houses, as well as the workers’ residences”, had been looted and burned. In November, 1811, Schiønning had felt it safe to send his workers up to the plantation again. “They cleaned around the coffee trees again, and the only harm the plantation had suffered was the lost of one harvest. All the trees were unharmed”. Hostilities had again erupted in 1812, this time between the people of Accra and Akuapem, and he had again brought his workers down to the coast. His plantation had been without supervision since August of 1812, and so another harvest had been lost. The coffee trees are still unharmed and the plantation can be saved, if the war can soon be settled. However, my loss is very great and this is added to it, that I must support more than 70 workers of various ages and sexes on the coast, without their benefitting me or earning food and clothing for themselves. All this shall not deter me from continuing my work with eagerness, as soon as I dare begin again. I write all this not to request a loan or support in the current state of the times. I can unfortunately all too well imagine the condition of my country, the dear land of my birth, and the great sums of money that are required to conduct a long and expensive war. All he could ask at this juncture was this: that note be taken of my tireless industry, of the flowering profusion to which I with no help but my own and my own fortune have brought my plantation, as the survey proceeding shows, of the faithfulness with which I have fulfilled the administration’s command, and of my goal of bringing about public benefit for my native land. He was convinced that “the wise leaders of the state will not let an enterprising man sink unrelieved beneath the burden of distress and poverty”, and he asked that this communication be laid before the king. Schiønning also recommended with this post that Fort Prindsenssteen should be closed. It took a quarter of the establishments’ budget, he said, but had been of no use since the cessation of the slave trade. Nothing could be grown there, and there was no wood. Johan Wrisberg, who remained, at least formally, the governor of the Guinea establishments, was apparently asked his opinion of this suggestion when it arrived in Copenhagen;50 he responded that control of the Volta required that both Prindsenssteen and Kongenssteen be maintained, and there the matter rested.51

50 GJ 1309/1813, item 3, and an annotation indicating a letter was sent to Wrisberg on October 21, 1813. In general, the colonial office appears to have conducted the administration of the African establishments without troubling Wrisberg, but it consulted him when it found it convenient to do so. 51 GJ 1353/1814, Wrisberg, November 2, 1813. 266 chapter seven

According to Peter Thonning’s notes in the Guinea Commission’s archives, Truelsen had also written home in March, 1813, arguing that [t]he administration’s goal cannot be achieved unless there is a separate gov. for the plantation enterprise, … and then the plantation enterprise will surely get going and pay the planters thousandfold—had we had a good fort up by our plantations when the disturbance broke out, then our enterprise there would have gone on unhindered, our plantations would have been in good condition, our folk in order, and Sch.’s, Mejer’s, and I together would have had nearly 100,000 # of coffee awaiting shipment.52 With this same ship, in March, 1813, Jens Flindt sent a letter addressed to both the Finance Collegium and to the Chamber of Customs.53 All had been well at Eibo until the end of 1810, and he enclosed as evidence of his industry a copy of an exchange with a British captain, upon whom he had prevailed to accept a payment in the form of three thousand pounds of cayenne pepper, half that amount of Guinea pepper, a ton and a half of yellow dye root, and sixty hides and skins. His plantation had then been destroyed by the Asante in 1811.54 In August, 1813, the Council was able to get another packet of mail off the coast; the letters arrived in Copenhagen in 1814. Schiønning reported that the Danish planters were still being prevented from sending slaves up to their plantations.55 Nevertheless, he said, “The coffee trees are so strong that although my plantation has not been cleaned in almost 3 years the trees are still healthy under the weeds and full of fruit”. He hoped to be able to take the matter up with the elders of Akuapem soon and to begin to make up some of the loss. Flindt, for his part, wrote that peace again prevailed at Ada; he wished only that Denmark had a couple of forts on some of the islands in the Volta, which would be able to “bid all superior might defiance”. For want of slaves, he had made no new progress at Eibo, but he was distilling quantities of ardent spirits. A large still brought out from England was up for sale, and he asked the Government for funds with which to purchase it; in return, he said, he would undertake to supply the establishments with all their spirits.56

52 GK III, Diverse, Materialer, a sheet of Thonning’s notes marked “Extr. af Guin. Sagen {?} ang. Kaff. Plant. & desl.” Truelsen’s letter, which appears not to be indexed in the Guinea Journal and may have been addressed privately to Thonning, was dated March 30, 1813. 53 GJ 1341/1814, from the Finance Collegium, forwarding Flindt’s letter, Kongenssteen, March 20, 1813; filed forward at GJS 1350/1814 (copy at GJ S 171/1836). 54 See also GJ 1751/1819, Reiersen, January 25, 1819. 55 GJ(S) 1348/1814, Schiønning, August 27, 1813. 56 GJ(S) 1350/1814, Flindt, August 26, 1813, addressed to both the Finance Collegium and the Chamber of Customs. plantation experiments during the war years 267

The Chamber of Customs had sent Schiønning’s earlier letters to the Finance Collegium for its opinion in October, 1813,57 but it had received no immediate response, for the Collegium, as Denmark struggled through the huge economic crisis occasioned by the war, was occupied with weightier matters. At the end of that dismal year, Ernst Schimmelmann was relieved of his duties at the Ministry of Finance, and the most important metropolitan advocate of the African colonial project was thus removed from at least one of the bastions of his influence.58 In May, 1814, the Finance Collegium sent Schiønning’s letters back to the Chamber of Customs together with Flindt’s missive regarding the purchase of a large still: the Chamber was of course free to lay the matter of Danish agricultural undertakings on the coast before the King, the Collegium wrote, but “under the present circumstances any payment from the [ministry of finance] for this colonization can absolutely not be counted on”.59 In July, the Chamber wrote to Flindt that he could expect no support for his distilling operation.60 In May, 1814, Schiønning61 reported that Peder Meyer had applied to the Council on the coast for support of his agricultural undertakings. The Council had been unwilling to assist him, in the financial circumstances, and “because no security can be given for a property in Aquapim, so long as no peace has been arranged, and because the Land of Aquapim has itself no security for its own existence”. Repeatedly rebuffed, Meyer had lodged a bitter protest with the Council, and the matter was now being sent up to the Chamber of Customs. Meyer had written that since September, 1812, unsettled local conditions had prevented him from working his plantation in Akuapem except for a period of forty days in 1812, when he had managed to weed the greatest part of his coffee before he was again forced down to the coast.62 The plantation can yet be saved from complete destruction, but if it must lie thus until the impending rainy season is past, it will be a flat impossibility to save even a single coffee tree. Upon rescuing this plantation my whole weal and woe depends, since I, in accordance with the Government’s proclamation by placard of 13th February 1798 of His Majesty’s most gracious will

57 GJ 1341/1814, annotation, to the Finance Collegium, October 21, 1813. 58 Olsen, “Finansforvaltningen”, p. 407. 59 GJ 1341/1814, Finanscollegiet, May 23, 1814. 60 GJ 1350/1814, annotation, to Flindt on July 8, 1814. 61 GJS 1366/1814, Schiønning, May 21, 1814. 62 ad GJS 1366/1814, item 6, copy of correspondence between Meyer and the Council: Meyer, Ussue, March 12, 1814. 268 chapter seven

regarding agriculture here in this land, ventured all I had acquired in a long residence here in this land on agriculture, all in the hope of support for the continuation of same if I needed it. The restoration of the plantation was now beyond his immediate means, and he asked for a loan of a thousand rigsdaler, offering as security the land itself, which, he said, he had duly purchased upon receiving the Finance Collegium’s polite rejection, in 1806, of his application for support. Without a fresh infusion of funds, he doubted that he would ever be in a position to repay a loan of two thousand rigsdaler that he had received from the Council on the coast in 1804. Schiønning was opposed to making Meyer a new loan: “the state our native land is in makes it our duty to save on all that we have”; Commandant Holm agreed. Johan Richter, on the other hand, felt that the plantation could easily be saved and recommended a loan of five or six hundred rigsdaler, although the use of the money should be closely monitored. Jens Flindt pointed out that Meyer had already pledged the plantation as security for the loan he had received in 1804. He felt that in any case no property could be secure in these troubled times, and he voted against Meyer’s application.63 Six weeks later, Meyer resubmitted his application, but now he asked for two thousand rigsdaler, with which sum he said he could purchase a good number of “folk” and other needful things at the impending auction of Truelsen’s estate; indeed, he would be able to buy the whole plantation, and offer both his own and Truelsen’s property as security for this loan. Only quick action, however, could save either of the two plantations from ruin.64 Schiønning and Holm remained opposed, but Richter now voted to grant the loan without reservation, “the more so since it is His Majesty’s supreme will that every private man who wishes to take up agriculture here in this land shall be supported by the Government here”. Richter found the security offered real enough. Flindt, again, wanted nothing to do with this loan. The Council, in dismissing Meyer’s new application, inquired as to the whereabouts of the slaves Meyer had put up as security for the loan made him in 1804. Truelsen’s plantation was even larger than Meyer’s, but less well developed, and the Council doubted that Truelsen had left enough slaves to work it. In addition, the Danish government’s intentions for the establishments remained up in the air, the Council felt.

63 ad GJS 1366/1814, Schiønning, Holm, Richter, and Flindt, March 15, 1814. 64 ad GJS 1366/1814, Meyer, April 29, 1814. plantation experiments during the war years 269

“The administration has, to be sure, recommended the colonial enterprise earlier, but the establishments’ immediate needs and wants should be the Council’s first and principal object”. Schiønning also permitted himself to suggest that Meyer was now attempting to mortgage his plantation at Bibease for the third time.65 Meyer, not pleased by Schiønning’s insinuation, wrote back in considerable dudgeon.66 What he had mortgaged in 1804 had been his plantation at Jadosa. “It is from that plantation that I was able to provide myself with the necessary coffee plants for my plantation at Bibiase, just as I also from same plantation provided… Herr Governor Schönning and merchant Truelsen with all the coffee plants and seed of fresh coffee berries that they have used to plant their plantations with”. He had begun on his plantation at Bibease in February of 1807, and when he had received the Finance Collegium’s letter of November 11, 1806, in which the Collegium had stated “that it is [an] important thing that the area on which my plantation is laid out must properly belong to me before any significant advance can be given”, he had, in October, 1807, “bought a significant piece of land at Bibiase, as the deed of 5th October same year shows”. He pointed out that he could not very well have mortgaged this plantation, “of which I was not the owner of a stalk of grass”, in 1804. He feared that the plantation at Jadosa “is altogether ruined”, since he had been unable to find time to weed it in 1812 and subsequently had not been allowed access to it. He referred the Council to the official standing budget for the establishments of May 18, 1796, in which there had been “fixed a significant annual capital for the support of agricultural establishments, indeed even that same budget orders that the superfluous inventory folk could be turned over to private persons who wished to do agricultural work”. He therefore protested in the strongest terms the Council’s handling of the matter. He stood to lose everything he had simply because he had committed himself to the crown’s express wish to advance agriculture on the coast. His Majesty’s orders were not being carried out, and Meyer complained that he suffered “the greatest destitution and poverty for my good intentions in fulfilling His Majesty’s supreme wish and command”. Schiønning circulated this communication to the rest of the Council. Holm argued that the Danish regime had never in fact provided any funds for the support of plantations, and that a plantation, of which the owner was master only so far and so long as the Africans saw fit, was of little value

65 ad GJS 1366/1814, Schiønning, April 30, 1814. 66 ad GJS 1366/1814, Meyer, May 1, 1814. 270 chapter seven as security for a loan.67 Flindt agreed that, especially under the circumstances, Meyer could not claim to control the land he was offering as security.68 Furthermore, he said, in three years of unrest, forty of the late Truelsen’s slaves had taken refuge with a local fetish priest and were thus lost to the estate. Meyer had appealed to legislation signed in 1796: Flindt went even farther back and argued that Meyer could not legally have purchased land in Akuapem, for it had all already been ceded to the Danish crown through Isert’s treaty in 1788. Flindt said that he was personally willing to make Meyer a loan or gift of 150 rigsdaler, for it was well known that Meyer, who had a large family, was in rather severe straits. Schiønning fired the last shot, saying that Meyer had offered no more security than “a meaningless piece of paper”.69 (Schiønning had of course sent just such a piece of paper to Copenhagen the year before to assure the Danish government of the legitimacy of his own claim.) The Council therefore rejected Meyer’s application, Schiønning wrote, “because you so many times for so many years, in so many places, have with eagerness made a beginning on fair and useful plantations, and merely out of the desire for change abandoned what you have begun after having used much money”. It did not seem wise to back him further. “Your fair plantation at [Jadosa], where 5 to 6,000 good coffee trees grew exceedingly well, you deliberately allowed to fall into decay”, without any compelling reason, and the workers offered as security to the crown had never been yielded up. The plantation itself no longer existed, but Schiønning warned Meyer that the books on these slaves could yet be reopened. When a copy of this correspondence arrived in Copenhagen, it was forwarded to Governor Wrisberg; he sided with the Council on the coast.70 Early in 1815, Schiønning reported that “Hr. Peter Meyer, with the insignificant means he has at hand, not without danger to person and property, has dared to travel up to Bibiase in the intention of saving a little of his plantation”.71 Schiønning had not found it advisable to follow Meyer’s example, but he had not abandoned hope of renewing his agricultural efforts, toward which end he had for three years now been maintaining at great expense an idle work force of a hundred slaves, in hopes of receiving some tangible encouragement from Copenhagen; if it was not to be forthcoming, he said, he wished to “leave my prison for a time and travel to Denmark”.

67 ad GJS 1366/1814, Holm, May 5, 1814. 68 ad GJS 1366/1814, Flindt, May 6, 1814. 69 ad GJS 1366/1814, Schiønning, May 11, 1814. 70 GJ 1371/1814, Wrisberg, November 25, 1814. 71 ad GJ 1488/1816, filed at GJS 7/1831, Schiønning, Christiansborg, February 5, 1815. CHAPTER EIGHT

AN EYE TO THE FUTURE: COLONIAL AMBITIONS IN A TIME OF RETRENCHMENT

Early in 1810, Peter Thonning, his princely charge having perhaps by this time outgrown his tutors, had been brought into the Danish civil administration as a junior officer in the Chamber of Customs.1 It seems reasonable to suppose that Thonning was being rewarded not merely for his service to the royal family but for his African service and expertise, and a year later he was promised supervision of the colonial office as soon as the aging Rosenstand-Goiske relinquished it, which, however, did not occur until 1815, upon Rosenstand-Goiske’s death, when, as a mark of the government’s confidence in him, Thonning was also given a large increase in emolument.2 It is likely that this was not simply a typical bureaucratic advancement for a promising young civil servant, but that it was King Frederik’s intent to place this experienced African colonialist in charge of the administration not only of the African forts but of the West Indian colony, whose circumstances had been so fundamentally altered by his ban on the slave trade. However, it is not to be supposed that the king was forcing the African colonial issue at this date, when his kingdom was so troubled. From the outset, Thonning could speak with enormous authority on the economic geography of the Danish enclave on the coast, and the substance of his project for a plantation colony in Akuapem—and Count Schimmelmann’s interest in it—was doubtless well-known in the halls of government in the old “red building”, the seat of the government in

1 GTK, Toldkammerkancelli- og Sekretariatsager, A., Kgl. Expeditioner vedk. Protokoller og Sager, Bestallingsprotokol for Danmark fra 1773 til 10 Februar 1816, 1810, p. 233, January 25, 1810. 2 GTK, Toldkammerkancelli- og Sekretariatsager, B., Kollegiets Organisation og indre forhold vedkommende Resolutioner og Sager, Geheimeraad Sehesteds papirer vedk. Generaltoldkammeret og Kommercekollegiet, 1814–31, Udaterede Koncepter til Forestillinger fra Sehested, Sehested’s undated draft, [1815]; GTK, Toldkammerkancelli- og Sekretariatsager, A., Kgl. Expeditioner vedk. Protokoller og Sager, Frederik VI’s resolutioner og rescripter vedkommende Generaltoldkammerets sager 1808–39, No. 13, Febr. 23, 1811, and No. 29, Sehested’s representation, October 17, 1815. 272 chapter eight

Copenhagen.3 His ability to articulate the colonial potential of the African enclave—and to negotiate and formulate the legislative basis for its development—was now tested at the highest levels. The operation of the Danish government revolved around the king’s unchallengeable prerogatives, and King Frederik involved himself in an amazing range of decisions: the royal signature was required on every official action of the slightest importance. He was minutely informed and endlessly, famously engaged: enormous, overwhelming quantities of information came across his desk, and his subjects paraded through his court.4 However, his decisions were in fact always taken in the context of a far more complex political process than is implied by the term ‘absolute monarchy’. Before any measure was brought to the king, it was subject to debate within and among the various branches of the administration, the bureaucrats constantly reminding one another, by way of argumentation, of the awful authority to which they were all subject. Cautious consensus doubtless tended to be the result, for no one cared to risk the monarch’s rejection of a legislative proposal. In 1816, the Chamber of Customs and the Commerce Collegium, which had jurisdiction over the Indian entrepôts, were merged into a single agency,5 and the geographical, economic, and cultural scope of the colonial office’s portfolio widened enormously. At least for as long as he held this office, the breadth and subtlety of Thonning’s view of the colonial world was perhaps unmatched in Danish society. All the information that was to be had about the colonies, every administrative report, every budget, every application for employment, every bill of lading, every legal complaint—every snippet of colonial news, from the Bay of Bengal to the Lesser Antilles—all of it came through his office. In 1823, he was given responsibility for the important customs district of eastern Denmark, including Copenhagen and Elsinore, which was of far greater fiscal significance than the colonial office,6 but it was in the nature of the collegial

3 See Ole Feldbæk, “Vækst og reformer; dansk forvaltning 1720–1814”, in Dansk forvaltningshistorie, Vol. 1, pp. [227]–340, on pp. 228–230, and Hanne Raabyemagle and Ole Feldbæk, Den røde bygning, Frederik den Fjerdes kancellibygning gennem 275 år (Copenhagen: Finansministeriet, 1996). 4 Georg Nørregård, Efterkrigsår i dansk udenrigspolitik 1815–24 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1960), p. 12. 5 Poul Erik Olsen, “Finansforvaltningen”, pp. 412–413. 6 GTK, Toldkammerkancelli- og Sekretariatsager, A., Kgl. Expeditioner vedk. Protokoller og Sager, Frederik VI’s resolutioner og rescripter vedkommende Generaltoldkammerets sager 1808–39, No. 51, Sehested’s representation, August 19, 1823, royal resolution of November 8, 1823; “Thonning, Peter”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 3rd ed.; GTK, Toldkammerkancelli- og Sekretariatsager, B., Kollegiets Organisation og indre forhold colonial ambitions in a time of retrenchment 273 structure of the Danish administrative apparatus that the conduct of African colonial affairs would be subject to his scrutiny and influence even after he no longer exercised direct control over the colonial office. Denmark emerged reeling from the Napoleonic Wars. As a consequence of the Congress of Vienna, the kingdom was stripped of Norway, a huge territory and an important source of experienced seamen, without whom the rebuilding of Denmark’s shattered naval and merchant fleets was slow and difficult. The economy was many years in finding its feet. Sugar production in the Danish West Indies and the India and China trade contributed somewhat to this recovery, but nothing can be said to have been coming out of Denmark’s West African establishments.7 One of Thonning’s tasks in his new position was to impose a radically reduced new budget on the Guinea establishments,8 and this was a complex and politically charged affair. Expenditures for the establishments would inevitably be scrutinized in relation to those for the East and West Indian colonies, and it appears that the argument that the African forts should be abandoned altogether was by no means to be dismissed out of hand in these difficult times. Thonning’s representation regarding the African establishments in 1816 was a careful and balanced presentation of the arguments, but it left no doubt about the colonial policy he recommended.9 His view of the situation seemed very clear, and, with five years in the heart of the bureaucracy behind him (or perhaps in spite of this experience),10 he expressed himself cogently and forcefully.

vedkommende Resolutioner og Sager, Akter vedkommende Overbestyrelsen, blandt andet om Revisionens Adskillelse fra Expeditionen, 1771–1844, Thonning, October 8, 1831, to Lowzow. 7 Nørregård, Efterkrigsår, p. 9; Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 191. 8 ad GJ 1488/1816, notes in Thonning’s hand, Forslag til yderste Indskrænkning i Etablissementernes Reglement, filed forward, with much else, to GJS 7/1831. See Hans Jensen, Vol. 1, pp. 15–16, for the national administrative context in which Thonning fashioned this strict new budget. 9 GTK, Vestindiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner for 1816, representation numbered 92 a, December 10, 1816 (resolution December 12, 1816 [recorded as December 13 by the Chamber of Customs]). 10 It is not much of an exaggeration to say that Official life in the last age of the [administrative] collegia, Frederik VI’s and Christian VIII’s days, seems to have been marked by a thorough uniformity…. Whether one picks up documents from the Chancellery, from the Exchequer, from the Admiralty, or wherever at all, one gets the illusion that they all must have been written by [the] same man: 274 chapter eight

Since the ban on the slave trade had come into force, he reminded the king, the establishments had been of “no advantage to the mother state”. There is no trade and almost no colonial agriculture to support. There is produced neither in the area nor in the hinterland any sort of ware in sufficient quantity to become the object of even the smallest European ship’s voyage. The peoples are not subject to Danish authority and are only by their own advantage bound to the establishments. Even if authority over the nations could (at significant expense) be established and maintained, nothing would be won thereby anyway, since the nations, because of their present customs, resources, and condition, do not pay anything [toward either local or national administrative costs;] and since migrations of people are not unusual, it would scarcely be possible to introduce by force any organization of the form of administration that entailed unaccustomed obligations or that by significant departures from the present state of affairs displeases the people. Under such circumstances no other benefit of the establishments’ maintenance can be seen than the hope of a future advantage, which can counter the costs now and over the course of time. If, to carry on with this assumption, a glance is cast to the future, it seems quite clear from the state of the West Indies that European colonial agriculture there will become more and more uncertain, especially as the negroes, after the cessation of the slave trade, more fully nationalize and thus more easily could agree upon the means of avoiding the discipline that in particular the cultivation of sugar requires, and which through the wide-spread church-teaching of the Methodists becomes more and more loathsome to them. The West Indian islands will then, in a changed condition, in no way be able to produce sufficient quantity of colonial products for Europe’s usual provision, and demand will force the European colonial system, in a form adapted to the circumstances, to turn to Africa. Denmark has then no nearer place than its Guinean domain for such agricultural undertakings, and scarcely the prospect of obtaining any nearer. In this region many happy circumstances for colonial plantations come together, namely: the most fertile soil and climate, bounded to the west by the river Sakumo-Fyo, to the north by a high mountain range, to the east by the river Volta, to the south by the sea. Many small rivers and streams flow through it and fertilize the land, and could ease transport to the shore. It is provided with all the non-Euro- pean necessaries appropriate to a colony at the cheapest prices, and to such degree that in the event of sea war it would require no support from the mother land or foreigners.

Kai Fr. Hammerich, “Systemskiftet i 1848. Overgangen fra collegium til ministerium”, in Den danske centraladministration, Aage Sachs, ed. (Copenhagen: V. Pios Boghandel, Poul Branner, 1921), pp. 397–509, on p. 470. Too much stress should not be laid on this regimenta- tion, however; the collegial system allowed royal officials substantial individual initiative, and indeed required it of them. colonial ambitions in a time of retrenchment 275

But to these essential and significant advantages are opposed the following: As long as the earth is uncultivated, the unhealthiness of the climate will demand many sacrifices. And when the land is settled, the colony can fear that good relations with the nations cannot always be maintained; it must therefore be prepared to be able resist an attack, even by the Asianté nation, which is the mightiest, and only 40 to 50 Danish miles [ or 160 to 200 English miles] distant from the area of the establishments. This nation can probably call 20–30,000 men to arms, a force that, although completely undisciplined, can nevertheless be dangerous for a little colony, and can even much disquiet a larger, if it is not in a position to go on the offensive. Another inconvenience, which the Guinea Coast has in common with the Coromandel Coast, confronts shipping, and is that there is from Sierra-Leona to the River Benin, a stretch approaching 300 Danish miles, neither harbor or any river navigable by large European ships, for the River Volta accommodates only vessels of up to 10 feet in draft. On the other hand the roadstead is good and ships at all seasons secure from hurricanes, which do not appear here. Despite many and significant advantages, the establishment of a colony near the establishments in Guinea may thus encounter great difficulties. A consideration from the point of view of humanity, which cannot be quite passed over here, is this: that just as Denmark gave Europe the example of the abolition of the slave trade, thus might Denmark also possibly be destined to show the rest of Europe the way to alleviate the drawback that the general abolition of the slave trade by the Europeans has given rise to in Africa, which all the more regrettably is quite recognizable in the unfortunate and cruel conflicts that have since that time prevailed unceasingly everywhere the European establishments extend. An impolitic passage in Thonning’s notes, “Despite everything that could be said against the abolition of the slave trade in such a way as occurred, it should scarcely be thought of to reintroduce it”, did not survive in the representation.11 Only through colonies will the Europeans be able to spread culture and milder customs, as well as win influence among the natives, and by a suitably wise manner of proceeding gradually open the way to the abolition of the slave trade and thralldom here, where it is older than the very oldest knowledge of the land, and thoroughly rooted in the nations’ present constitution and every condition. The intentions of the English and the Dutch for their Guinea establishments have not yet revealed themselves, although the Dutch were said to have begun plantations for colonial products at that establishment that is

11 ad GJ 1488/1816, Thonning, Note til Deliberation angaaende Etablissementerne i Guinea, filed at GJS 7/1831. 276 chapter eight

most isolated from the English, namely Axim, in the vicinity of the River Ancobra, a few miles west of Cap Tres Puntas.12 In all these circumstances it does not seem that for the moment the decision can without misgiving be taken to completely cut all expenditures by abandoning the establishments. Deliberations must therefore address the least expensive way to maintain the standing of territorial rights. All of the forts except Christiansborg were to be closed.13 Thonning also laid out a long list of cost-cutting measures, some of them quite trifling: fewer watch-guns were to be fired, for example, to save powder. The staffing, in particular, would have to be reduced. The budget allowed for only six European officers in the establishments,14 which made it all the more important to appoint effective and respectable officers to the establishments and to pay them well, so they are not for noticeable want subject to contempt from the natives of the land or the other European nations established there, which is so much the more necessary, as personal prestige has the most important influence on the natives…. Scarcely anything should presumably be budgeted anything for cultivation of colonial products on a small scale…. The governor, if he has the desire and industry, will be able to accomplish what is required to give the negroes knowledge of these products and their handling with the inventory negroes and insignificant costs, which can be reckoned among the unknown expenses, … and if the chief takes no interest in this matter, then all money expended on it is wasted. On the other hand it would be beneficial if private individuals could be encouraged to it without loss to the royal treasury, for example by assuring them of the disposal of the products, which now absolutely does not occur, or only most incidentally, for such products are not articles of trade here, and this is an absolute hindrance to all beginnings. This goal could possibly be worked toward by proclaiming that the establishments would buy coffee and cotton in small lots, and the price given would have to be only high enough that they could be brought home by the ship that every year takes out the establishments’ cargo and sold without loss.15 In the prevailing fiscal circumstances, this was as far as the Chamber of Customs was prepared to go to encourage agriculture for export in the enclave.

12 See Daendels, passim; see also Martin, pp. 153–154. 13 Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 191. 14 GTK, Guineiske Resolutioner 1816–20, Thonning’s note to Ove Sehested, the head of the Chamber of Customs and Commerce Collegium, Febr. 28, 1818. 15 See also a draft of letter of December 14, 1816, to the government on the coast: ad GJ 1488/1816, filed at GJS 7/1831. colonial ambitions in a time of retrenchment 277

Governor Wrisberg, in Copenhagen, was duly consulted as the new Guinea policy was being crafted; aside from some disagreement about the relative importance of various forts (Thonning thought Fort Prindsens steen was of little value, since it was unable to protect either the Volta or a colony in Akuapem, and on the whole favored new fortifications at Kpone and Lai16), the governor appears to have given Thonning little trouble.17 Wrisberg, having perused the papers Thonning had brought him, found Thonning’s calculations “very correct”, except that an interpreter at Fort Kongenssteen should be budgeted for.18 Shortly thereafter, Thonning’s budget proposal went before the king. Wrisberg was now at last relinquishing his formal appointment. He had been permitted to travel home from the coast in 1807 to recoup his health, but, after nine years, his health had not much improved, and he asked to be pensioned off.19 It thus happened that King Frederik, within the space of a few days, read Wrisberg’s petition to retire, in which he recounted all the steps he had taken to advance the colonial project—a road to Akuapem, the introduction of coffee and other exotic plants at the garden he had established at Frederiksberg, and the like—and Thonning’s new budget, which, although it cut the forts’ funding drastically, in fact secured the possibility of further Danish colonial efforts on the Guinea Coast in the future.20 The king signed both measures. In October, 1816, on the coast, Jens Flindt, expressing surprise at having had no word regarding his account of the destruction of his plantation at Eibo and of his forced sojourn with an Asante army, nor regarding “the utmost efforts made to investigate and discover the richnesses, hitherto

16 ad GJ 1488/1816, Thonning’s notes, filed at GJS 7/1831. 17 Thonning kept with his notes and his draft of the new African budget a personal note from Governor Wrisberg, who invited him and another official to his home in Copenhagen to discuss the proposed cuts in the budget, as he was too ill to go out; Wrisberg closed by sending his regards to Thonning’s wife. This is a courtesy utterly indispensable in Denmark to this day, but its use here is an indication that Thonning and Wrisberg were on more than a purely official footing: ad GJS 1488/1816, Wrisberg, Copenhagen, November 17, 1816, filed at GJS 7/1831. The African circle in Copenhagen was very small, and Thonning probably now found himself, more than ever, at its center. Allowing for whatever other circumstances or antipathies might intervene, their common experience on the coast of Africa would tend to bring these people together. 18 ad GJ 1488/1816, Wrisberg, December 1, 1816, filed at GJS 7/1831. 19 Wrisberg’s application to be relieved of his appointment, in November, 1816, is also to be found in this file of papers regarding the new budget: ad GJ 1489/1816, Wrisberg, Copenhagen, November 28, 1816, addressed to the king, filed at GJS 7/1831. 20 GJ 1489/1816, royal resolution relieving Wrisberg of his post and appointing Johan Richter governor in his place, December 12, 1816, copy, filed at GJS 7/1831. 278 chapter eight hidden from all Europeans, of the River Volta” and various of “the most essential and important” colonial measures to be taken, sent in a fresh report on the Volta region. (This new description was classified by the Guinea Commission years later as Designation III, document D.)21 Flindt was sure, he wrote, that the Chamber of Customs had received numerous proposals regarding the establishment of plantations in the “Aquapim Territories”. He doubted, however, that the Chamber had been apprised of the difficulties connected with agriculture in Akuapem, however rich the land might be. Foremost was the cost of transportation, “which for the poor colonist without private means will quite consume the profit of all his work and harvested fruits”. Furthermore, no colony in western Akuapem could ever be safe from the Asante, “from whom no fortification, so deep in the country, where they can be surrounded and bottled up by the enemy, can secure any colonist, still less their property”. A siege of only a few months would be sufficient to starve them out. Besides that, there was no water anywhere for miles around except in the rainy season. Water had to be fetched from springs at the feet of the Akuapem hills. (An annotation, doubtless Thonning’s, protests that “many brooks flow down out of the mountains”, and that these could easily be dammed.) The Chamber and the Finance Collegium had doubtless long since learned, Flindt went on, that Schiønning’s, Meyer’s, and Truelsen’s plantations had been destroyed in the recent troubles; he understood that Meyer and Truelsen were now both dead and that the Africans had forbidden Schiønning access to his plantation. He referred to his earlier communications regarding the Volta region, which, he said (rather expansively interpreting the Finance Collegium’s courteous expressions in its rejection of his applications for funds), “really is the important place where the Finance Collegium has expressed to me its most eager wishes there to continue my efforts”. His work at Eibo had

21 Flindt’s letter, Kongenssteen, October 30, 1816, was journaled by the Chamber of Customs as GJ 1569/1817, and there is a reference forward to GJ 1662/1818, August 4, 1818, when the Directorate for the National Debt and the Sinking Fund asked the Chamber for information about the substantial debt Flindt had owed the state since 1800. Here there is another reference forward to GJ 1751/1819, where acting governor Reiersen, on the coast, January 25, 1819, reported in response to the Chamber’s query that Flindt’s plantation had been destroyed by the Asante and that Flindt was in no position to repay his debt, which the GTK duly reported to the Directorate for the National Debt. At this place in the files there is an empty folder marked both GJ 490/1804 and GJ 1569/1817, and this is doubtless where the Guinea Commission found Flindt’s letter of October 30, 1816, with enclosures. However, the four Designation III documents, all letters from Flindt, are now filed with irrelevant material at GJS 1697/1818. colonial ambitions in a time of retrenchment 279 by no means proved unfruitful, he said, but the fact was that Eibo would not stand comparison with the advantages and conveniences of the rest of the Volta region, including the fertility of the soil, the frequency of rainfall, and the area’s fruitful and wide-spreading extents of land, that all closely border on the River Volta, on which, with the country’s canoes or flat bottomed vessels and prams built for the purpose, whole ships’ cargoes can be transported to and from each plantation. Most of the country’s streams and creeks were lined with extensive woods “of the most useful and useable tree species”. He urged the Chamber to “consider the Rio Volta’s glories, both for agricultural industry and the expansion of trade following therefrom, and what use same in time might entail to the benefit of the royal Danish establishments and the true advantage of the fatherland”. Bato, sixty-five miles up the Volta, was the last river town in what Flindt regarded as Danish territory. Above that was the land of the Aqvambo, and Bato should therefore be well secured against attack. “And to completely achieve this, nature has, about four miles above Bato, formed a little island in the Volta River about two miles long and a half mile wide”; here, on this island, in Gerhard Friderich Wrisberg’s time, Flindt went on, there had been a trade factory. This would be a good place for a Danish fortification. The island was subject to what Flindt called seven-year floods, to be sure, and might easily be washed away, but he thought it could be protected with bulkheading. The position would prevent the Asante or any other force from coming down the river in times of trouble. (“This island is not on Lind’s map and [has] not improbably washed away”, Thonning remarked in the 1830s).22 Below Bato were the towns Mafee, Mlefi, and Blappa, fifty miles or so above Fort Kongenssteen. The reaches on which they lay were well supplied with shellfish, and a good, white, strong lime for a colony’s defensive works could be burned from the piles of shells which had built up over the years. Where Flindt mentions mountains on the east bank, Thonning, who was at least to this degree familiar with the area, scrawled “Mountains!!!” in a margin, but he thought it “very likely” that, as Flindt suggested, this

22 Lind, a naval officer, mapped the lower reaches of the river in 1827 and 1828: H.G. Lind, “Undersøgelser, foretagne op ad Floden Volta i 1827 og 1828”, Archiv for Søvæsenet, Vol. 6, 1834, pp. 1–16 (with map tipped in at back of volume). 280 chapter eight area was healthy, and perhaps one of the best places for European colonization on the Volta. Just across the river from Mlefi were great cliffs on which fortifications could be erected, Flindt wrote. Flindt had taken soundings around some of the islands and in one place had found between six and eleven fathoms of water, where, he said, a whole fleet could comfortably anchor. A couple of miles above Kongens steen was another island, perhaps three miles long and a half mile across, a rifle-shot from the east bank across a channel six or eight feet deep. From this island there was a clear view to the mouth of the river and out to sea: nothing could move undetected into or past the mouth of the Volta or into the Amu, the tidal channel running up towards Keta. Below Fort Kongenssteen was Ada Island, where there had been a Danish lodge before the fort was built. The Ada people had lived there until they were driven off to the area around the fort by the Anlo. It was a large and fertile island, a couple of gunshots from the fort, but it would be difficult to fortify, because it was cut through by so many small channels. Its area was added to in the annual floods, and in particular in the seven- year floods. The southern ends of these islands were marshy, the northern ends higher. The annual floods seldom lasted for more than a couple of months, and the land produced two crops a year. At the mouth of the Volta were three strategically well-placed islands. To the northeast was an island about four miles in circumference, opposite the mouth of the Amu, from which the Anlo and the Krepe maintained “an incessant canoe traffic across the Rio Volta to its western tongue of firm ground at the mouth, to go thence overland to Accra and otherwise all other places by canoe up the River Volta, indeed all the way to Aqvamboe”. There was a second island right in the mouth of the Volta, separated from Ada Island by a narrow channel. The third island, to the west—Crown Prince Frederik’s Island—was perhaps two miles around, and the main channel, through which all vessels into or out of the river had to pass, ran up this island’s northeast flank, where there was always enough water for ships drawing as much as eighteen feet. Here on this island could also be placed a convenient shipbuilding wharf: … this last I base especially on the judgment of 2 knowledgeable seamen, namely Captain Jens Berg and Captain Mortensen Ishøy’s, who both have circumnavigated same. Fortifications here could protect the Volta from any European power whatsoever, and others on the eastern island would deny passage to the Anlo, who had no other way into the river with canoes. The King of colonial ambitions in a time of retrenchment 281

Denmark, Flindt said, would then possess not only the right but the key to the Volta. There was no question, he wrote, that the mouth of the river would be navigable for competently piloted ships of quite large draft. He had himself “some years since gone out, or more rightly said: piloted a schooner out of the mouth and accompanied it over 2 miles to sea; where I in running out of the mouth constantly sounded and had more than 6 or more fathoms of water, and went thereafter, with the fort’s canoe and people, the same way into the Rio Volta again, without the least danger or any breaking sea”. (Figure 8) Having assayed this description of the reaches and islands of the lower Volta, Flindt ventured to address various matters that would be crucial in the case of a colonization on the river. The late lamented Hr. Captain Isert did not without deeply thought-out grounds base his treaty on the republic of Crobbo. Crobbo is a very high mountain, upon which a very high and extensive steep upstanding rock, to within a couple of rifle-shots of whose lowest foot an arm of the Rio Volta runs. It is on the surface of this rock, impregnable hitherto to all negro might, that the whole republic of Crobbo is established, and in its northeasterly low-lying areas, under the foot of the Aquapim Mountains, they cultivate their everywhere rich lands. About twelve miles west of Krobo lie the so-named Schaj Mountains, which similarly are quite separate from the Aquapim Mountains. Close to the foot of these Schaj Mountains’ west side, the so-named Ponny River has its course, all the way from the seacoast. Thus this Ponny River and the Rio Volta inland come as close as circa 12 miles’ distance to one another. Flindt’s idea was apparently to establish an inland connection between these two watercourses. The enormous extent of the Volta’s inundation already allowed access far into the intervening countryside by canoe at the time of the annual flood. A mile or so west of the town of Kpone, lay what Flindt called Sigga [Sike or Sika on Thonning’s maps], which was marked by a number of tall coconut trees, where the best landing place on the whole Gold Coast is, and which was also by former Captain Berg noted for its most secure harbor and anchorage, where any ship can be unloaded and loaded with the ship’s own vessels. Here it was that the lamented Hr. Captain Isert, when, because of intervening obstacles, he could not get his plan carried out by the Rio Volta, but had, in order to get a foot on the ground and possession of the Aqvapim region, to make his beginning in the mountains of Aqvapim—that he 282 chapter eight

Fig. 8. Peter Thonning’s map, detail, showing the mouth of the Volta, with arrows indicating the six-hour ebbs and flows of the tide. RAKTS, U-samling, DfuA U 1. (By courtesy of the Danish National Archives.)

intended to erect a central storehouse, in order with the help of this Ponny River to transport everything to and from the colony plantations, which, if he had lived, would have had its beginning at the upper end of this Ponny River near Schaj. From the Aqvapim Mountains to this Schaj Mountain and farther thence, along side the eastern side of said river, I had the honor, in company with [Peter] Thonning, when he was botanist in Guinea, that he made a journey with me, in which we, beneath the Aqvapim Mountains near this Schaj mountain, [crossed] the uppermost end of this above-named Ponny River. The Ponny, from a little way inland from its mouth and well up into the country, was always fresh, he said, and rich in fish. “On both sides of this river are regions of the fairest soil”. The mountain Nåjo, the highest and most notable on the whole Gold Coast, was about twelve miles east of Krobo, and around its foot ran the Volta. Directly across the river lay the Akwamu town Assintialee, which Flindt reckoned was at least forty miles above the uppermost river town in colonial ambitions in a time of retrenchment 283 the Danish territory. There was a fetish shrine on Nåjo, but no one lived on the mountain. The ground lay high around it, and the people of Osu had once lived in the hills in this area, called the Ussutekue (or Osudoku), which would again be their refuge in time of need. There were woods of mahogany and other useful trees along a tributary of the Volta that ran in from somewhere to the west of Nåjo. (Flindt mentioned the prevalence of sea elephants or sea cows, which is to say manatees.) He was of the opinion that it would be necessary to control these mountains and the surrounding area to defend a colony against the Akwamu and peoples still farther up the river and to command trade into the interior. Rapids blocked the river where it ran between the mountains of Akuapem and Akwamu, he said, but above that it is again navigable for vessels and prams more than 200 miles into the land, to a large trading town called Qvahu, where there is the greatest tusk trade and where the Rio Volta again is said to divide itself in 2 long arms; but to date unknown where it extends. What indeed can be more splendid for a colonial establishment than to have such a far-flung trading commerce with the inland nations, to which an open navigation from and on the Rio Volta could be opened. It would be equally important to control the Ponny, wherewith the Danish crown would command an area “as large as the whole district of Sjælland”. To be sure, this would require negotiations between the Danish and English crowns, because the English had a little fortified establishment on the Ponny at Prampram. In addition, the Prampram fetish tolerated no canoes on its waters, Flindt said, “but a gun boat is no canoe!” In sum, he wrote, it would be essential to place batteries at the mouth of the Volta as well as farther up the river at Hume. Kongenssteen should be rebuilt at the mouth of the river, where it would become the most important of the Danish establishments on the coast. Ships could be repaired here that might otherwise have to sail to Principe to find shelter, and provisions of water and wood could regularly be obtained. Flindt hoped that all this could be laid before the king, but he did not flatter himself, he wrote, that the government would rely on this incomplete report. He proposed that two men be assigned to investigate the matter further, “namely: an experienced seaman and good navigator, who could be the captain on the first outcoming Danish ship”, who could chart the Volta, its islands, its tributaries, and the most useful woods as far inland as the river was navigable. A land surveyor should also be assigned to make a map of the whole area he had discussed in this letter, which, he thought, could be done discreetly. Flindt reminded the Chamber of Customs of the 284 chapter eight trouble Isert had encountered on the river, but he was confident that with his own assistance these men could accomplish their tasks without difficulty and at reasonable expense. So that the High Collegia should not think that this my herein made report of the Rio Volta &c is based on historical knowledge or reports obtained from the negroes, may it be most graciously permitted me to say that I myself personally have traveled to most of the places mentioned herein. He had been along the whole stretch of the Akuapem hills from end to end three times; to Shai three times, on the one occasion with Thonning, when they had traveled down the Ponny to the sea; and to the foot of Krobo Mountain twice. He had spent two and a half months in the Asante camp by the nearest arm of the Volta, which the Asante had been obliged to cross and recross three times in the course of their assault on the Krobo. He had spent eight days with the Asante at the foot of Nåjo, on the south side, and the camp had drawn its water directly from the Volta on the north side. He had not himself seen the Osudoku hills, nor had he been farther up the Volta than Bato, but was personally familiar with the whole reach below that, at both normal water stages and during floods. He had not been up the big tributary deep into Krepe to the east. Flindt was here laying out with considerable authority the detailed, down-to-earth geography of a large Danish colony on the Volta, very concretely defining its bounds, its arteries of communication, the nerve- centers of its defense, and the basis of its sustenance and wealth in the soils and other natural resources. It is quite a compelling description, and Peter Thonning doubtless read it with great interest both in 1817, when it arrived at the colonial office in Copenhagen but when he had little choice but to file it away for future reference, and again in the 1830s, when he dug it out of the archives for the Guinea Commission. It was presumably on the latter occasion that Thonning wrote across the top of Flindt’s letter, “This description of the Volta region deserves to be read through and come into consideration. Th”. In March, 1814, Governor Wrisberg, in a letter addressed directly to King Frederik, had resuscitated his scheme to trade the African forts to Portugal for the island of Principe. The king appears to have passed the matter off to the Slave-trade Commission,23 but he seems not to have forgotten the

23 Dok. vedrørende Kommissionen for Negerhandelens bedre Indretning & Ophævelse m. m. 1783–1806 I, Johan Wrisberg, Copenhagen, April 18, 1814, to the king, copy. Thonning found the original of it for the Guinea Commission in the 1830s and classified it as Designation I, No. 3: it is now filed at GJS 226/1836. colonial ambitions in a time of retrenchment 285 matter: it may be that the idea of acquiring a rich new tropical island rather appealed to the monarch, stricken as he was at his royal heart by the loss of his huge Norwegian domains.24 In May, 1816, the king sent a note to his foreign minister, Niels Rosencrantz, raising the possibility of trading the African establishments for the “island called Princess, in the Æthio pean Sea in the Bight of Biafra”; the king suggested that, now that diplomatic contact was being re-established with the “Brazilian court, it might perhaps be possible to bring this matter to negotiation”.25 Rosencrantz appears not to have made any immediate response. In March 1817, the king received a letter signed merely “Bardenfleth”. This was undoubtedly Johan Frederik Bardenfleth, under whom Peter Thonning had served as Prince Frederik Ferdinand’s tutor, and who later served as the governor of the Danish West Indies.26 Bardenfleth enclosed for the king’s gracious perusal an article from an English newspaper the year before. The article, Bardenfleth pointed out, recounted that, according to reports received the day before from the Gold Coast, the Dutch governor-general Hendrik Willem Daendels had investigated the region of the Ancobra River and had advised his government of the feasibility and desir- ability of purchasing a large stretch of land there and establishing coffee and cotton plantations. Daendels reported that the Ancobra was navigable up into the territory of the Asante, as Willem Bosman had reported in 1704.27 According to old Dutch charts compiled from even older Portuguese maps, the governor-general wrote, the Portuguese had had establishments, and even monastic churches, more than forty leagues up the river into the interior. If the Dutch and the English were to place forts on either side of the river, Daendels suggested, with the permission of the king of Asante, all of the trade of Asante and indeed of all the territory south of the Long Mountains,28 would be drawn thither, and Bardenfleth pointed

24 It has been suggested that the loss of Norway in 1814 weighed so heavily on Frederik as to have had an effect on his colonial policies to the end of his life: Georg Nørregaard, “Englands køb af de danske besiddelser i Ostindien og Afrika 1845 og 1850”, Historisk Tidsskrift, 10th Series, Vol. 3, 1934–36, pp. 335–412, on p. 399. 25 DfuA, GG, Box 872, Frederik R., Copenhagen, May 5, 1816, to Geheime Statsminister Rosencrantz. 26 DfuA, GG, Box 872, Bardenfleth, Copenhagen, March 13, 1817, to the king; “Bardenfleth (Johan Frederik)” in Erslew, Almindeligt Forfatter-Lexicon. 27 See Daendels, pp. 33, 39–40, 44. 28 Bardenfleth may have been referring to the “Mountains of Kong”, which were often mapped in the nineteenth century but in fact did not exist: see Thomas J. Bassett and Philip W. Porter, “ ‘From the best authorities’: the Mountains of Kong in the cartography of West Africa”, Journal of African History, Vol. 32, 1991, pp. 367–413, esp. pp. 387–389. 286 chapter eight out that this would be at the cost of trade through the Danish establishments. The project need not cost the two regimes more than ten thousand pounds, for the Asante could be expected to provide laborers and to supply wood, stone, and lime, of which there were plenty in the vicinity. “This idea could perhaps be extremely important”, Bardenfleth suggested to the king, if the negroes in the West Indies, which is easily possible, should drive out the Europeans; but the advantage will then be to those who in time had made preparations [and] arrangements on the coast of Guinea. Perhaps it might be best to let a company of private people participate in the enterprise, but the purchase must however presumably be made by the administration and the colony naturally be administered by it. Without doubt an insignificant sale [of] the West Indies, while the properties there still have value, can raise abundant means to secure oneself, on the coast of Guinea, against the loss that probably, before the end of this century, is eminent in the West Indies. Bardenfleth permitted himself to suggest that it would be worthwhile to learn what the Dutch and British governments’ responses to Daendels’s suggestion had been. King Frederik forwarded this communication to Johan Wrisberg, who responded29 that he did not believe that the Africans’ good will and cooperation could be counted on after the price of the land was paid, or that thereafter any practicable security or defensive measure in these regions would be able to assure the colonists concerned a peaceful, undis- turbed, and lasting possession of the land itself, its trade advantages, and plantations, etc., for among these raw nations, I dare assert because of my experience, that their first political principle consists in seeking their own interest and that their concepts of the inviolability of lawfully obtained property rights scarcely comes into consideration against immediate profit. Even if the colonists were well defended, the Africans would be able to cut off trade and supplies at any time, and the colony would “constantly be exposed, during the usual frequent wars among the natives, to all manner of demands and requests from friends and plundering and destruction, indeed, loss of life itself, from enemy attack and invasion”. Wrisberg had no doubt that the plantations he himself had begun on the coast “have gone to ground”. He urged the king to instead consider his proposal regarding Principe. “Here one will find sufficient security for life and property [and]

29 DfuA, GG, Box 872, Wrisberg, Copenhagen, March 27, 1817, to the king. colonial ambitions in a time of retrenchment 287 come into possession of an island blessed with many natural advantages and abundances”. If, however, this was diplomatically impossible, then one will be able, if it were made necessary by the possibility of the Europeans’ being driven by the negroes from the West Indies to establish new colonies, to make use of the significant extents of land that are Your Majesty’s property both near the Aqvapim Mountains, which lie about 20 miles north of Christiansborg—as well as by the River Volta. Fort Kongenssteen should in any event be well maintained, Wrisberg advised. He informed the king that the Ancobra River lay perhaps two hun dred and fifty miles west of the Danish establishments: he doubted that developments there would have much effect on trade at Christiansborg. The king then apparently sent Bardenfleth’s letter, with Wrisberg’s remarks, to the Department for Foreign Affairs, among whose files both documents are now archived. Early in May, 1817, when a new Danish chargé d’affaires, Olintho dal Borgo di Primo, was preparing to travel to his post at the Portuguese court at Rio de Janeiro, Foreign Minister Rosencrantz wrote to the king: By the descriptions Governor [Wrisberg] has made of the island Princess, I cannot otherwise than regard it as highly advantageous if [Your Majesty] could barter for said island against the Danish forts and lodges on the Guinea Coast, which, as is well known, throw off no profit of any kind, but only are a burden to the state treasury. However, Rosencrantz saw no evidence in Wrisberg’s proposal that the Portuguese would be willing to dispose of the island. Wrisberg had suggested that Portugal might find the Danish possessions useful for carrying on the slave trade to Brazil, but Rosencrantz expressed some doubt that the king of Portugal and Brazil would contemplate such an exchange in the face of the British government’s growing determination to suppress the Atlantic slave trade, “which lies so close to the Engl. administration’s heart”. The English were threatening to destroy the slave trade by seizing ships at sea, Rosencrantz pointed out, and “then the Brazilian administration will without doubt find itself obliged to ban the slave trade”; thus any interest the Portuguese might have in the Danish possessions would “fall away”. The English government would also certainly work to prevent a territorial exchange, he said, “toward which end it with its overwhelming influence on the Portuguese administration has means enough at hand”. Nevertheless, Rosencrantz allowed that there would be little harm in putting the suggestion before the Brazilian court, if it pleased the king to add 288 chapter eight the matter to dal Borgo’s orders.30 The Foreign Minister made no mention at all of Bardenfleth’s missive. To put dal Borgo in a position to broach the subject in Brazil, the Department for Foreign Affairs wrote to the Chamber of Customs, enclosing Wrisberg’s proposal regarding Principe, and asked the Chamber to provide, as soon as might be, the fullest possible description of the Danish possessions on the coast of Guinea with respect to same’s situation, extent, relations with neighboring negro tribes, and rights of possession, as well as the revenues and commercial advantages associated with these possessions.31 In the meantime, Rosencrantz apprised dal Borgo of this new consideration and of the international difficulty which attended it: “As you can see …,” he wrote to dal Borgo, “you will have to proceed delicately”.32 Years later, Wrisberg’s proposal, copies of Peter Thonning’s notes on the Principe question (probably made as he prepared for the Chamber of Customs’s discussion of the matter in 1817) and the Chamber’s response to the Department for Foreign Affairs were studied by the Guinea Com mission.33 Thonning had not been pleased by this colonial chimera the king had set his bureaucracy to pursuing; he had only six months before obtained the royal signature on a new budget predicated solely upon retention of the Guinea establishments as a long-term investment in the colonial future of tropical Africa. “I fail to see what might induce Portugal to accept the Danish possessions in Guinea in exchange for Prince’s Island”, he wrote. The Portuguese were being pressed by the British to abandon the slave trade, and their only other trade to Africa was in Brazilian tobacco, which could be sold directly from ships cruising down the coast, so they had no need of African forts. Portugal certainly did not need the land for “intertropical agriculture” with all Brazil (which was also better situated relative to the prevailing winds and currents) at its disposal. Thonning supposed that the expense of maintaining Principe was

30 DfuA, GG, Box 872, ad 433/1816, [Rosencrantz], May 10, 1817, draft, to the King. Frederik VI may have been cynical, but he was not entirely unrealistic in this matter—the Brazilians did not begin to enforce legislation against the Atlantic slave trade until 1850: Curtin, The image of Africa, p. 317. 31 DfuA, GG, Box 872, undated memo regarding a letter to the Chamber of Customs of May 17, 1817; GJ 1503/1817, Department for Foreign Affairs, May 17, 1817. 32 DfuA, GG, Box 872, May 27, 1817, draft, to dal Borgo. 33 The Chamber of Customs’s letter to the Department for Foreign Affairs, July 19, 1817, and unsigned, undated notes (copies), together making up Designation I, No. 4, filed at GJS 226/1836; what appear to be Thonning’s original notes on the matter are in GTK, Dok. o. l. vedr. Guinea. colonial ambitions in a time of retrenchment 289 not great, compared with the cost of the forts on the coast, so there was little reason for Portugal to wish to be relieved of it. He further suggested that it might actually be more difficult for a Danish colony to establish itself on the island than on the African mainland, “for it is said to be occupied by 5–6,000 in habitants, who just as surely as the Brazilian Portuguese are fanatic Catholics, among whom the Danes establishing themselves must forever fear a Parisian blood-wedding”. (This was a reference to the St. Bartholomew’s day massacre of the Huguenots in 1572). The island would furthermore be subject to blockades and descents from the sea. Because of the availability of inexpensive provisions from the mainland, cattle and food crops would be driven out by the more valuable export crops, just as in the Danish West Indies, where provisions could be obtained cheaply from North America; in the event of war, a couple of enemy frigates would then be able to starve the colony out in a short time. “It would be otherwise with an establishment on the mainland in Guinea”, where, Thonning said, an unlimited territory was available. The soil will therefore not become so expensive but that every plantation will be able to cultivate both its necessaries and its commercial crops, or a single plantation could devote itself to the cultivation of provisions; the supply from the nations in the country cannot here be cut off by a European power. Inexpensive forts would be sufficient to protect the colony against the African nations, who were altogether ignorant of the science of war. “Denmark has in Guinea the most desirable land for colonial production”. The Department for Foreign Affairs had asked for no such opinion, to be sure, but only for a description of the Guinea establishments. The Chamber of Customs’s response to the Department34 appears to have relied rather heavily on a large-scale map, without doubt a copy of Thonning’s map. A very brief description of each of the forts was provided, in each case with the disclaimer “as far as can be determined here”, and a plan of each was enclosed.35 In the Chamber’s opinion, Denmark’s claim to the

34 Guin. Kopibog, July 19, 1817, to the Department for Foreign Affairs. There is a draft of this letter in Thonning’s hand at GJS 314/1893. 35 It appears that the bill for the copying of these drawings is preserved: GJ(S) 1646/1818, Hjorth, May 26, 1818. Thonning annotated a copy of the Chamber’s letter years later, during the Guinea Commission’s investigation: “since the drawing of Xborg can no longer be found in the Indies department and my own original is also gone, the fort plan could perhaps be obtained [from] the Department [for Foreign Affairs]”: GJS 226/1836, Designation I, No. 4, copy of the Chamber’s letter to the Department for Foreign Affairs, July 19, 1817, Thonning’s penciled annotation. There is no indication that this ever happened; the Commission’s archival research appears to have been limited to the Chamber of Customs’s own files and to whatever Thonning had on hand of his own. 290 chapter eight stretch of Coast between Christiansborg and Prindsenssteen could not be challenged by any European power, except perhaps at Prampram, where there was “a small, dilapidated English fort, called Varnon’s Fort”. Frederikssted and Frederiksnopel were described as plots of plantation ground, Frederiksberg as a cotton plantation with a few buildings. As for relations with the African peoples, “the regent of Asianté” received from Christiansborg an annual payment of 192 rigsdaler, “as a right”, and the leader of Akyem another 96 rigsdaler. “The regent of Akvapim and a couple of the most distinguished there” received altogether 108 rigsdaler “to show themselves well-disposed to the Danes”. The peoples of the coastal region were “bound to carry only the Danish flag” and undertook not to permit other European nations to establish themselves among them. They otherwise follow their own laws and conventions and are in essence independent, although they often request the Danish subjects’ arbitration in the deciding of conflicts among them, which intervention is always associated with expense. The negroes from Christiansborg to the Volta are bound to Denmark by a voluntary attachment for all time, sworn to according to the country’s customs. The Augnas, on the other hand, to the east of the Volta, by the terms of a peace; they all enjoy in return for their bond a small wage which is bestowed on the towns’ most distinguished. Thus neatly Thonning encapsulated these highly complex relationships between the Europeans on the coast and the great African polities in the region. He was committed to the idea that the Danish position on the coast could not only be tenable but permanent and profitable, and he thought it was in the African nations’ interest that the Europeans should remain among them. He appears never to have learned to fear the Asante.36 This is not to say that his position was overtly imperial. Christiansborg had been in Danish hands since 1660, the Department for Foreign Affairs was informed, and the other forts had been built by the crown in the previous century, Fredensborg in 1735 and Kongenssteen and Prindsenssteen in 1783 and 1784.

36 Yarak argues, in discussing the relationship between Asante and the Dutch on the coast, that the Dutch interest was “principally mercantile”, rather than imperial, while “Asante’s interests in its relationship with the Dutch during the nineteenth century are more difficult to discern. Nevertheless, it does appear that for the Asante kings the Dutch were but one element in a complex political and economic patchwork of towns, states, and ports of trade in the southern districts”: Asante and the Dutch, pp. 279–281. This last statement could as well apply to Asante and the Danes. colonial ambitions in a time of retrenchment 291

These establishments were all, like the other European nations’ establishments on the Gold Coast, obtained and maintained for the sake of the slave trade. As long as this trade was conducted, the king received 10 [rigsdaler] for every negro that was exported; with the end of the slave trade this income has fallen away. Other sources of income for the king have not existed, and neither can they be obtained, as the establishments are constituted, for the other trade is insignificant and of such nature that it can not easily be taxed. The inhabitants themselves know no form of taxation and would undoubtedly not allow any to be laid upon them. With regard to income and direct commercial profits the establishments have thus no value, but for the cultivation of intertropical crops the country has the most fertile extents along the mountains and the River Volta; this river is passable for vessels of up to 10-foot draft. It is in regard hereto that the establishments or, more properly, territorial rights are still maintained. The expense of this position had been cut to 24,000 rigsdaler by a royal order the previous December. This sum covered the salaries of the head of the establishments, two clerks, two missionaries, and a doctor, besides twenty-two under-officers and soldiers and sixty working inventory slaves, besides their families. The Department for Foreign Affairs translated the Chamber’s letter into French, the language of diplomacy, and sent it to dal Borgo, who was by then already at Altona, on the Elbe, on his way to England; he carried it and Thonning’s map and the fort plans with him on his long voyage to Brazil.37 Three summers later, in 1820, the king forwarded to the Department for Foreign Affairs a new communication regarding Principe, this one from Johan Wrisberg’s brother Philip. (Johan Wrisberg had died in 1819.)38 This extraordinary family, two members of which had served as governor on the coast, and which had by now for fifty years made its living in African administration and in the trades of the tropical Atlantic, appears to have enjoyed fairly easy access to the king. Philip Wrisberg was apparently born in the Danish West Indies but educated in Copenhagen39 and, according to an internal memo drafted by Peter Thonning sometime early in 1819, had been appointed head of the Guinea military force in 1814: when he in this capacity was to travel to his post, he took on a connection with a commercial partnership according to which he as supercargo was to

37 DfuA, GG, Box 872, undated slip ordering the translation made; draft of letter, July 26, 1817, to dal Borgo. Dal Borgo acknowledged receipt of the material in a letter to Rosencrantz from Altona, August 15, 1817: Niels Rosencrantz’s archive, No. 6218, Private Breve, dal Borgo. 38 DfuA, GG, Box 872, Frederik VI, Copenhagen, May 31, 1820; Fabritius, pp. 262–264. 39 Efterladte papirer fra den Reventlowske Familiekreds, Vol. 8, pp. T. 63–64. 292 chapter eight

see to trade along the coast of Guinea for the ship in which he went out; when he came to the Danish establishments, Commandant Holm was dead, and Wrisberg was in his place immediately appointed commandant at Fort Prinsensteen, which he took over Aug. 1, 1816, but remained there only ca. 1 week, whereupon he traveled on with the ship in same commercial affairs, although he came back after a lapse of ca. 3 months, remained a couple of weeks at the fort, took away all the forts account books and public papers, and neither himself came nor sent these papers, necessary to the fort’s administration, back from this trip; furthermore he traveled without the governor’s or the Council’s permission. He remained with the ship until March, 1817, at Prince’s Island, whence he on Febr. 16, 1817, applied to the Government to travel home on the grounds of illness, and traveled without awaiting permission in the beginning of March with his trade expedition. When Wrisberg had arrived in Copenhagen, the accounts from Fort Prindsenssteen had been demanded of him, and he had responded that he had left the papers at the fort. He had then made another trading voyage down to the coast and back to Europe, and after two and a half more years, Thonning complained, he had still not submitted the accounts required of him.40 The younger Wrisberg’s revision of his late brother’s portrait of Prin cipe was quite skillfully handled.41 “After making another voyage to Africa”, he wrote, “I am in a position to compile a more exact description and a more complete map of said island” than his brother had been able to produce.42 Many of the inscriptions on the map that Wrisberg submitted with his report are in English as well as in Danish, and it seems not unlikely that he had some of the substance of the report from some English map or other publication. The island lay about four hundred miles from the Danish establishments and perhaps a hundred miles from the mainland of Africa; it was about twenty-five miles long and twenty across. Coffee, sugar cane, and palm wine and oil were produced there, besides maize, “Guinea corn”, rice, “and all possible tropical fruits”. There was good ship-building wood available, brown ocher with which to protect the bottoms of ships in tropical waters, and horses and other domestic animals; the waters around the island abounded in fish. Ten thousand souls lived there, all Catholics. The

40 GTK, Guineiske Resolutioner 1816–20, an undated draft by Thonning headed: Note om de efter Ançienniteten competente til Gouverneurposten i Guinea til Overveielse ved Collegiets Forslag om dette Embeds Besættelse efter Gouverneurens major Richters Død. 41 DfuA, GG, Box 872, No. 887/1820, Philip Wrisberg, Copenhagen, March 18, 1820, report on “Den Portogisiske Øe Princess”. 42 DfuA, GG, Box 872, No. 887/1820, Philip Wrisberg, Copenhagen, March 18, 1820, cover letter for his report on Principe. colonial ambitions in a time of retrenchment 293 garrison was weak and poorly equipped. There were four hundred houses and seven churches in the town, on the east side of the island, and seven large plantations, each with a slave village, in the countryside. The western and southern portions of the island were almost deserted. The town itself was very unhealthy, with streams that frequently flooded on either hand, but Wrisberg thought the town could easily be moved to the heights on either side of the harbor entrance; building materials were inexpensive. The mortality in the hills was a fifth that in town. He related that he had been ill for nine weeks while living in town in 1817, had recovered as soon as he had moved to the hills for a time, and had suffered a relapse when he had come down to the town again to take ship. Two coffee harvests were taken each year with scarcely any trouble; most of the island was still uncultivated (unlike in the Danish West Indies, where, he suggested, the soils were largely exhausted), and still it produced a hundred and fifty thousand pounds of coffee a year. The place was not visited by hurricanes; nor was it subject to drought, which plagued the sugar planters of the Danish West Indies. Plantations could be established here for a tenth what it cost in the West Indies. Slaves brought here from the mainland would experience no change in the climate, so the mortality among them could be expected to be much lower. Wrisberg envisaged that the entire island could be given over to sugar cane, coffee, cotton, and indigo; healthy and inexpensive foodstuffs could be fetched from the mainland in small vessels. The trip would take only a couple of days, and the slaves would be able to eat the food they had been accustomed to from childhood. Sugar cane had been grown here before Europeans had settled in the West Indies, he said, but that industry had since been abandoned; it could be reintroduced at small cost. This was the only good harbor for two thousand miles and, if a wharf was constructed, the island could become an important port of call for shipping to Africa and the East in need of repairs, fresh water, or provisions. The island could furthermore engage in trade to the island of São Thomé, to Bimbia, to the rivers Calabar, Cameroon, Malimba, Bonny, St. Benito, Gabon, and others, all of which entered the Gulf of Guinea not far from Principe; gold dust, wax, palm oil, turtle shell, ivory, coffee, hides, rice, indigo, ebony, and various dye woods could be brought out to Principe in small vessels and shipped on to Europe in larger ships, together with island’s own produce. King Frederik now wrote to his Department for Foreign Affairs: As We have hitherto heard nothing of the desired negotiation with the Portuguese court regarding the trading away of Our possessions on the coast of Guinea, in exchange for obtaining the above-named island Princess, We 294 chapter eight

wish to learn whether such a negotiation has begun [and] how far it has been advanced. The king made particular mention of the delicate manuscript “croquis” of the island incorporated in Wrisberg’s proposal, and the map is indeed a very pretty and concise image of a little colonial world out in the blue.43 Wrisberg had said of it that it was as accurate as he could make it, but that he had not been allowed into any of the defensive works or to undertake any sort of general survey. Rosencrantz reported that the matter had been laid in the chargé dal Borgo’s hands in 1817, with “detailed information about said Danish possessions, with associated maps and drawings”, but that no word regarding the affair had been received from Brazil.44 Rosencrantz dutifully wrote to dal Borgo to enquire “if you have been able to turn your attention to this affair” and if there were any indication that the Portuguese government might be interested in the proposition.45 Another three years had passed, and the Portuguese court had returned to Portugal, before dal Borgo, himself back in Copenhagen by this time, submitted his final report on the matter: I thought it superfluous to report to the Department on such a subject, since it must have been aware of the Convention concluded between His Britannic Majesty and His Most Pious Majesty by which King John VI renounced the trade in negroes on the whole north coast and as far as 6 degrees south of the line, whereupon not only has the Portuguese government lost all interest in having establishments on the said coasts, where our possessions are found, but it would scarcely be able to make the acquisition without giving umbrage and attracting to itself the just remark of England. The Convention having been signed before my arrival in Brazil, I left the papers concerning this affair in their portfolio [and] refrained from saying a word of it, flattering myself that this would meet with the approbation of the Department for Foreign Affairs.46 The Danish government also briefly explored the possibility of disposing of its African establishments to the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States. In May, 1817, the Danish consul in Philadelphia, Peder Pedersen, wrote to the Department for Foreign Affairs

43 DfuA, GG, Box 872, Philip W. Wrisberg, “Øen Princes - Princes Island”. 44 DfuA, GG, Box 872, June 7, 1820, draft, to His Majesty the King. 45 DfuA, GG, Box 872, June 6, 1820, draft, to dal Borgo. 46 DfuA, GG, Box 872, dal Borgo, Copenhagen, August 31, 1823 (in French). See also Nørregaard, “Englands køb”. p. 398. colonial ambitions in a time of retrenchment 295

that this government wished to find a place suitable for a colonial establishment for freed slaves and mulattoes, whose strongly increasing number begins to disquiet the white residents of the southern states; the president was even requested by the Congress to have negotiations opened with certain great powers concerning this matter, and a private society, formed only and solely for this purpose, has at its own expense sent 2 commissioners by way of England to Africa to pick out the most serviceable place there for the residence of such a colony. It was thought that the Gold Coast might be a suitable location, “and the thought immediately occurred to me which I now permit myself to express to Your Excellence, namely”: to sell the Guinea Coast forts, so useless since the abolition of the slave trade, for a tidy sum. Among Ernst Schimmel mann’s personal papers there is a copy of a letter from the American Colonization Society, dated November, 1817, appointing Samuel Mills and Ebenezer its “Agents on a Mission to explore a part of the Western coast of Africa for the purpose of ascertaining the best situation which can be procured for colonizing the free people of colour of the United States.” The matter was believed to have the potential to affect “not only the temporal and spiritual interests of thousands of our fellow creatures, in this country, but in Africa likewise”. The society was sure that its commissioners could “calculate upon the cordial aid and co-operation of the philanthropist of every clime and country, whose assistance you may need in the prosecution of your design”.47 Schimmelmann suggested that the Chamber of Customs should make arrangements for these commissioners’ friendly reception on the Guinea Coast: back to back with the Society’s letter in Schimmelmann’s archives, there is a letter to the count from the Chamber of Customs in February, 1818, enclosing a set of sealed orders to the Government in Guinea “regarding the reception of the agents of the American society for the colonization of free mulattoes in Africa”; an open copy of the orders was enclosed for Schimmelmann’s information. The Government on the coast was ordered to provide Burgess and Mills with whatever support and information they might require. The Chamber thought it possible that the Commissioners might express an interest in establishing a colony on the Volta or in the hills of Akuapem, and the Government was instructed

47 Private Arkiv No. 6285 (1751–1848), Heinrich Ernst Schimmelmann, bundle 11, Concepter ang. Slavehandelen og Negervæsenet i Vestindien og Kopier vedr. Sierra Leone Kolonien, copy of Mills’s and Burgess’s commission, Washington, November 1817; Chamber of Customs February 12, 1818, with enclosure. 296 chapter eight that it went without saying that “any such colonization cannot occur under the influence of any foreign authority, but that it in all respects must be subject to the conditions His Majesty might most graciously find fit to determine”.48 The American Colonization Society in the end founded its colony, Liberia, seven hundred miles farther west along the coast from the Danish forts, on the St. Paul River, in 1822. Sweden also approached the Danes about trading the island of St. Barthélemy, in the Leeward Islands, for the Danish establishments on the coast, where the Swedes had it in mind to place a penal colony. There was also talk in the 1820s of disposing of the Danish possessions in India to England, but this, too, came to nothing at this time.49 The mortality among the Danes on the coast was a central difficulty of the colonial administration, especially after the drastic cuts in staff man- dated by the new budget of 1816, and a young assistant could reasonably hope within a short time of his arrival on the coast to find himself reading the rites over the last of his superiors and elevating himself to the rank of acting governor.50 Late in 1817 or early in 1818, Peter Thonning received a personal letter from Henrik Richter, on the coast, announcing the death of his father, the governor, in October.51 Richter begged Thonning to use his influence to see to it that Philip Wrisberg was not appointed governor. Wrisberg was hated by the Africans, Richter said, did not pay his debts, and had simply abandoned his post at Fort Prindsenssteen. Christian Schiønning died within a few weeks of Governor Richter late in 1817,52 and in February, 1818, Thonning took the opportunity to write a memoran- dum53 “for the information of Pres. Sehested upon the rumor of Richter’s death”. Thonning carefully reminded the new director (who, coming from the Commerce Collegium, had been placed in charge of the combined operations of the Commerce Collegium and the Chamber of Customs) that, since the abolition of the slave trade, the forts had been maintained to protect Denmark’s territorial claim for some future colonial endeavor. “The whole present organization is arranged in the most frugal manner to

48 VI kopibog, February 12, 1818, to the Government in Guinea, No. 102. 49 Nørregaard, “Englands køb”, pp. 398–399. 50 See Nørregård, Danish settlements,, pp. 192–193; see Privatarkiv Nr. 5262, Balthazar Christensen, Box 2 (C-F), C. Sager vedr. Balth. Christensens Ophold i Guinea 1830–31, Christensen’s journal, entry for October 19–23, 1830. 51 Guineiske Resolutioner 1816–20, H. Richter, October 25, 1817; Larsen, p. 137. 52 GJ 1629/1818 Reiersen, October 25, 1817. 53 Guineiske Resolutioner 1816–20, Thonning, Note Skreven 28 Febr 1818 til Underretning for Præsid. Sehested ved Rygtet om Richters Død. colonial ambitions in a time of retrenchment 297 that end, just as I, drawing on my 3-year local knowledge, proposed it and am convinced that the goal can be put into effect”. Thonning also tendered his ideas of the qualities called for in a governor. The man must possess “good knowledge of the negroes’ customs and character” and have “their trust and respect; for although the Government has many dealings with the negroes, it has nevertheless no jurisdiction or authority over them than that which can be achieved by sound judgment and good understanding”. The governor must of course be disinterested and unselfish. “A good and if possible mild, sociable character is furthermore a quality that is more necessary here than any other place, since the opposite embitters life for the other officers”. An agreeable disposition was the “most important advantage, just as the opposite is the greatest misfortune that can be met with in so small a circle”. Thonning then discussed the qualifications of the men who might be eligible to succeed Richter. He knew little of Jens Reiersen, the first assistant, who was then serving as acting governor, beyond that he was experienced. Of Jens Flindt Thonning wrote that he was “dulled by intem- perance, is not respected by the negroes, is a disorderly keeper of accounts, and has a very uncomfortable social manner”. Philip Wrisberg had been accused of “self-interest, arrogance, and unsociability; I am reluctant to give my opinion of him”, he said, but he felt he ought to say “that Wrisberg is sober and without doubt a good bookkeeper”. Even if all the European officers died, Thonning assured Sehested, the administration of the establishments could safely be entrusted for a time to the “mulatto” sergeants. With mulatto in Guinea one must not connect the same ideas as with mulatto in the West Indies; in Guinea it is not so much the color, as fortune, way of life, and authority that determines the case. A mulatto in Guinea is born a free man … and mulattoes of breeding and fortune take full [part] in the whites’ society. In a fragment of Thonning’s draft of this report farther down in the bundle, there is this phrase: “When I was in Guinea some mulattoes ate daily and even on formal occasions at the governor’s table, from which, on the other hand, some inferior whites were excluded”. He certainly saw no need to increase the number of Europeans in the establishments. Thonning concluded with great praise for the late Richter, who had put the new budget into effect without complaint; the Chamber could remember, Thonning informed Sehested, that it had “before suffered the affront of seeing its orders for reductions at the establishments altogether unexecuted and remonstrated against”. 298 chapter eight

In March, 1819, Reiersen reported that Assistant Matthias Thonning had applied to leave the coast because of a painful affliction of the eyes.54 Thonning had been cultivating two pieces of land, one close to the fort and the other farther inland, and Reiersen feared that Thonning’s slaves “now upon his departure will regard themselves as free, for the negroes’ daily increasing liberties are without bounds, since those in the forts are not able to punish them as they deserve”. Philip Wrisberg left the coast in March and in October reported to the Chamber of Customs that he understood from private correspondence that Reiersen and another seasoned officer, Kjærulf, were dead and that Christian Svanekjær, who had taken over as governor, was himself sick and would probably soon be applying for permission to repatriate. Now there was only Georg Lutterodt left, and the administrative situation was rather precarious.55 This last letter appears to have had the desired effect: three weeks later, despite Thonning’s reservations about him, Philip Wrisberg was appointed governor.56 Before he could take ship, however, Wrisberg became entan- gled in accusations that he had attempted to arrange a murder on the coast, and his appointment was withdrawn.57

54 GJ 1732/1819, Reiersen, Christiansborg, March 16, 1819. 55 Guineiske Resolutioner 1816–20, Wrisberg, October 6, 1819 [GJ 1773/1819]. 56 GJ 1779/1819, royal resolution, October 26, 1819. 57 Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 193. PART FOUR

RENEWED INTEREST IN AFRICAN COLONIALISM IN COPENHAGEN

CHAPTER NINE

FRESH COLONIAL MOMENTUM IN THE EARLY 1820S

In May, 1820, King Frederik appointed as governor a man with no experience on the coast. His appointment can be thought to express something of a resuscitation of colonial ambitions in a capital regaining its confidence; for years, the government had been in the more or less helpless position of acquiescing in the succession of officers thrown up by evolving circumstances on the coast. The man the king now chose to head the administration on the coast was a military man, Peter Svane Steffens, the philosopher Henrik Steffens’s younger brother. Steffens was a couple of years younger than Peter Thonning,1 and it is not unlikely that they had been acquainted in the days of the Natural History Society. Steffens had served in Prince Frederik’s regiment and lectured in history and the art of war to the officers of the garrison of Copenhagen.2 There was a splash of colonial blood in him: his father, a Norwegian doctor, had been born in Suriname,3 but not only was Steffens not an old Guinea hand, he was a man of some social and intellectual substance in the metropolis, and thus quite a different kettle of fish from some of the other men who had risen to the top on the coast. The Wrisbergs were products of the colonial Atlantic; Steffens was a Copenhagener. His marriage had lately been dis- solved,4 and this circumstance perhaps played a part in his decision to betake himself to the colonies. He was also a licensed land surveyor,5 and Peter Thonning, at any rate, was well aware of the colonial office’s need for more detailed and techni- cally better-founded maps of the Guinea territory than his own. Steffens was supplied with sophisticated surveying instruments and books by Heinrich Christian Schumacher, professor of astronomy at the University

1 Larsen, p. 137. 2 Efterladte papirer fra den Reventlowske Familiekreds, Vol. 7, p. 472. 3 Garboe, Vol. 1, p. 169. 4 Balslev, Svend, and Hans Ejner Jensen, Landmåling og Landmålere. Danmarks økono- miske opmåling ([Copenhagen]: Den danske Landinspektørforening, 1975), p. 231. 5 Balslev and Jensen, p. 231; Efterladte papirer fra den Reventlowske Familiekreds, Vol. 7, p. 472. 302 chapter nine of Copenhagen, whom Frederik VI had entrusted with the Danish geo- detic survey.6 Other elements of the Danish scientific community also took an interest in Steffens’s appointment to the coast. In May, 1820, the commission appointed by the crown prince back before the turn of the century to set in motion the establishment of a national museum for the natural sciences had received permission to seek new premises for a number of important collections that had fallen to the crown’s lot over the years, including, among much else, the Natural History Society’s specimens, Niels Tønder Lund’s and Ove Sehested’s famous insects, an excellent assemblage of West Indian birds donated by Governor Mühlenfels of the Danish West Indies, Olintho dal Borgo’s fine Brazilian birds, and various valuable mineralogical and zoological specimens from Greenland and Norway.7 In July, Johan Reinhardt, who had also followed the instruction of the Natural History Society and was now the Museum Commission’s curator,8 urged the commission take advantage of Peter Steffens’s interest in natural history. For lack of funds, Reinhardt complained, the collection could be built only slowly, trading duplicates and hoping for such wind- falls as dal Bargo’s birds: it was important to take advantage of every opportunity that offered itself.9 Major Steffens, he wrote, “who is a man of recognized scientific character, has expressed to me the desire to utilize his coming position to contribute to the increase of the Royal Museum, and has requested my instruction in collecting and conserving zoological specimens”. He advised the commission to officially encourage Steffens to supply the museum with specimens “from that interesting part of Africa where he will come to reside”. For a matter of fifty or sixty rigsdaler, Steffens could be provided with suitable collecting jars and cases. The Museum Commission gratefully acknowledged Steffens’s interest and ordered Reinhardt to make the necessary arrangements.10 This took some time, and in March of 1821 Reinhardt reported11 that he had obtained

6 “Schumacher, Heinrich Christian”, Dansk biografisk lexikon, C.F. Bricka, ed.; GJ(S) 143/1822, Professor Schumacher, June 12, 1822. 7 Museum Commission, Journal sager, No. 116, Lehmann, May 20, 1820, Underdanig Rapport over det Kongelige Natural Museums Materialier og Trang til et passende Locale; Museum Commission, correspondence journal, No. 117; Gosch, Part 1, pp. 10, 13–15, 37–38. 8 “Reinhardt, Johan(nes) Christopher Hagemann”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 3rd ed.; Gosch, Part 1, pp. 29. 9 Museum Commission, journal sager, No. 121, Reinhardt, Copenhagen, July 10, 1820. 10 Museum Commission, journal sager, Nos. 128 and 129, to Steffens and Reinhardt, August 26, 1820, drafts. 11 Museum Commission, journal sager, No. 150, Reinhardt, Copenhagen, March 4, 1821. fresh colonial momentum 303 for Steffens three chests, divided into compartments, containing speci- men glasses of various dimensions, with corks; arsenic soap for the preservation of bird skins, insect pins, tweezers, and the like. Reinhardt had also purchased for Steffens’s use a book on collecting and taxidermy and another on zoology, which because of the number of clear engravings it contains, is particularly useful for those that have not before occupied themselves systematically with zoology.12 Hr. Governor Steffens visited the museum several times, whereby I often found occasion to make him aware of several circumstances that could promote the successful outcome of his offer. Reinhardt had drawn up twelve pages of instructions on collecting and preserving specimens.13 The museum had almost no mammals, so any specimens from this class of animals would be welcome, Reinhardt said. He drew attention to differences in coloration and in the shape of the horns in various animals, especially the antelopes. Reinhardt wanted especially to know “if either the dugong or the manatee were to be found in the Guinean waters”; if so, he hoped to get a skeleton and a heart and other organs in spirits. There followed some instructions on how to pack skeletons—the rib cage had to be well stuffed with straw—but, he lamented, whole skeletons were a great deal of trouble and expensive to ship. Crania, the fore and hind feet, and certain other bones would be very serviceable. He especially wanted an ape fetus, and it would be best if this could be cut out of the mother with the placenta and vagina and the whole preserved in spirits. There were instructions on birds, amphibian reptiles, and snakes; he asked that note be taken of how these animals laid their eggs. There was said to be an enormous snake in the forests of Guinea: did it really attack the inhabitants, Reinhardt wished to know. How did it over- power its prey? The Museum Commission appears to have been so pleased with these new initiatives that it asked that word of the Museum be officially brought

12 See Hopkins, “Books, geography and Denmark’s colonial undertaking in West Africa”, p. 236. 13 RA, Danske Kancelli, Universitets- og Skoledirectionen, Direktionen for Museet for Naturvidenskaberne (1829-), Korrespondance og Fortegnelser vedrørende Sendinger til Museet m.m. I, 1818–1830, Korrespondance vedr. forsendelser fra Guinea, 1820–23, Schimmelmann, Hauch (signing for Den til et Kongeligt Natural Museums Oprettelse aller- høieste anordnede Commission), August 26, 1820, to Reinhardt, with Reinhardt’s draft of his collecting guide tucked into it. There is another such draft here: the instructions were apparently provided Philip Wrisberg in November, 1822, when he was again on his way to the coast. 304 chapter nine to the colonies by the Chamber of Customs; colonial officers should “be encouraged to obtain contributions to this public institution, for which their positions in distant regions gives them so many opportunities”. It was promised that “it will be laid before His Maj’ty the King and publicly proclaimed what thus comes in by patriotic dispatches”.14 Ernst Schimmelmann was among the members of the Museum Com mission, and Steffens did not fail to apply to the Fonden ad Usus Publicos, of which Schimmelmann retained control, for further support of the scientific investigations he hoped to undertake on the coast. He pleaded that he had had scientific commissions laid on him both by the Museum Commission and by professors H.C. Ørsted, the physicist, the mineralogist Gregers Wad, and Jens Hornemann at the Botanical Garden. He had already purchased various expensive reference books and instruments and asked for funds for a telescope with which to make astronomical observations and for various other instruments for “hygrometric and aero- metric as well as magnetic investigations”. He was granted five hundred rigsdaler.15 Senior elements of the Danish military establishment also attempted to hold a protecting hand over their man Steffens. King Frederik was fascinated by the military: he delighted in reviewing his troops, and tore out a fine old formal garden at Rosenborg, the exquisite Renaissance palace in Copenhagen, to make room for a parade ground for the royal guard.16 General Frants von Bülow, a man of enormous influence, was one of Frederik’s closest confidants.17 In June, 1820, von Bülow forwarded to the Chamber of Customs a letter to him from Steffens complaining that he would prefer to take with him two competent non-commissioned officers instead of the two missionaries called for in the budget of 1816.18 In the

14 Guin. Kopibog, May 10, 1821 (ad VJ 410/1821), to the government on the coast; the surgeon recently sent to the coast had been similarly instructed. 15 G.N. Kringelbach, Civile direktioner og kommissioner samt andre overordnede myndigheder under enevælden (Copenhagen: Rigsarkivet, 1899), p. 100; FaUP, kongelige resolutioner, 1820–21, No. 33, Steffens, Copenhagen, September 20, 1820, addressed to the king, royal resolution September 23, 1820; Fonden ad Usus Publicos, Vol. 2, 1801–1826 (Copenhagen: Rigsarkivet, 1902), p. 323. 16 Sys and Godtfred Hartmann, Kongens Nytorv og Rosenborg, Vol. 7 of København før og nu—og aldrig, Bo Bramsen, ed., (Copenhagen: Forlaget Palle Fogtdal, 1997 [1987]), pp. 180–181. 17 Von Bülow is said to have lead the conversation at the king’s table, while the monarch himself concentrated on his dinner: “Bülow, Frants Christopher”, Dansk biografisk lexikon, C.F. Bricka, ed. [at runeberg.org/dbl]. 18 GJ 1862/1820, Bülow, June 23[?], 1820. fresh colonial momentum 305 king’s name, von Bülow asked the Chamber’s opinion of this matter. A new line of colonial communication, outside the Chamber’s normal chain of administrative command, was being opened, at least for a time.19 Thonning’s draft of the Chamber’s response is preserved.20 Von Bülow had suggested that the two non-commissioned officers could drill the Guinea troops, assist Steffens with his land surveying, and in general be of great service to him. Thonning thought these soldiers would be superfluous and out of place. Their social position would be very delicate, for their rank would not permit them to move in the governor’s circle, but, being white, they would be cut off from the society of their peers; if they were at all ambitious, Thonning warned, they could be expected to “soon vex themselves to death”; if they were without ambition, they would “take to drink or to familiar intercourse with their subordinates, or to both”. Thonning appears not to have taken the idea that the two missionaries could be dispensed with terribly amiss, however, and, indeed, he seems to have seen in this an opportunity to advance the colonial cause: the Chamber recommended sending down two young people seventeen to twenty years of age, “(that at which acclimatization is best achieved) with good general knowledge”—and, he inserted, “good morality”—to assist the officers of the Government: the new governor would be wholly unacclimated and the others were much weakened by many years of African service. These young men could “possess themselves of a knowledge of the country’s language, laws, and customs, as well as the peculiarities of the Guinean administration”. It was recommended that they be given junior civil ranks, but (perhaps to appease Bülow) the Chamber suggested that the king might give preference to candidates with some military training. Steffens also went down to the Guinea Coast armed with a new “Instruction [of 1820] for the administration of the royal establishments in Guinea”.21 Voluminous drafts reveal that Thonning exerted himself to a

19 Seventeen years later, an administrative officer at Fort Christiansborg, Hans Giede, alluded in a private letter to von Bülow’s influence on appointments to the African establishments: Privatarkiv No. 5796, Kopp family, I, B, Breve fra H.A. Giede, fra Afrika, 1836– 1839, photocopies, Giede, [Christiansborg,] November 1, 1837, to his sister. Grove and Johansen, p. 1419, refer to an unpublished typescript in the Kopp family’s own hands. 20 Guineiske resolutioner, 1816–20, draft (forestilling July 25, 1820, resolution July 30, 1820); GJ 1870/1820. 21 GTK, Instruction for Bestyrelsen af de Kongelige Etablissementer i Guinea, approberet ved Kongl. Resol. af 29 Sept. 1820. This bound volume, signed by the Chamber colleagues on September 30th, has no title page, but opens with a table of contents (which, however, does not cover material past p. 70). 306 chapter nine frightful degree on this document.22 It was a thorough stock-taking, an enormous effort not only to set things to administrative rights in the Guinea establishments but to exert the authority of the central administration in Copenhagen. He was exquisitely aware, as no one else in the Chamber of Customs could be, of the unthinkable cultural remoteness and strangeness of the establishments and of the tenuousness of the administrative lines of communication, but he seemed also very confident of the authority his personal experience on the coast lent his legislation. He was truly an unusual figure in the halls of government in this regard. The Instruction he produced at this rather promising juncture in the colonial development of the African establishments is endlessly detailed in places, blithely vague in others. As a customs officer, Thonning was a member of a bureaucracy whose charge it was to weigh, measure, record, and tax commodities of every conceivable nature, grade, and quality, and the Guinea Instruction of 1820 reflects those official fiscal concerns. At the same time, the Instruction was designed to preserve Denmark’s foothold in a highly speculative and nebulous African colonial future. It proved a central administrative document: the colonial office’s copy of the Guinea Instruction was repeatedly referred to, amended, and annotated until at least as late as 1846. The Instruction declared that the main function of the Government on the coast was to “guard His Majesty’s territorial rights over the areas and the places” where the Danish flag was flown, including Akuapem; “to protect and promote His Majesty’s subjects in their lawful undertakings in the abovementioned territory, be it trade, cultivation of the earth, or suchlike”; and to strictly prevent the export of slaves. The orders established the chain of command, how often the Govern ment was to assemble, the format and maintenance of the Government’s protocol-books, and prescribed the method of numbering and archiving letters. Business could be introduced by the Council members either in writing or orally but was in either case to be duly recorded. Africans (and Danish-Africans who were unable to formulate their cases in writing) were to be allowed to present themselves at the regular meetings on Tuesdays and Fridays, and their cases were to be subject to the same procedures as all others. The Chamber of Customs periodically wanted to see lists of letters sent home by the Council, and wanted all its own letters properly recorded in

22 Guineiske resolutioner, 1816–20, Thonning’s drafts for the Instruction of 1820, file marked No. 30. fresh colonial momentum 307 the Government’s minute-books. Signed duplicates of all government letters were to be sent to Copenhagen regularly, and the Government was reminded that it was necessary to send duplicates of all enclosures, as well. The Government was with every opportune ship to send in extensive reports on the state of the establishments and relations with their African neighbors and the other European forts, on plantations “or the encouragement of the production of colonial crops by the inhabitants”, and indeed on anything “that the Government might deem to be of any importance or influence and interest”: this was a desperate plea for information, poign antly expressive of the inevitably difficult and disjointed transoceanic communication between metropolis and colony. (An annotation to this article in 1832 recorded that the Government had been reminded of the importance of strict compliance with this requirement.) Article 13 provided that the “Government shall take care to employ every means at its disposal to strengthen and expand its regard and influence among the inhabitants of the country and win their trust and respect”. It was vital not to “awaken their ill-will, f. ex. by offending their religious customs”. The Government was also not to involve itself in the mediation of disputes that did not directly concern the establishments unless requested to do so, and costs were to be covered by the parties in such cases. Controversial matters were to be referred to Copenhagen for resolution, with complete explication and documentation. On the other hand, any violent attack was to be thrown back forthwith with all available force. Danish-born and naturalized citizens were permitted to settle “in any place in the royal territory” and were to “enjoy all such protection and support” as the Government was able to provide them. Fort Christiansborg was to be maintained as cheaply and simply as possible: only the two best 12-pounders and all the lesser guns were to be kept in working condition. “The royal buildings at Frederiksberg and Bibiase may also be maintained in habitable condition, for the common use of the officers”, if this could be done for less than 50 rigsdaler a year. The other forts were to be all but abandoned, with a total of 20 rigsdaler a year budgeted for their maintenance; no new buildings or additions were to be erected without prior permission from Copenhagen. Nevertheless, the non-commissioned officers in charge of the outlying forts were to be literate and competent in Danish, so as to be able to alert the Government at Christiansborg in the event of trouble. The slave trade was to be suppressed wherever it sprang up, but all the officers were otherwise permitted to engage in such commerce as they saw 308 chapter nine fit. Thonning did his best to provide some guidance about how to negotiate the extremely fluid relationship between the European currency val- ues in which the budget was formulated and the local value on the coast of the wares sent down from Europe. Specific sums were budgeted for regular payments to the African polities with which the Danes maintained relations, and the Government would have to convert these figures into trade goods with care and impartiality. Quantities and qualities of the goods landed were to be recorded by the warehouse supervisor, or, in the case of medicines, by the doctor. The costs of shipping were to be calculated when the trade goods were written into the inventory. Thonning provided rates of conversion to African units of value of the cowrie shells sent down to the coast from Denmark (having first been imported from the Indian Ocean). The officers’ wages appear to have depended on the difference between what had been paid for the whole cargo in Europe (and shipping costs) and its value in gold dust on the local market; the Instruction contains long examples of how this calculation was to be performed. The arrival of a cargo vessel from Copenhagen, needless to say, will have been a momentous affair on the coast, a day of celebration and perhaps of disappointment: these goods were these men’s bread. The Instruction acknowledged that the establishment might from time to time be obliged to trade for such necessaries as cowries, tobacco, or spirits, but the Government was admonished, for example, not to purchase more Brazilian rolled tobacco than could be disposed of while it was still fresh. There were rules for allowances for breakage, spillage, and evaporation: the officer in charge of the warehouse was to calculate that aqua vitae could be expected to dwindle at the rate of eight per cent and rum at about nine, depending on the temperature in the warehouse. Breakage of cowries and beads could be reckoned at four per cent, of clay pipes at ten. The warehouse was to keep set hours. Rubric by rubric, the Instruction specified how the various fort accounts and work-journals were to be kept. For what seems every detail of the collective life of the establishments Thonning wrote a regulation, which his stern and scrupulous monarch endorsed and imposed. The cistern water at Fort Christiansborg, for example, was to be used only for personal consumption and cooking, and never for bathing or washing. The large cistern in the main yard of the fort was reserved for the white people, who were to be allotted between two and four gallons a day, except the governor, whose consumption was not limited. The other cistern in the fort was to be for the use of the Danish- African employees. Danish ships were to be supplied from the cistern in the fort’s garden, and other vessels in dire need, if there was water to spare, fresh colonial momentum 309 could be provided with enough water for their use while anchored in the roads and during the short journey around to Keta. No dogs or any other animals were to be allowed on the roofs or on the batteries where the rain water was collected. When Governor Steffens arrived at Christiansborg in December, 1820,23 fresh new Instruction in hand, he was startled to be informed by the free Danish-Africans in the enclave that the royal orders banning the slave trade in 1803 had never been communicated to them; this was confirmed by assistants Thonning (who had returned to the coast with Steffens) and Lutterodt. Steffens reported this directly to the king, who, in June, 1821, directed his Chamber of Customs to account for this state of affairs.24 The Chamber of Customs responded25 that “it is doubtful whether it can rightly be forbidden the negroes themselves to export slaves”. The king then asked the Chamber to clarify for him whether this statement also applied to the Africans under his dominion. “To illuminate this, the Collegium permits itself in the deepest humility to set forth a short survey of the constitution [in the sense of ‘political state of affairs’] in Guinea”. There was nothing at all humble about the way Thonning now unfolded his African expertise before the king. His tone seems almost patient as he instructs his monarch in the political system that prevailed among the Africans. The peoples of the Gold Coast everywhere lived in villages and towns, Thonning informed the king, some of them of several thousand inhabitants. Every town has its own regime, consisting of a hereditary cabuceer and of grandees, who are the most powerful heads of families in the town; this municipal council confers and decides in all the town’s affairs, and judges in all cases among themselves according to customary law…. Every town thus constitutes a sort of republic; and this political system is to be found both in the shore regions and in the interior of the land, even there where several towns or a whole landscape are collected under a sort of regency…. Such regencies occur thus, that the cabuceer of the most powerful town in a landscape has by his town’s supremacy obtained influence on all the nearby towns. The large town’s grandees and in part the smaller towns’

23 GK III, Diverse, Materialier, Thonning’s notes; GJ 13/1821, government on the coast, January 20, 1821. 24 GJ 34/1821, from the king, June 28, 1821; copy in Guineiske Resolutioner, 1821–26. 25 Allerunderdanigste Betænkning from the Chamber of Customs, September 4, 1821 (numbered Designation I, No. 6), filed with Guinea Commission documents at GJS 226/1836. 310 chapter nine

chiefs take a more or less active part in the regime, depending on the great cabuceer’s ability, by means of his fortune, numerous family, or intelligence and eloquence, to draw power [to a] greater or smaller degree to himself. However, this regency seldom extends, in the smaller landscapes, such as: Akvapim, Akvambu, Akotim, Augna, farther than to the towns’ common affairs, disputes among themselves, or the landscape’s external relations to its neighbors. Just as a great cabuceer and grandees draw power over the nearby towns to themselves, so a great landscape’s cabuceer in turn exercises dominion over the surrounding smaller. In this gradation of power the regency is isolated more and more in the great cabuceer and enables him to deal despotically, as is the case with the great cabuceer or the so-called king in Assiantee, who is the mightiest regent in the landscapes of the Gold Coast. In the shore regions the towns are, under the above-mentioned republican form, independent of one another, to which the European possessions without doubt have much contributed, although the [Asante] nation is everywhere dominant in its prestige and military might. All the European possessions are merely fortified commercial establishments; the negroes in the town where they are situated and, in part, in the neighborhood receive certain fixed annual payments, although not of significant value, for not laying any obstacles in the way of the establishment’s trade and especially for, in the event of war, serving in defense of the establishment; otherwise the establishments have no jurisdiction among the negroes but must in all relations with them conform to their laws and customs; however, it depends on the establishment chief’s judgment and the pecuniary means he has at his disposition to win significant influence among the negroes, even to such a degree that it were as if he exercised a sort of presidency in their republican constitution. Every established European nation considers, in its relations with other Europeans, the negro town or the region in which the establishment lies as belonging to such a degree under same’s sphere that no other European nation is allowed to conduct any trade or involve itself in the affairs that are carried on in that place; with that in mind they have prevailed upon the negroes concerned to fly their flag, and thus these flags often meet one another in domestic wars, without the Europeans’ taking any other part therein, than to protect their side as far as the establishment’s cannons can reach, or, by mediating, to negotiate settlements. Although no negro nation under this political system can be regarded as having ceded its right to trade in slaves, the European nations can nevertheless indirectly hinder this trade by forbidding their own [subjects] and other European nations from exporting slaves from the establishments’ district. With regard to these circumstances, the 17th § in the Instruction for the establishments of 29 September 1820 most graciously approved by Your Majesty thus reads: “The only impermissible trade in the establishments is the export of slaves; this the Government shall most strictly and most scrupulously prevent. The negro town from which such export occurs is to be punished with the termination of its wage and custom for a certain time, according to the Government’s judgment. If the export is by someone who falls under the establishment’s jurisdiction, he is to be punished as the fresh colonial momentum 311

refractory transgressor of the royal decrees; if he is an official, he has for- feited his commission. It is hoped that Your Majesty’s most gracious command is by these particulars most humbly complied with. Although this was presumably not the sort of political analysis the king was presented with by his customs bureau every day, he appears to have been satisfied by Thonning’s description of the political delicacy of the Danish position on the coast and by the careful language of the Instruction. The king at any rate let the question of whether slaves had been or still were being shipped out of the Danish enclave rest. (The matter remained of sufficient interest, however, that the Guinea Commission turned to this opinion again years later.) It seems certain that Steffens had been encouraged before he left Copenhagen to attempt to breathe some life into whatever interest in plantations remained among the Europeans and Danish-Africans on the coast. Not long after his arrival he again wrote to the king, who, it appears, had given Steffens permission to report directly to him; the king forwarded Steffens’s letter to the Chamber of Customs in July, 1821.26 Steffens wrote: In my most humble report to Your Majesty about the establishments’ present state I dare to suggest to [Your Majesty], for the establishments’ better- ment, to most graciously take the starting of plantations under [Your Majesty’s] protection. Here I venture to propose that [Your Majesty] would grant the planters here a small capital of 4 to 5000 [rigsdaler] as an advance, so as to clear out the plantations ruined by the Assiantes in the late Interim Governor Schønning’s time, of which some still belong to Your Majesty yourself. Steffens had purchased Schiønning’s plantation at Bibease, with its fifty slaves, and had set them to clearing the land.27 The merchants Balck (or Balch) and Aarestrup also had plantations. Steffens reported that “not the half of these coffee trees are destroyed, but that there is the highest degree of likelihood that these trees in 2 or at the most 3 years will bring in the money laid out”. Without state support, however, nothing could be accomplished, “in the prevailing destitution”. Once again, the king was offered the collateral of the plantations themselves.28

26 GJ(S) 35/1821, Steffens, Christiansborg, February 6, 1821, forwarded by the king July 3, 1821, filed at GJS 702/1849. 27 GJ 38/1821, the Council on the coast, February 1, 1821, filed at GJS 702/1849. 28 See also the Council’s letter to the Chamber of Customs, GJ(S) 26/1821, January 31, 1821, filed at GJS 702/1849. 312 chapter nine

The Council also reported29 that it had received word that the English crown was taking over direct control of its establishments on the Guinea Coast from the African Company (the Company of Merchants trading to Africa),30 and that a new governor, officers, and a two-thousand-man garrison of Africans and Eurafricans from the West Indies was expected soon, perhaps that year. “They regard Accra in the vicinity of the main Danish fort as the best place to establish themselves if there were ever the intention of colonizing the coast”, and Governor John Hope Smith, at Cape Coast Castle, had inquired of Steffens whether he thought the king of Denmark would be willing to dispose of his possessions. Steffens had dared not make him a reply without orders from Copenhagen.31 Everyone agreed that the English intended to colonize, and the Council thought that a strong English military force keeping peace in the area would benefit a Danish agricultural colony as well. There was scarcely enough trade to support the independent merchants who had established themselves at Danish Accra, and if the English moved their main establishment to Accra, all trade would be drawn to it and it would be impossible to compete with them. The Council therefore recommended “colonizing of the Danish possessions as the only way to make them useful for the future”.32 “The soil and the climate here the high collegium is itself too well familiar with” (and here Steffens and his Council were clearly addressing themselves to Peter Thonning) that the Chamber could doubt its fertility; the whole foot of the mountains … is the most blessed country, twined through by brooks and streams, and by all we hitherto have learned of it, this is the most suitable country for the establishment of plantations in this part of the world. Thonning’s own hands were tied by the prevailing economic strictures, but this was rather ambitious colonial language that was being laid in his lap by the king’s hand-picked new man on the coast. The Council feared, indeed, that these proposals might take the Chamber of Customs aback, for, they said, whatever the government’s long-term goals in Africa might be, the Chamber and its servants must remain committed for the time being to fiscal caution and retrenchment. Nevertheless, the Council wrote, “if it is the English’s intention to colonize

29 GJ 24/1821, the Council, February 6, 1821, filed at GJS 144/1828, duplicate at GJ (S) 63/1821. This document was studied by the Guinea Commission as Designation IV, Letter K. 30 See Martin, pp. 153–166. 31 Martin, p. 158, and Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, p. 425. 32 See Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 425–427. fresh colonial momentum 313 their portion, then there is truly no time to give away”. Capital invested in plantations would not be wasted, even in the event of local disturbances. There was always plenty of warning when battles were fought here, and a large army, living off the land, could never stay long in one place. Everything of immediate use was seized or destroyed or by marauding armies, “but they in no way waste time with destroying whole plantations, except that which they out of wantonness can spoil in the vicinity of the roads just as every country place even in Europe is subject to be in times of war”. The Council argued that Denmark’s involvement in European wars had done as much to harm Danish plantations in Africa as had the Asante wars, and just when these new colonial undertakings in the Danish territory had “come so far that they could serve as an example in all Africa”. Governor Steffens had spent only three days in Akuapem, but he was convinced that plantations there could be protected with a few easily-constructed gun- towers; he promised to send in a plan of defense after he had completed a survey of the territory. They concluded: Because the Council believes that in so important a matter, where the correspondence is so difficult, there is no time to waste [and] we have thus expatiated at length on this subject, for we all see … that for the sake of our Most Gracious King’s interests there is only to choose between 2 things, namely, to give up the possessions, or colonize same. The initial costs need not be great, and the place to begin to invest was in setting the existing plantations back on their feet. A month later, the Council reported that a number of Danish-Africans had begun to make their plantations ready for the rainy season but that they would not be able to plant coffee for lack of funds.33 A thousand coffee trees at Schiønning’s old plantation had been rescued from the underbrush and pruned and were now putting forth fresh shoots. The royal garden at Christiansborg had been fenced in and manured, so that the seeds recently brought out from Europe could be planted as soon as the rains came. The garden at Frederiksberg had also been newly fenced, and the fort’s smith had made new gates for both gardens. Steffens himself wrote directly to the Chamber of Customs with the same mail. In order to familiarize himself with the country, he said, both, if it should be the administration’s intention to colonize it, to find the most convenient and most appropriate places, and, in scientific regard, to

33 GJ(S) 83/1821, the Council on the coast, March 18, 1821. 314 chapter nine

investigate it as far as my abilities permit, and send home exemplars of what is found, and finally so as to find the most suitable stations for the determination of latitudes and longitudes and surveys of the whole country, it is necessary to undertake journeys in the interior of the country as far as H. Majesty’s territory extends. He would have to be accompanied by an interpreter, which would incur the expense of an extra hammock and porters, and by laborers “to cut me [through] to heights and other notable places through the thickets growing so thick everywhere here”. He was ready to depart on this expedition as soon as he obtained the Chamber’s approval. “But when I most humbly remark that a quantity of costly instruments were delivered to me for such undertakings, and also that I possess some skills that could be of use”, he was sure the Chamber would approve his plan.34 A similar letter directly to the king, referring to “the places that are particularly suited to colonizing”, was passed along to the Chamber of Customs by General von Bülow in August, and Thonning was ordered by the Chamber to prepare a representation on the matter to the king.35 Thonning apparently judged that the time had come, with the well- connected and enthusiastic Steffens on the ground, to begin to press the colonial project. It was now almost twenty years since he had first set down his ideas regarding Danish colonization in West Africa. There is no indication that the plan he had submitted to Count Schimmelmann in 1805 had reached Crown Prince Frederik’s desk; nor had Thonning since found opportunity to lay out the details of his plan at any length or with any hope that the resources for a serious colonial undertaking could be found. He had, however, in the midst of national fiscal ruin, written crucial legislation securing the future of a Danish colony in Africa, and now it appeared possible that his African ideas and expertise might be allowed at least some of the rein he obviously felt they deserved. In Thonning’s rough notes among the Guinea Commission’s papers, in a file of material for a representation to the king regarding Steffens’s proposals, there occurs this phrase, referring to a full-scale colonization: “In case that time should not be too far away”.36 Thonning’s draft of the Chamber’s representation to the king, preserved in this place in the archives, reiterated Denmark’s African colonial policy. “The object of Your Majesty’s Guinean possessions”, Thonning’s draft

34 GJ(S) 84/1821, Steffens, March 18, 1821. 35 GJ 92/1821, Bülow, August 22, 1821. 36 GK II, in a file of papers regarding a Forestilling ang. Forslag af Gouv. Steffens. fresh colonial momentum 315 began, “is to preserve access to a fertile country for the production of colonial products”. The commodities produced would necessarily be agricultural products,

because the nation’s degree of culture level is too low to think of manufactures, which industry presumably also, after the application of machinery, is more suited to a European mother state than to an Indian colony. When therefore it must chiefly come into consideration what the earth by cul tivation can produce, then the land in Y.M. Guinean establishments is found to have soil and quality of air of the greatest variety, so it is probable that all the crops of the hot climate can succeed here; and experience has already shown that coffee, cotton, indigo, tobacco, and sugar cane, in addition to the provisions and fruits of the warm climate, can thrive here to perfection. Thonning described once again the meagerness of the soil and vegetation in the vicinity of the shore, the lushness of the hills of Akuapem, and the fertility of the marshlands along the Volta. “Besides the fertility of the earth and the climate, the country has the following essential and very significant advantages for the cultivation of colonial crops in the European manner”: first, land in the most fruitful areas could be obtained at insignificant cost. (Thonning had now for more than five years had charge of the administration of the Danish West Indies, as well as of the African establishments, and he knew whereof he spoke when he drew these comparisons, generalizing freely across the breadth of the Atlantic.)

The laborers can be bought and maintained for 1/4 of what they cost in the West Indies. The country is richly provided with all the necessaries of life at very cheap prices; it has maize, millet, rice, banana, beans, and excellent root crops; it has all European domestic animals except the horse, the don- key, and the goose, which, however, can live and thrive here; all building materials of wood, stone, and lime were available, “except the long timbers of needle-leaf trees necessary for large buildings”. Thonning balanced his argument with great rhetorical care:

The country is in all these circumstances so richly equipped by nature compared to the colonized lands in the West Indies that the local difficulties that have discouraged colonial agriculture should be investigated, with regard to whether they can be surmounted by means that are available and not too expensive, for in the contrary case all use of money on the country’s occupation, the establishments’ maintenance, and the support of colonial agriculture will be lost. 316 chapter nine

He then introduced five main circumstances that in his view had worked against the development of colonial agriculture in West Africa. It may be that Thonning, in making this summation, entertained a false historical notion of the ease and rapidity with which the plantation system—and European settlement—had taken hold in the Americas. The five factors he listed were the want of security in the event of hostilities with the Africans; the “common difficulties for beginning agriculture in an uncultivated country”; the unhealthiness of the climate for European colonists; the fact that laborers in Africa were less productive than it was possible to force them to be in the West Indian islands, which were in effect prisons (“a general knowledge of the negroes in Africa and colonial cultivation in America easily teaches that it would not be possible to introduce a remunerative colonial agriculture in Guinea with free labor”: the necessaries of life were too easy to obtain there, and free Africans, whose needs were so modest, could never be held to the work);37 and, finally, the crippling influence of the slave trade on every other economic undertaking

(No European has hitherto come to Guinea with the idea of making same his permanent home; almost all have been unmarried, a condition which leads to longing for the family, and even if some after many years’ residence have preferred to end their days in Guinea, they usually arrived at this decision when they were so old that they could scarcely have been expected to take up the life of the planter with any energy.)38 The problem of security was fundamental; if the safety of the colony could not be assured, all other questions were superfluous. The nature of the land and climate was such that an agricultural colony would have to be placed ten or fifteen miles from the forts on the coast; the plantations would have to be able to defend themselves and to maintain

free and secure communication with the coast… If now a beginning colony cannot for a long time have the power to meet a numerous if undisciplined enemy in the open field, it must nevertheless be able to defend itself: thus the plantations and communication with the coast must be [secured] with fortifications.

37 GK II, in a file of papers regarding a Forestilling ang. Forslag af Gouv. Steffens, Thonning’s notes. 38 GK II, in a file of papers regarding a Forestilling ang. Forslag af Gouv. Steffens, Thonning’s notes. fresh colonial momentum 317

These would have to be fairly substantial to be effective, and not too far apart. A masonry tower thirty feet tall, with a half-dozen three-pounders and a couple of heavier guns, manned by a few men whenever necessary, could easily defend itself; a surrounding wall and prickly-pear hedges would provide temporary refuge for the plantations’ people and domestic animals. A tower would have to be built every mile and a half or so along the way to the coast, and when the land is laid out in squares as on St. Croix, one tower for 4 plantations, placed there where they adjoin, will protect their whole terrain and on the greatest part of the land thus fortified set up a crossfire in connection with the neighbor plantations’ towers. Thonning thus quite casually appropriated as a model for his African vision the peculiar colonial landscape of St. Croix, where, for reasons that had nothing to do with defense, the bulk of the best sugar-cane land had been divided, beginning in the 1730s, into what was at that time a highly unusual grid of rectangular plantations, rather like the pattern later imposed over vast areas of the United States.39 In the notes associated with this draft, Thonning suggested that the plantations should each be three thousand feet long and two thousand wide, just as on St. Croix, and on the back of one of his sheets of notes, there are a couple of sketches of how these great rectangles of land should be arranged, with each plantation numbered consecutively, just as they were on St. Croix. (Figure 9) It is surely not a matter of purely Danish happenstance that the model provided by St. Croix lay so conveniently at hand in the colonial office (and there were perhaps maps of St. Croix on the office walls):40 almost every African colonial notion, judging by the Danish record, appears to have drawn upon precedents set in the Americas. (Figure 10) The towers’ guns could be served by the planters and their most dependable slaves, who would be trained for the task. Thonning estimated that each tower would cost six thousand rigsdaler: “The cost of defense

39 Hopkins, “The Danish cadastral survey of St. Croix, 1733–1754”. 40 An important Danish colonial map, a large-scale topographical survey of the island of St. Croix, in the Danish West Indies, was privately published in Copenhagen by Peter Lotharius Oxholm, a retired military engineer, just at the time that Thonning was recruited for his expedition to the Gold Coast at the close of the eighteenth century, and there are references to this officer’s work in Thonning’s notes in GK III, Colonisations Momenter: Daniel P. Hopkins, “Peter Lotharius Oxholm and late eighteenth-century Danish West Indian cartography”, in The Danish presence and legacy in the Virgin Islands, Svend E. Holsoe and John H. McCollum, eds.; Frederiksted, St. Croix: St. Croix Landmarks Society, 1993, pp. 29–56, on pp. 52–53. 318 chapter nine

Fig. 9. Thonning's rough sketch of layout of plantations, in GK II, Forestilling ang. Forslag af Gouv. Steffens. (By courstesy of the Danish National Archives, photograph by Marty Ross.) fresh colonial momentum 319

Fig. 10. P.L. Oxholm, Charte over den danske Øe St. Croix i America, G.N. Angelo, engraver (Copenhagen: published by Oxholm, 1799), detail, showing the rectangular layout of plantations on St. Croix to which Thonning referred on various occasions. (By courtesy of the Royal Library, Copenhagen, Department of Maps, Prints, and Photographs.) 320 chapter nine for each plantation will then be 1/4 of the erection of the tower and arm- ing, which is, one time for all, about 1500 [rigsdaler], and the annual maintenance, which will be insignificant, scarcely 50 [rigsdaler]”. There Thonning’s draft ends. Thonning may have encountered resistance to the scope of his colonial ambitions within the Chamber of Customs; Governor Steffens’s query about explorations in the territory appears at any rate not to have been advanced through the bureaucracy, and in July, 1822, word reached Copenhagen that Steffens was dead.41 Once again momentum toward a Danish colonization was halted by the death of a single officer.42 The Chamber’s representation to the king in September, 1822, confined itself, by and large, to the question of whether the state should make loans to coffee planters on the coast, as Steffens had urged; talk of watchtowers and thorn hedges and other such matters was apparently found premature for the present.43 As the only collateral for loans would be the plantations themselves, the Chamber advised the king, it could not “unreservedly recommend this suggestion, but must permit itself to present the circumstances that might here seem to come into consideration”. Here Thonning was permitted a fairly forceful statement about founding a large, state-run agricultural colony at some time in the future. The land around Your Majesty’s Guinean establishments has many advantageous qualities for an agricultural colony, such as extraordinarily fruitful extents of land, negroes for work, many building materials, and all significant foodstuffs, all in abundance at very low prices, in a climate particularly favoring vegetation and that is also free of hurricanes, earthquakes, or suchlike very destructive natural phenomena. But there are also local circumstances that much hinder a colony’s development solely through private plantations, and which call for state organization and support, such as: the country’s little cultivated state and great proliferation of woods; the most

41 GJ 146/1822, Peter Thonning, July 16, 1822; GJS 338/1824, Matthias Thonning, Christiansborg, November 15, 1821, reported that Steffens had been caught out in a heavy rain by the Volta on a trip to Fort Prindsenssteen and had fallen fatally ill as a consequence. 42 Professor Schumacher, the astronomer, asked for his surveying instruments back when heard of Steffens’ death, and what remained of them was sent in from the coast a couple of years later, along with a broken “Kaleidascob” that had been sent down as a gift to the king of Asante, with a plea that it be repaired: GJ(S) 143/1822, Professor Schumacher, June 12, 1822; GJ 414/1824, Government on the coast, January 7, 1824. 43 GTK, Vestindiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, 1822, # 110, Forestilling, September 24, 1822, Resolution, October 15, 1822. fresh colonial momentum 321

fertile lands’ distance, ca. 16 miles, from the coast, where the products would have to be embarked for export; the lack of roads for wagon transport; the lack of horses and donkeys; and the country’s inhabitation by nations, who although they are undisciplined in war, nevertheless are numerous and well armed enough to be dangerous. There is thus demanded the clearing of the land, residences, the construction of roads, the procurement and breeding of work animals, common defensive arrangements for the plantations and for the communications between them and the coast, which all presupposes a unified effort according to a particular plan until the colony has achieved a certain strength, as well as preparations, time, and costs that could not be repaid sooner than in several years, and which can thus only with public means and under public administration be expected to be implemented. And in addition there is the unhealthiness of the climate, which because of high death rates in the new population, often occasions disruptions or halts in private plantations. It was therefore not to be hoped that private undertakings would contribute much toward the establishment of a colony until the necessary public measures were taken, particularly to secure the lives and property of colonists. For the want of such measures, Wrisberg, Schiønning, Meyer, Aarestrup and Balck, who had begun to plant coffee, had been forced by “a general war on the Gold Coast” to withdraw their labor forces from their plantations. “This state of affairs lasted for several years”, the king was informed, in which time the plantings had no care, the young coffee trees were choked by the lush wild vegetation, which transformed the plantations to underbrush and thickets of wild species of trees; the fruit of the labor applied was lost, and when the unrest had somewhat settled, the restoration demanded almost the same work as a new plantation. But although these remarks show that private energies are in all likelihood not sufficient to produce an agricultural colony in Guinea, and that loans are subject to being lost, support that is not insignificant for a future colony implemented with the necessary energy could nevertheless be expected from such plantations. Thus, namely, the inhabitants will thereby become acquainted with this the Europeans’ peaceful occupation; a portion of land will be cleared and cultivated, to which attaches the advantage that the unhealthiness of the climate in the regions is somewhat lessened; the workers will be trained and disciplined, overseers will be educated, plants and seed for larger plantations can be obtained. These were such significant advantages as to deserve even the outright sacrifice of some resources: even if the borrowers could not repay the loans, “the value of the capital expended can still be indirectly recouped in the preparation and the saving of time that a planned colony would enjoy there as a result of the loans”. 322 chapter nine

In the meantime, the Chamber recommended “that loans could be granted on properties in the mountain dwellers’ landscape between Jadosa and the river Sacumo Fyo or the great Accra River”. (This seems an extraordinary bit of local detail that Thonning here worked into the rhetoric with which he hoped to sway the royal will. The exotic place names flash like strokes of tropical color in the reassuringly domestic “landscape” that he so briefly sketched.) (Figure 11)

The existing plantings are all in this landscape, which it is desirable to preoc- cupy under Your Majesty’s flag, as the most convenient Arrondissement to the west is to be obtained for a colony thereby; which principle seems not so necessary for the landscapes east of the line between Jadosa and Christiansborg, as these all, with the exception of the insignificant and infertile landscape of the two Prampram towns, are so much under the influence of Your Majesty’s establishments that it can with reason be forbidden any other nation to establish itself here.

The English and Dutch establishments in Accra could lay claim to the town’s rural territory, which Thonning said “can be reckoned east and west from the River Sacumo Fyo to halfway between Akra and Ussu”, and about twelve miles inland from the beach, rather a narrow strip, which it did not appear would be able to compete with the more fruitful regions farther inland except perhaps in the production of cotton. (Here Thonning was quite arbitrarily and unilaterally delimiting the English and Dutch possessions and, no doubt, oversimplifying the political geography of the enclave for his monarch’s ear.) Loans should be made only to people who already had clear possession of land in this area and who owned the slaves to work it; these people, the Chamber recommended, should be lent twenty-five rigsdaler for every male slave they put to work on the land. This would be easily sufficient to put the slaves on the same economic footing that free Africans enjoyed (and thus discourage them from decamping). The loans should be made only for plantings of coffee,

because this is a current article of trade, because the Guinean coffee does not demand special works and preparation, because it is easier to make a trade-article of a single [crop] than several at once, and because the planting of coffee is already progressing.

The Chamber recommended that interest-free loans should be made available for a period three years, with repayment to begin after five years, at the rate of one fifth of the loan per year in gold, cowries, or fresh colonial momentum 323

Fig. 11. Peter Thonning's map, detail, showing the area Thonning favored for plantation cultivation, north of Fort Christiansborg, "between Jadosa [Jadofa, on the map] and the River Sakumo Fyo". RAKTS, U-samling, DfuA U 1. (By courtesy of the Danish National Archives.) good, shelled, cleaned, and well dried coffee. This suggestion bases itself on: that coffee planting after 4 years should be able to bear the repayment of the capital expended on its establishment [and that] interest can reasonably be sacrificed as a premium for a work whereby a public aim and benefit is promoted. 324 chapter nine

(The price of coffee at Principe, the Chamber asserted, was currently such that it could profitably be brought to market in Europe.) The Chamber recommended an investment of two or three thousand rigsdaler a year. “The existing plantations will scarcely qualify for more, and with this capital much can be accomplished by private efforts in Guinea”. The king endorsed the recommendation, but his resolution required that the loans should come out of the funds already budgeted for the establishments: not much was here ventured.44 It appears that the Guinea possessions were slowly being drawn once again into the orbit of the metropolis’s interests in various ways. Between 1807 and 1813, when Denmark had been cut off from its colonies, the Handelstidende had run little colonial news, and had indeed been reduced to printing articles on domestic substitutes for sugar, tea made with straw- berry leaves, and the like. In 1814 the paper had published an essay, drawn from British reports several years old, on the African Institution for the promotion of agriculture and civilization in general at Sierra Leone and elsewhere along the Gold Coast.45 This institution’s aims, according to the article, were to instruct and assist the Africans in the development of new branches of commerce to take the place of the slave trade. Cotton seed had been distributed, and agricultural implements had been sent down. Experiments were being conducted with palm fiber, for rope, and mangrove bark, for tanning. Three young Africans, raised and educated in Europe, had been sent to Sierra Leone to teach. The Handelstidende was not published at all from the end of 1814 until 1818;46 when it reappeared, after the Commerce Collegium and the Chamber of Customs had merged their functions in 1816, it can be thought that the expanded and united colonial office may have had some editorial influence, if only indirectly. In 1821, the paper alluded to T.E. Bowdich’s Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee as if the book should already

44 The resolution was recorded at GJ 174/1822; a copy of it is filed at GJS 144/1828. The resolution and a copy of the letter conveying the substance of it to the Council on the coast were classified by the Guinea Commission as Designation IV, letter L; see related papers among Dok. o. l. vedr. Guinea, in a file marked “Aller und. betænkning, September 24, 1822, No. 110”, in Thonning’s hand, with “Bilag L” on the inside back cover, as well as at GJS 702/1849; see also the Guinea Instruction of 1820, in the section of addenda on Cultur af Colonialproducter. According to the Guinea Instruction, the letter to the coast was dated November 14, [1822]. 45 “De nyeste forsøg med at udbrede Cultur og Oplysning i Africa”, Handels-og Industrie- Tidende, No. 24, June 13, 1814, pp. 94–96; see Martin, p. 143; British policy towards West Africa, pp. 103–106; and British colonial developments 1774–1834, Vincent Harlow and Frederick Madden, eds. (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1953), pp. 388–389. 46 Søllinge and Thomsen, Vol. 1, p. 119. fresh colonial momentum 325 have been well-known to the readers of the Handelstidende.47 (According to Peter Thonning’s notes among the Guinea Commission’s papers, Bowdich had urged that British trading posts be placed on the Volta, and in April, 1821, the Danish Government on the coast reported that Sir George Collier, a British naval commander, had sent three ship’s boats into the Volta as far upriver as Fort Kongenssteen.48) In 1822 the Handelstidende ran an article on the abortive Danish colonial undertaking in the Nicobar Islands and another on the cultivation of cocoa in South America, where “30,000 trunks secure a family’s welfare for a generation and a half”, although the crop was demanding. “It is seen thereby that not even in this land of earthly paradise is wealth given without work and denial, and that in the New just as in the Old World one only attains prosperity by reining in his desires and by moderating his wishes”.49 The Handelstidende also expressed the opinion that while the American trade could be expected to expand steadily, it “does not, however, exactly offer any hitherto unknown commercial connections with Europe”, and that the manufacturing nations should therefore turn their attention to Africa.50 The entire continent had been hitherto inaccessible: the north coast was in the hands of wild brigands, and the whole western coast has been cut off from every real connection with the interior of the land by the Europeans’ kidnapping, which has now already lasted for several centuries, that has involved the nations of the coast in incessant wars that have subjected their countries to destruction and that have interrupted all relations and all communication with the rich and cultured nations in the interior. Only when the slave trade was finally brought to an end and “the peoples on the coast have raised themselves from this long state of confusion” would it possible “to conduct there an extensive and profitable commerce, and treasures, which will far exceed those South America in its day poured forth, will stream to Europe from these lands rich in gold”, particularly if European mining techniques were brought to bear.

47 Handels-og Industrie-Tidende, No. 21, March 13, 1821, p. 84. 48 GK V, Udkast til betænkningen afsluttet 26. februar 1847, Diverse notater ang. forskellige udkast til betænkning (ca. 1846–47?), 1/4 46, Endvidere Observanda i Betænk., Thonning’s notes; Bowdich, pp. 455, 457 (the paging in the edition consulted does not correspond to Thonning’s references); GJ 87/1821, government on the coast, April 15, 1821. 49 “Om Nicobar-Øerne”, Handels-og Industrie-Tidende, No. 51, June 25, 1822, pp. 277–278; “Cacaotræet”, No. 66, August 17, 1822, p. 342. 50 “Handel paa Afrika”, Handels-og Industrie-Tidende, No. 70, August 31, 1822, pp. 357–358. 326 chapter nine

King Frederik was an enthusiastic adherent of Joseph Lancaster’s enormously influential system of mutual or monitorial instruction, which permitted the reduction of outlays for teachers through reliance on simple, highly standardized rote instruction by older pupils working with printed charts or tables of letters, words, and figures hung on school-room walls; the king was persuaded that the system would also be of benefit to his Danish-African subjects on the coast and ordered four copies of a new Danish work on the monitorial instruction system sent down to the coast.51 This book was the work of Joseph N.B. Abrahamson, another military man at court, on whom Frederik VI relied in quite a number of connections and who was closely involved in launching the use of monitorial instruction in the Danish schools.52 The tables that were so central to the method were printed in a lithography shop purchased by the crown expressly for this purpose.53 Abrahamson also published a series of ele- mentary text books for use with the systems’ geography tables,54 which consisted, by 1823, of 32 sheets of maps. The main outlines of Peter Thonning’s map of the Guinea enclave were printed on a sheet with five other small representations of the Danish possessions in the West Indies and India.55 The maps were made in two versions, one for instruction (Figure 12) and one, with the place names deleted, for examinations.56

51 GJ 109/1821, the king, October 6, 1821; other copies were to be sent to the Danish colonies “in the Indies”. See Jørgen O. Bjerregaard, “The Danish school system in the former Danish West Indies from 1702–1917”, in The Danish presence and legacy in the Virgin Islands, pp. 59–68, on p. 60. 52 P.H. Münster and J. Abrahamson, Om den indbyrdes underviisnings væsen og værd (Copenhagen: trykt hos A. Seidelin, 1821–28); “Abrahamson, Joseph Nicolai Benjamin”, Dansk biografisk lexikon, C.F. Bricka, ed. The Chamber also sent down to the coast a copy of Lancaster’s book on his system: Guin. Kopibog, October 25, 1821, No. 470, to the government on the coast; Joseph Lancaster, Improvements in education as it respects the industrious classes of the community (London: Darton and Harvey, 1803). 53 Finans Deputationen, Expeditions, Assignations, & Bogholderkontor, Journalsager, No. 2856 J1820 FD, Frederik R, Frederiksberg Slot, July 9, 1820; “Lithografi”, Salmonsens konversationsleksikon, 2nd ed. 54 See, for example, [Jos. Nic. Benjam. Abrahamson,] Geographi, henhørende til Geographitabellerne No. 1–18 ved den indbyrdes underviisning and Geographi, henhørende til Geographitabellerne No. 19–32 ved den indbyrdes underviisning (bound together in the Royal Library’s copy: Copenhagen: Trykt hos Andreas Seidelin, 1823). 55 Jacob Henrik Mansa, Indbyrdes Underviisning, Geographitabel No. 31, De danske besiddelser i Ostindien, Vestindien, og paa Kysten Guinea (Copenhagen: [published at the Kgl. Stentrykkeri, n. d.] (Royal Library, Copenhagen, Kortsamling, 1909 Nr. 691). Mansa was a prominent Danish topographic cartographer: “Mansa, Jacob Henrik”, Dansk biografisk lexikon, C.F. Bricka, ed.). 56 Mansa, Geographitabel No. 32, Examinationskort (Copenhagen: [published at the Kgl. Stentrykkeri, n. d.] (Royal Library, Copenhagen, Kortsamling, 2324–0–1908/1); [Abrahamson,] Geographi, henhørende til Geographitabellerne No. 19–32, pp. 8–9. fresh colonial momentum 327

(Figure 13) Thousands of sets of the instructional tables were printed,57 and they remained in use, especially in provincial schools, long after the Lancastrian teaching method fell into disrepute.58 At the king’s wish, instruction in geography was reserved as a special privilege for the best students,59 but it must be assumed that a substantial segment of the Danish populace in the 1820s and 1830s was exposed to Thonning’s image of the Danish enclave on the Guinea Coast. At least some of the instructional tables were sent to the coast, and Thonning’s map may have been studied by the children of the African establishments, as well.60 In April, 1821, H.C. Monrad, who had served as the African establishments’ priest from 1805 to 1809 and was now ensconced in a parish in Jutland, invited the public to subscribe toward the publication of a book on the Guinea establishments.61 He had long been convinced, he said, that the public would welcome a new, expanded, and more reliable description than had hitherto been available; Isert’s book, he pointed out, was now more than thirty years old. He had to that end, in the course of his five-year residence on the coast, collected all the notes and experiences that could provide material for a description both of these Danish colonies as of the region of Africa in which they are situated, and of the manners, customs, way of life, culture, and constitution of the negro nations in whose territory our forts and trading posts are placed. My materials for such a description, based entirely on my own observations, I have now put into order and worked up for publication. He asked his fellow citizens “who have a taste for knowledge of the human race, also in its uncivilized life, and who interest themselves in knowing of the people that the Europeans for centuries have treated in a manner revolting to humanity”, to support the expense of printing the work. He found himself in a position to publish his account early in 1822, and dedi- cated the book to Frederik VI,62

57 Finans Deputationen, Expeditions, Assignations, & Bogholderkontor, Journalsager, No. 3504 J1823 FD., Frederik R., November 4, 1823. 58 “Mønster, Peter Hans”, Dansk biografisk lexikon, C.F. Bricka, ed. 59 Danske Kancelli, 1st Departement, Kongelige resolutioner og expeditioner, Danske Kancellis Forestillinger for 1st Departement, Forestilling April 1, 1820, resolution August 21, 1822. 60 GJ 147/1828, Undersøgelseskommission, April 1, 1828. 61 H.C. Monrad, “Subscriptionsplan”, Schlesvig-Holstein-Lauenburgsche Provinzial berichte, 1821, No. 6, pp. 173–174. 62 Monrad’s Bidrag til en skildring af Guinea-Kysten was described in the first edition of the Dansk Biografisk Lexikon as “a good piece of work, that gives a lively account and a clear 328 chapter nine

Fig. 12. Lithographed school map, 1820s, of the area around the Danish forts on the Guinea Coast, drawn from Thonning's map: [Jacob Henrik] Mansa, Indbyrdes Undervisniing, Geographitabel No. 31, De danske besiddelser i Ostindien, Vestindien, og paa Kysten Guinea, detail. (Copenhagen: [published at the Kgl. Stentrykkeri], n. d.) Danish Royal Library, Kortsamling, 1909 Nr. 691. (By courtesy of the Royal Library, Copenhagen, Department of Maps, Prints, and Photographs.)

Among Europe’s regents the first who heard the cries of Africa’s sons for deliverance, whose humane work it was that the negro’s heavy slave-chains for the first time were lawfully broken, and whose paternal eye watches over even his most distant subjects.63

picture of Guinea’s nature and the negroes’ life”. He was completely suppressed in the third edition of the Leksikon, published in the 1980s. Grove and Johansen, pp. 1407–1410, make good use of Monrad’s descriptions in their historical geography of the Volta delta. 63 Monrad, Bidrag til en skildring, p. [IV]. fresh colonial momentum 329

Fig. 13. Lithographed school map, 1820s, of the area around the Danish forts on the Guinea Coast, with the place-names removed, for examinations: [Jacob Henrik] Mansa, [Indbyrdes Undervisniing,] Geographitabel No. 32, Examinationskort, [De danske besiddelser i Ostindien, Vestindien, og] paa Kysten Guinea, detail ([Copenhagen: published at the Kgl. Stentrykkeri], n. d.). Danish Royal Library, Kortsamling, 2324–0–1908/1. (By courtesy of the Royal Library, Copenhagen, Department of Maps, Prints, and Photographs.)

Christian Molbech, the distinguished lexicographer, historian of literature, and bibliographer, who was quite a central figure of the Danish intel- ligentsia, although somewhat slighted in his own time—he was a better scholar, in other words, than he was a poet—wrote a foreword and saw Monrad’s book through the press for him.64 The book spoke sufficiently well for itself, Molbech wrote: “The author’s handling of the material, drawn entirely from his own experience and careful observations, will assure him the approval of the discriminating and the knowledgeable”.65

64 “Molbech, Christian”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 2nd. ed.; C Molbech, “Foretale”, in Monrad, Bidrag til en skildring, pp. [V]-XVIII. 65 Molbech, pp. V-VI. 330 chapter nine

The librarian in Molbech found it natural to provide a review of the earlier Danish literature on Africa, and this fell out quite to Monrad’s advantage. Isert’s work, by then a standard, was rather roughly handled. Molbech recommended the much less well-known material published by Frederik Thaarup in the late 1790s, including the “extraordinary documents” relating to Isert’s colony. (On the basis of his reading of those documents, in some comfortable office in Copenhagen, Molbech went so far as to take exception, in a footnote, to Monrad’s statement that Isert’s colony had been situated too far into the interior.) Isert had accomplished a great deal, Molbech thought, but his unfortunate death had halted “every step to continue the establishment of a colony that seemed to promise so very much”.66 Monrad’s account of the various attempts at plantation agriculture early in the century were of particular interest and relevance in forming judgments of “the political value and significance of the Danish possessions in Africa”, Molbech wrote. “If these plantations seem hitherto not to have attained any significant flowering”, this was attributable more to the failure of their owners to pursue their undertakings with sufficient energy than to “local hindrances”. Since Isert’s death no forceful step seems to have been taken for this cause; and yet it is scarcely dubitable that even with the sums that since 1788 have been expended on the Danish possessions in Guinea significant progress toward new colonial plantations could have been achieved on this coast, whose importance in this regard will assuredly one day be acknowledged, perhaps when it is too late for us to make use of the good opportunity we have not lacked.67 “Already before the slave trade was ended by a royal command in the year 1803,” Monrad wrote, the humane Danish administration, without doubt with the time in view when this trade should end, not only encouraged the establishment of plantations in Africa but also employed not entirely insignificant sums thereon.68 No settlers had been sent out, however: the project had been left to the administration on the coast, which at that time was, after all, in the business of trading slaves. Monrad recalled that the colonial undertaking had been the subject of some ridicule on the coast. One planter of his acquaintance had joked that the loan he had received interest-free from the

66 Molbech, p. XVI. 67 Molbech, pp. XVII-XVIII. 68 Monrad, Bidrag til en skildring, p. 315. fresh colonial momentum 331 government might as well be regarded as payment-free. Isert, Monrad thought, had so placed his colony as to invite trouble: “the farther into the land, the more one is exposed raiding parties in the wars, and although there is as yet no example of a Danish plantation being destroyed thereby” (here his information apparently dates back to his own time on the coast), “nevertheless such an occurrence is so common, that it even often takes place between cultivated nations, and what is not to be expected of uncultivated ones?”69 Monrad reckoned that more had been invested in Jens Flindt’s plantation at Eibo than in any other private effort; coffee had been planted there for years, but the soil was too sandy for that crop. Cotton, on the other hand, did well at Eibo, as did various provision crops, including maize, and Flindt had enjoyed some success with his distilling operation. The plantation was eight miles from Fort Kongenssteen, however, and rather exposed to attack, Monrad said, and Flindt had always been involved in one dispute or another with his African neighbors. (Monrad suggested in a note that the fact that “this courageous, strict, and extraordinarily tough man” had not been killed when he was the captive of the Asante “provides surely another proof that they are not so bad as they are proclaimed to be”.)70 In 1800, Monrad related, as the end of the slave trade approached, the Government on the Guinea Coast had received royal orders “to make an effort at agricultural establishments on public account”. A plantation had been established near the Akuapem hills ten or twelve miles from Christiansborg at Bibease. Another had been started a mile or so north of the fort on a hill called Kuku. “Here a handsome stone house and a number of negro huts for the work negroes were put up, and the whole place was called Frederiksberg”, after the royal residence on a prominent hill just outside Copenhagen. “A fine allée, in the same form as that which leads to Frederiksberg Palace, runs to Kuku”. From there, a “fine, wide, and completely straight” road had been cut to Bibease; “it goes through wood and bush, over the mountain-like hill Legon, is for about six miles flanked with trees on both sides, and seeks in vain its match in Guinea”.71 Cotton, coffee, fruit trees, and even grapevines had been planted at Bibease, but the heat had shriveled the grapes before they could mature. A West Indian—and Monrad was presumably referring to Christian

69 Monrad, Bidrag til en skildring, pp. 315–317, quotation on p. 317. 70 Monrad, Bidrag til en skildring, pp. 318–319, quotations on p. 319. 71 Monrad, Bidrag til en skildring, p. 320. 332 chapter nine

Jansen—had had charge of these plantings. Jansen had died before Monrad’s time, but the priest described him as a man of a vey fearful character; he constantly saw decapitated negro heads and a tiger in every bush, and when conflicts between the negroes thereabouts really arose, he left the plantation, fled with the work negroes to Christiansborg, and related that all was destroyed and plundered at Bibiase. This was by no means the case. The place had thereafter been neglected, and “[o]ccasion was found to say and perhaps write to Europe: ‘It is not possible to plant in Africa, because the negroes disrupt the plantations’ ”. An “insignificant” attempt had also been made on Legon Hill.72 The plantation Frederiksberg, on the other hand, was “on the whole rather well maintained; fine hedges, lemon, cherry, tamarind trees [, and others] can be seen there”. The coffee trees there had been planted by inexperienced people on a dry and stony hill, where they could not possibly thrive; they wasted away for a number of years and now it is said: ‘Coffee trees cannot grow in Africa’. Yes, it is true, near the seacoast, in the more sandy areas, wreathed in ocean vapors, they will not succeed; but in fitting soil, near Aqvapim, they grow more lushly than in even the West Indies and, as I myself have seen, bear fruit already in the second year.73 He thought the cotton planting at Kuku very promising: if it were properly managed and expanded, and if machines could be used to clean the fiber, then there was no doubt that cotton “could be exported from there on a large scale”. The Danish flag still flew at Frederiksberg, and its small cannons were sometimes fired; [e]specially in Governor Wrisberg’s time it was open to any European; one walked there almost every evening, amused oneself in a very respectable manner, and went home by torchlight. Next to or in the vicinity of all Danish forts are smaller plantations, ornamented with country houses of stone, which should though best be called gardens, for pleasure is really their purpose. The garden at Qvitta or Prindsensteen especially distinguishes itself, and so much more so since it is located in an extremely sandy area. The burnt-off negro town probably stood on the fertile ground where the plantation is now to be found.74

72 Monrad, Bidrag til en skildring, pp. 320–321, quotations on p. 321. 73 Monrad, Bidrag til en skildring, pp. 321–322. 74 Monrad, Bidrag til en skildring, p. 322. fresh colonial momentum 333

The garden at Kongenssteen was altogether neglected in Monrad’s time, and perhaps wisely so: the Africans there had opposed the clearing of a road from the fort to the plantation for fear of giving the local fetish offense, but the road, which could be covered by the fort’s guns, had been built nonetheless. When the fort commandant had died suddenly, the Africans had asserted that the fetish had done away with him; Monrad, however, believed he might have been poisoned.75 Overall there is no lack of smaller, quite fine plantations or pleasure spots, especially near the main fort; but they have no permanence and gradually become dilapidated, as their European owners die off or travel home to their fatherland. It is really a charming characteristic of the Danes in Africa that they, more than other nations, seek to beautify nature there where it in itself is so wild.76 Although the royal plantation at Bibiasé is neglected, there is to be found there, however, a quite significant private plantation, which has several thousand coffee trees. It is owned by the oldest European in the Danish establishments, a merchant Meier…. During his whole 30-year residence here in this land he has displayed a striking desire for planting. Had he united steadiness and humanity with his industry, then I know no one who was more suited to establish agriculture there; it was also his proudest wish to be regarded as the father of colonization. Although he has often applied for royal support, I do not know that he has enjoyed any other than that lately he has from time to time had some of the royal negroes as help. Many are the places that bear the traces of his activity. Indeed, it was Meyer’s failing that he was always eager to go on to some new enterprise. At Popo, below Prindsensteen, a long way back in time, he had a garden; as commandant at Kongensteen he made there a handsome garden with a stone house, which is now crumbling; on the island Tuberecco in the Rio- Volta he had a factory and started a plantation there; at Accara he has also had a very large cotton plantation; on Legon Hill, or more properly next to it, he had a plantation of both coffee and cotton; at Ajeadufa, about four miles south of the Aqvapim Mountains, he had the most perfect coffee plantation I saw in Africa.77 The most notable of all the burgeoning plantations in my time was Governor Schønning’s by the name Daccubie, so called for a very high hill, which actually is an offshoot of the Aqvapim Mountains. The plantation is laid out in an extremely fertile valley, through which a rather rich brook winds. On the hill itself rests a solid and indeed handsome stone house,

75 See Hopkins, “A poisonous plant of the genus Datura”. 76 Monrad, Bidrag til en skildring, p. 323. 77 Monrad, Bidrag til en skildring, pp. 323–324. 334 chapter nine

surrounded by huts for the working negroes, and from there is a glorious view over the valley, which on all sides, except to the south, is encircled by Aqvapim’s woods-thatched mountains. Here there was also an excellent spring, a great rarity in Africa. And indeed for this reason, that by the sea- shore there is only cistern- and wretched surface- or brackish water (of the first there is always only a little) while on the other hand near the mountains, which draw the rainclouds to them, there is seldom anywhere a lack of good water, planting and the establishment of colonies here ought to be far preferred. There were to be seen at Daccubie more than 50,000 coffee trees in the most luxuriant growth, besides plantings of other useful trees and fruits. The governor was a man who with a clear head, knowledge of many things, and an extraordinary inclination to physical activity, directed the work, which naturally was also much advanced because he, as supreme commander, could set many hands in motion. Even regarded as a pleasure spot, this plantation is exceedingly attractive, and I passed many pleasurable hours in the silent, majestic nature that surrounds it….78 Although nothing direct has been done for the elevation of the free negroes by all those who hitherto have occupied themselves with planting in the Danish establishments, no step made to draw closer to them, except in so far as advantage dictated it, nevertheless their example has not been without all use in economic regard. Encouraged by the richer yields that the more fertile soil of Aqvapim provided, several Europeans, mulattoes, and negroes have begun there to establish plantations, or rather their so-named Rosarre-Pladse [or cultivated clearings79], on which their work negroes live in the cultivation season; however, as far as I learned, only the cultivation of the land’s indigenous fruits, such as maize, yams, [etc.] have been the object of their industry. It would be important to establish close relations with the neighboring Africans, and when they saw that coffee, cotton, sugar (the sugar cane grows to astonishing size, and very sweet in Africa), rum, [etc.,] could be sold and exported with profit, there is no doubt that they, especially when all slave exports ceased, would apply themselves to such saleable things; for the negroes’ indolence is, … at least in many places, and especially farther into the land, not so great as is commonly believed….80 It is not only possible, but also probable that the plantations referred to, in part so promising, now lie neglected; for death has carried off their owners. It is regrettable, too, that such plantations should be dependent on a single man’s life or death, and that they are not from the beginning assured permanence by the participation of several; but I fervently wish that their memory might be preserved as an unfailing proof of the truth: that it is not necessary to abduct Africa’s sons

78 Monrad, Bidrag til en skildring, pp. 324–325. 79 Larsen, p. 145. 80 Monrad, Bidrag til en skildring, p. 326. fresh colonial momentum 335

and daughters to the distant West Indies, so as to obtain thence the things our luxury calls necessities.81 The Chamber of Customs subscribed for twenty copies of Monrad’s book, of which two were sent to the coast with orders that one of them was to be placed in the official working archives at Fort Christiansborg, so it could be consulted in the event the administration in Copenhagen might refer to it in future communications.82 The Chamber’s purchase of the other eighteen copies may merely have been a means of expressing the government’s gratitude for Monrad’s service, but it is clear that this was a book of more than incidental interest to the Chamber. The published reaction to Monrad’s ambitious work was slow to develop. A very short notice appeared in Paris in 1823, in the Revue encyclo- pédique.83 The journal also ran some other African news elsewhere in the same volume: it was reported that cotton, coffee, bananas, pineapples, European vegetables, and “magnificent” sugar canes were thriving, perfectly acclimatized, in the very promising Royal Garden, not yet a year old, in Senegal.84 The Revue had received word that in September, 1822, there were 800,000 square feet (about eighteen acres) of cotton plants on the left bank of the Senegal River, and this area was expected to be doubled soon. Indigo and other plants were also doing well, and many of the “naturels”, attracted by the equitable administration of the French government, had taken service as free laborers. From Saint-Louis, at the mouth of the river, it was reported that “L’Ecole d’enseignement mutuel commence à exercer dans ce pays une influence bienfaisante”. The Revue published another short notice of Monrad’s book a couple of years later, in its section of “Nouvelles scientifiques et littéraires”;85 by this time the book had

81 Monrad, Bidrag til en skildring, pp. 327–328. Peter Thonning copied out and underlined that last ringing statement in his notes on Monrad’s book among the Guinea Commission’s papers: GK V, Udkast til betænkningen afsluttet 26. februar 1847, Diverse notater ang. forskellige udkast til betænkning (ca. 1846–47?), 1/4 46, Endvidere Observanda i Betænk., Thonning’s notes. 82 GJ 130/1822, Molbech, April 19, 1822; Guin. Kopibog, April 20, 1822, to the government on the coast. 83 Review of Monrad, “Tableau de la côte de la Guinée, et de ses colonies danoises”, in “Bulletin Bibliographique. Livres Étrangers”, Revue encyclopédique, Tome XIX, 1823, item 134, p. 394. 84 Revue encyclopédique, Tome XIX, 1823, p. 212. 85 “Copenhague.—Description des colonies danoises”, in “Nouvelles scientifiques et lit- téraires”, Revue encyclopédique, Tome XXV, 1825, p. 251. The notice has been attributed by Erslew, Almindeligt Forfatter-Lexicon, to P.A. Heiberg. Heiberg worked for the French foreign ministry, and Monrad’s book may have been of interest to him in that professional connection as well. 336 chapter nine appeared in a German translation,86 and this second notice will conceivably have been of somewhat more interest to the Revue’s readers, few of whom will have had much use for Monrad’s book in the original Danish. In the same section of the Revue, there was another report from Senegal, under the heading “Agriculture coloniale—Introduction et multiplication de la cochenille”. In an item picked up from the Annals Maritimes, it was reported that Mr. Perrollet, “agriculteur botaniste, attaché au service des colonies”, had arrived there the past September with cochineal from Guadeloupe and nopal cactus from Marie-Galante, as well as other plants and seeds that had never before been introduced in Senegal. The royal brig Curieux had made a fifty-day crossing from the Antilles to Senegal with this botanical cargo, but only a few of the nopals had perished, and these had been the ones least “infested with cochineal-insects. On the others, these insects multiplied to a singular degree and arrived at Saint-Louis in good condition”, and every effort would be made to encourage them to acclimatize themselves.87 All along this coast, it appears, colonialists were drawing upon the crops and the accumulated knowledge of the West Indies in their African plantings. In Copenhagen, the first review of Monrad’s book appears to have been rather a long essay in the Dansk Litteratur-Tidende in 1824.88 The article can been attributed to Adolph Engelbert Boye, who at about this time became the editor of another Copenhagen newspaper, Nyt Aftenblad; Knud Rahbek, who had given the abolition of the slave trade so much play in his own Minerva, was a contributor to Nyt Aftenblad, and so were Christian Molbech and Rasmus Nyerup, the historian of literature, who had arranged for Rahbek to publish Frederik Sneedorff’s accounts of the Sierra Leone undertaking in Minerva. Boye was also a functionary in the finance ministry and may thus have had some direct, official knowledge of the government’s African policies.89

86 Monrad, Gemälde der Küste von Guinea und der Einwohner derselben, wie auch der dänischen Colonien auf dieser Küste, H.E. Wolf, transl. (Weimar: Verlage des Landes- Industrie, 1824). 87 Under “Nouvelles scientifiques et littéraires”, Revue encyclopédique, Tome XXV, 1825, pp. 241–242. 88 [Adolph Engelbert Boye,] review of Monrad, Bidrag til en skildring af Guinea-Kysten, in Dansk Litteratur-Tidende, 1824, No. 30, pp. 465–480, No. 31, pp. 481–496, No. 32, pp. 497–504. 89 “Boye (Adolph Engelbert)”, Erslew, Almindeligt Forfatter-Lexicon; Søllinge and Thomsen, Vol. I, p. 144. fresh colonial momentum 337

It would be lamentable [Boye wrote,] and one more proof of the prevailing tepidity for the literature of the land of our fathers, if this noteworthy publication were not generally read and appreciated, so important are the reports and remarks it contains on distant Danish possessions, whose current state was almost altogether unknown to the public. One must wish this book read as much by the administration as by the people, for even if the colonies of which it provides information are now at present insignificant to the state in financial regard, and the motherland’s means to give them a greater significance few or none, when such are to be generated at a price, nevertheless, regarded from the point of view of humanity and culture, the situation becomes quite otherwise, and from this side much remains to effect by wise and humane measures.90 The work begun so honorably by the King of Denmark, said Boye, meaning, of course, the abolition of the slave trade, could not otherwise be fittingly completed. Monrad’s book made clear that no steps had been taken toward such a result in his time on the coast, and no indication of more recent efforts was to be found in either of the two government organs in which one could expect news of such measures to be recorded, Boye wrote, referring, no doubt, to the Handelstidende and the Collegial-Tidende, the governmental newsletter, whose name refers to the structure of the central administrative apparatus.91 Monrad’s book stood up well to recent English accounts from the Guinea Coast, Boye wrote; “The book is by no means the usual dry and for the common reader tiresome chorography” (or local geographic description). He praised the author’s “spirit of observation, veracity, and rare exactitude”; the book’s lively style made it “so much the more accessible to readers of all classes”.92 Indeed, Boye plucked a great deal of Monrad’s material out of his book and presented it to his own readers. Monrad’s situation had been rather difficult, Boye recounted: there had been Europeans at Christiansborg who dared not enter the fort’s chapel for fear of incurring the wrath of the local fetish.93 Only the very richest Africans and Europeans kept what could be called seraglios, but even less well-placed men had more than one wife, and the wives’ lot was hard.94 There was, by Monrad’s account, no birdsong in Africa: the night was full of strange noises, “but no trilling voice”. The Danes’ praiseworthy horticultural efforts in Guinea had been

90 Boye, pp. 465–466. 91 Boye, p. 467. 92 Boye, p. 469. 93 Boye, pp. 470–471. 94 Boye, p. 473. 338 chapter nine imitated by the English. Cabbage and celery grew well there, but there were no potatoes or carrots. European grains shot up well but set no seed.95 The Africans’ agriculture, husbandry, and navigation all remained at “rather a low stage”.96 In what may have been a reference to Governor Steffens’s fate, Boye stressed the importance of having passed through the first bouts with the climate fever before undertaking explorations inland. Monrad had himself relied on African medicine and had been easily cured of the yellow fever. Smallpox was prevalent on the coast but unknown in the interior, and it was not thought to be indigenous; on the authority of Bowdich, Boye reported that the Asante and “the Moors” possessed knowledge of vaccination against this disease.97 Only in Sierra Leone had significant plantations been established in West Africa. Efforts in this direction in the Danish enclave had been left to hard-drinking former slave-traders, Boye complained, men who had sunk almost to the cultural level of the Africans, and who “die at last with the brutish tranquility of an ignorant barbarian”.98 Nevertheless, Boye, assured his readers, there was no question that the African soils were suitable for the cultivation of all the West Indian crops, “if only it were seriously wished to colonize and cultivate the coast of Africa”.99 Boye was pleased to pass along “an official report for the year 1813”, in which acting governor Schiønning had described the state of his coffee plantation. When the administration (the author of the report believed) wished at a more favorable juncture to sedulously put to use this discovery that West Indian crops could be produced in abundance in Africa, it would be of incalculable advantage to Denmark, which in time could harvest the same benefit of its colonies there as of those in the West Indies (which, as is well known, still always yield a very significant annual surplus).100 It is to be doubted that Boye would make so free as to publicize Schiønning’s archived official report in this way, even ten years after the fact, without the approval of his superiors. This is not to say that the ministry of finance was actively advancing a fresh new colonial initiative: it may, however,

95 Boye, p. 478. 96 Boye, p. 480. 97 Boye, Dansk Litteratur-Tidende, 1824, No. 31, pp. 481–482. 98 Boye, pp. 493–494. 99 Boye, p. 495. 100 Boye, Dansk Litteratur-Tidende, 1824, No. 32, pp. 497–498. fresh colonial momentum 339 reflect a common presumption in at least some circles within the government that Danish plantations would indeed in due time spring up and flourish in West Africa. That the favorable juncture soon might come, [Boye went on,] when the administration could forcefully advance so important a matter, is certainly much to be desired. What in the meantime could occur was appropriate preparations that could have important consequences without for the moment requiring significant sacrifices. Christianity might with diligence be propagated and wild and raw ways thereby banished; the natives living around the forts might be encouraged to themselves cultivate their land, and private plantations in every way be favored. It would depend, then, on whether any of our still remaining rich merchants should not find that the capital that now cannot be placed in trade could in part be given a worthy and profitable use on small colonies in Africa. It would in several respects be right to begin with little, even if necessity did not require it. But it could presumably be thought that, by means of such colonial plantations on rich private men’s account, avenues to employment and to a milder fate for various needy people here at home could be opened, whose ability, age, health, and morality made them suitable for the like. Such colonies should be connected with a more enterprising and more lively trade with the richer negro nations outside the coastal stretches, and it must in every way be sought to make the fatherland’s manufactures market- able there. The Danish colonies’ old, uninterrupted friendly relations with West Africa’s mightiest nation, the Ashantees, seem to make the complete resuscitation of such a trade easy.101 Early in 1824, Boye’s paper, Nyt Aftenblad, published an unsigned article entitled “Historical remarks on Denmark’s trade, shipping, and colonies up to the North American war”, in which the argument was carried to another circle of readers in Copenhagen that the Guinea establishments could only be of use if Denmark was able to encourage the land’s cultivation with the crops of hot climates. With the help of the free negroes, plantings, f. ex. of cotton, indigo, and coffee, as well as of sugar and all kinds of spices, could be established on the Guinea Coast and thereof expected the most vigorous harvest and great commercial advantages”.102

101 Boye, pp. 498–499. 102 “Historiske Bemærkninger over Danmarks Handel, Søefart og Colonier, indtil den nordamerikanske Krig”, in Nyt Aftenblad, 1824, January 31, No. 5, pp. 33–40, on p. 36. Boye also wrote for the German papers, and this article presented itself as a “fragment of a treatise, written in 1821 and with the author’s permission translated from the still unpublished German manuscript”. The review of Monrad’s book in Dansk Litteratur-Tidende (p. 488) referred to this article, which was perhaps also Boye’s work; “Boye”, Erslew, Almindeligt Forfatter-Lexicon. 340 chapter nine

In May, 1824, another Copenhagen paper, Nyeste Skilderie af Kjøbenhavn, ran a long unsigned article of rather a different tenor, under the heading “The Ashantees”.103 While peace prevailed in Europe, it said, there were war cries in the air in Africa; English troops were being thrashed “in another continent by black barbarians, not only black of skin, but also of heart”. The Asante had attacked Governor Macarthy’s force and beaten it, according to the latest reports.104 The Asante were reported to be a nation of a million people, of whom 200,000 were warriors. “Since Assanthee lies in a region where Denmark has its African possessions, a report of that people may be at this moment doubly interesting to Danish readers”. The article described Bowdich’s arrival in Kumasi, the Asante capital, in 1817: the party was greeted with volleys of shots.105 English, Danish, and Dutch flags waved everywhere. The splendor on the whole exceeded all imagining. The gold gleaming everywhere bore witness that this was the true home of this metal and the drums hung with the bones and skulls of slain enemies what barbarians one found oneself among. With the slave trade in drastic decline, the article continued, prisoners who could no longer be sold into slavery were now being sacrificed “in the most inhuman way. So as not to wound the reader’s sensibility, we will merely state, after Rømer”, that when an Asante king died, his subjects lamed his wives and slaves—on one occasion, more than three thousand all told—and cast them into the grave with him. They might live in that condition for eight days. H.C. Monrad, at home in his parish, read this article and found himself unable to stomach its author’s suggestion that the color of a people’s skins was an indication of the color of their hearts, and that it would have been better if the Europeans had dealt with the Africans the way they had dealt with the American Indians. He published a response in Nyt Aftenblad the following month.106 In Africa, he wrote, as anywhere in Europe, there were large differences of character from nation to nation. If mild races were no longer to found on the coasts, “the greedy and in their way barbarous

103 “Assianterne”, Nyeste Skilderie af Kjøbenhavn, 21st year, Nos. 42–44, May 25–29, June 1, 1824. 104 Macarthy perished in the encounter, and his head was carried to Kumasi: Nørregård, Danish settlements, pp. 194–195. 105 See Wilks, Asante in the nineteenth century, p. 399. 106 H.C. Monrad, “Et par ord om Afrikas neger-nationer, særdeles om Assjanteerne”, Nyt Aftenblad, Nr. 26, June 26, 1824, pp. 225–228. fresh colonial momentum 341 slave-traders might be thought to have had their part in it”. Europeans had no call to decry other people’s inhumanity, when one recalled all the bloodshed in Europe in the last half century “in a continent that calls itself highly enlightened and [on] which the holy light of Christianity has shone for so many centuries”. Monrad doubted that the average man in Europe was much elevated above the African. “It has been seen that the rabble in Europe can also be more like the bloodthirsty tiger than the human being”. It was irresponsible now to refer to Rømer’s book after professor Molbech, in his foreword to Monrad’s own work, had so damningly impugned Rømer’s reliability.107 Monrad mildly allowed that Rømer’s prejudices were not surprising, for he had been “an uncultivated slave-trader”. He held Bowdich in some regard, except that Bowdich wrote “in a proud, boasting tone…. I do not know that he said the least good about the Africans, and this does not speak for his impartiality”. Monrad scoffed at the idea that the Asante posed a serious threat to British interests in Africa. The climate might be another matter, but, he asked of his readers: Who knows anything of this land’s monstrous wealth, and of the acuteness, perseverance, and vigor of the English, and is not tempted to believe that when perhaps both the East and the West Indies are lost, or their sources of wealth exhausted for the English, then Africa will become their Golconda—a source of new, inexhaustible wealth? Who observes the events of the world and doubts that also West Africa will have its glorious age, as so many lands in the world have had?

107 Reindorf, in Scandinavians in Africa, pp. 125–126, suggested that Molbech had in fact treated Rømer too gently.

CHAPTER TEN

CONFLICTING COLONIAL SCHEMES IN THE LATE 1820S

News of Governor Steffens’s death reached Copenhagen in July, 1822, and another military man, Johan Christopher Richelieu, staff-captain in the king’s regiment, was appointed governor in his stead late in 1822, although he did not arrive on the coast until January, 1824. In the interim, Peter Thonning’s brother Matthias Thonning acted as governor.1 Among the Guinea Commission’s papers there is a file, marked “Guinea. Maize trade from Guinea to St. Croix. Coffee cultivation”, which contains a couple of pages of draft in Peter Thonning’s hand, undated, but with address to the crown:2 Before Gov. Richelieu’s departure from here, this matter, to establish a trade in corn (which is also called large millet, maize, Turkish wheat, African corn) from Guinea for the provisioning of St. Croix, was discussed orally in very great detail, as a means to begin an enterprise among the negroes around the establishments, so that they, from this to them familiar cultivation and the profit thereon, could be encouraged in the cultivation of coffee, cotton, and such articles, whereby the way could be opened for a direct connection between the establishments and Denmark, and whereby the possessions in Guinea could gradually become what is actually intended for them, and which otherwise cannot be achieved without the sacrifice of capital and people to overcome the local difficulties of the country and the unhealthiness of the climate. Further as a means whereby it could be hoped to secure St. Croix a cheaper provisioning than from North America; and that a portion of the ships and crews that are now used in the traffic between St. Croix and Denmark, and which lie idle 4 to 5 months a year, could be kept in constant profitable activity, if the voyage went from here to Guinea with a cargo for the purchase of maize, thence to the West Indies with grain and from the West Indies to Denmark with colonial products, which tour would take approximately 10 to 11 months.

1 “Richelieu (Johan Christopher)”, Erslew, Almindeligt Forfatter-Lexicon; Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 194. 2 GK III, Guinea. Mais Handel fra Guinea til St. Croix. Kaffe Dyrkning, Thonning’s draft of a report to the crown; GTK, Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner for 1825, No. 111, January 18, 1825, Allerunderdanigst Betænkning og Oplysning. 344 chapter ten

(Thonning noted elsewhere among the Commission’s papers that Monrad, on his voyage home from Africa, had crossed the Atlantic in a British vessel carrying corn from the Bight of Biafra to Barbados.3) Governor Richelieu was ordered to investigate the matter but was long delayed in taking up his post;4 the Chamber of Customs wrote directly to the Council on the coast in July, 1823, to inquire “whether the maize produced in the countryside around the establishments might not become the object of export to the Danish West Indian Islands”, which, the Chamber said, consumed twelve thousand barrels of cornmeal a year. Even if not enough corn was presently produced to export, the Chamber expected that with due encouragement, and when the Africans became aware of this new market, this commerce might establish itself. If the Council thought it justifiable, “then there could be sent out from here an easily constructed windmill”, which could be erected on one of the bastions at Fort Christiansborg or, even better, at Frederiksberg, which last place, being farther from the shore, perhaps for that reason would be more suitable, for the grain would not be so much exposed to absorbing the dampness from the sea, which could damage same during its packing and transport.5 In three letters home early in 1824, after Richelieu’s arrival, the Council responded to this suggestion with some enthusiasm.6 Richelieu apparently also sent a copy of one of these missives directly to the king, who asked the Chamber of Customs for “information regarding what has been done and in the future could be done to advance the establishment of millet and coffee plantations in Guinea.”7 The Council on the coast had declared8 that it should not be difficult to obtain twelve thousand barrels of maize a year at a reasonable price, “if only the natives were sure of being able to dispose of same”. Barrels would be impossible to obtain locally,

3 GK V, Udkast til betænkningen afsluttet 26. februar 1847, Diverse notater ang. forskellige udkast til betænkning (ca. 1846–47?), 1/4 46, Endvidere Observanda i Betænk., Thonning’s notes. 4 A.C. Forsberg, Røst fra Kysten Guinea, eller Beretning om den i Aaret 1822 dertil sendt Expedition, under Hrr. Major Richelieu, som daværende Gouverneur (Copenhagen: Møller, 1827). 5 Guin. Kopibog, July 26, 1823, to the government on the coast. 6 GJ 383/1824, Government on Coast, January 6, 1824; GJ 384/1824, Government, Febr. 5, 1824; GJ 385/1824, Government, March 2, 1824. See Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 427–428. 7 GJ 378 and 393/1824, royal communications of July 7, and July 31, 1824; GK III, Guinea. Mais Handel fra Guinea til St. Croix. Kaffe Dyrkning, Thonning’s draft. 8 GJ 384/1824, government on the coast, Febr. 5, 1824. conflicting colonial schemes 345 however, so old barrels would have to be sent down from Denmark. Frederiksberg would doubtless be the best place for a windmill, but the Council thought that unground corn would actually be easier to ship: “the English transport it thus to Madeira and the Americans to the West Indian islands where they grind it themselves; all maize is carried loose in the ship, whereby packing is saved, and in the judgment of many it is best preserved thus”. The first corn harvest each year was taken in March, the second in September, the Council reported, so a ship would be needed to transport the first harvest in June or July and another in November or December. If notice of a ship’s impending departure could be sent via England, the Government could purchase a cargo of corn to have ready. In closing, the Council urged “the Collegium to consider the incalculable benefits that both Guinea, the motherland, as well as the West Indian Islands would have from this commerce if once it could be got going”. In November, 1823, when he was 48 years old, Peter Thonning was promoted to the management of the Copenhagen, Elsinore, Bornholm, and Sound customs jurisdiction, which was by far the most complex and fiscally the most significant of the Chamber’s customs portfolios: the Chamber’s national customs policies were very often based upon precedents set by decisions made in this office. A John Collett was put in charge of the colonial office.9 Thonning no longer had his thumb directly on the colonial correspondence, but the collegial organization and execution of the Chamber’s work ensured that he was always at the table when important communications to or from the Guinea Coast were discussed, and in particular when important representations to the king were prepared. His African expertise was simply not to be dispensed with. On the other hand, it is to be doubted that the Collegium would have allowed Thonning to regularly undercut Collett’s authority, or that he would have had time to seriously interfere with Collett’s work. Nevertheless, it was Thonning who drafted the analysis of the plan to export corn from the Guinea Coast

9 GTK. Toldkammerkancelli- og Sekretariatsager, A., Kgl. Expeditioner vedk. Protokoller og Sager, Frederik VI’s resolutioner og rescripter vedkommende Generaltoldkammerets sager 1808–39, No. 51, November 8, 1823, Sehested’s forestilling Aug 19, 1823; draft mate rial in GTK, Toldkammerkancelli- og Sekretariatsager, B., Kollegiets Organisation og indre forhold vedkommende Resolutioner og Sager, Geheimraad Sehesteds papirer vedk. Generaltoldkammeret og Kommercekollegiet, 1814–31, Udaterede Koncepter til Forestillinger fra Sehested; GTK, Toldkammerkancelli- og Sekretariatsager, B., Kollegiets Organisation og indre forhold vedkommende Resolutioner og Sager, Akter vedkommende Overbestyrelsen, blandt andet om Revisionens Adskillelse fra Expeditionen, 1771–1844, Thonning, October 8, 1831, to Lowzow, immediately following Acter ang. Collegiets Organisation i 1831. 346 chapter ten to the Danish West Indies that the Chamber laid before the king in January, 1825.10 St. Croix, Thonning wrote, consumed a great deal of corn meal, but only a small amount of corn, which was fed to the domestic animals: a thousand barrels of whole corn would swamp St. Croix’s markets for a year. The planters there had never used their windmills (which were built to crush sugar cane) to grind North American corn for their slaves in the off season, and there was no reason for them to begin to do so with corn from the Guinea Coast: if corn was to exported from the Guinea Coast, it would have to be ground there first. Loose or sacked corn was in any case more subject to spoilage than flour in barrels. The timing of the African corn harvests corresponded nicely with the St. Croix sugar harvests, so ships carrying corn from West Africa to the West Indies could expect to find return cargoes to Europe. The daily sea breeze on the coast would drive a windmill for ten or thirteen hours a day, but there would also be the costs of fabricating a mill and shipping it, broken down, to the coast; of millers’ wages; of the necessary storehouses; of a watch tower at Frederiksberg to protect the mill; of barrel staves and hoops—none of which private entrepreneurs could be expected to finance and all of which would thus be a burden to the state. Why, Thonning inquired, did the French in Senegal and the English at Sierra Leone not export corn to their West Indian Islands, even though the distance was not as great and the winds were more favorable than from the Gold Coast? Counting the cost of the transport of the corn through the surf by canoe to the vessels in the roads at Christiansborg and freight to the West Indies, it would be difficult to dispose of Guinea corn against the competition of North American corn on the West Indian market; the price differential between African and American corn would have to be very high indeed to induce the merchants of St. Thomas, the great entrepôt of the Danish West Indies, who were heavily involved in the North American trade, to turn to this new source of supply. The voyage from New York to the Danish West Indies could be done in fourteen days, and a round trip, including time in harbor, in six weeks; an American vessel could make several trips a year. The corn delivered would be fresher, and there was less risk of spoilage en route. Mails between the West Indies and North American ports moved quickly and regularly, so shippers could keep a close eye on demand in the islands.

10 Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner for 1825, No. 111, January 18, 1825, Allerunderdanigst Betænkning og Oplysning; GK III, Guinea. Mais Handel fra Guinea til St. Croix. Kaffe Dyrkning, Thonning’s draft and associated notes. conflicting colonial schemes 347

Even if an American merchant was unable to get a return cargo of sugar or rum from St. Croix, the loss on the whole voyage would be far smaller. The innumerable constraints governing voyages from Denmark to the Guinea Coast and thence to the Antilles would prohibit Danish shippers from responding quickly to fluctuations in the market for corn meal in the West Indies; even if North American ships were blockaded in their harbors in wartime, it would still be cheaper to send corn to the West Indies from Denmark than from the Guinea Coast. The Americans were already well acquainted with this trade, expert in the grinding of the corn and in packing it for export; as regular suppliers, they already had excellent business relations with the planters and merchants of the Danish West Indies. Even in the old days, when slavers had shipped corn as food on the crossing, embarking it at Ouidah or at Prindsenssteen, and selling the surplus in the West Indies, and when everyone was familiar with prices, demand, and the rhythms and mechanics of the exchange, an independent African corn trade had not developed. Governor Richelieu reported when he had been on the coast for a year that he had introduced the monitorial instruction system and that 85 children were now receiving a fairly good education. Fourteen grown Danish- Africans of both sexes had been baptized since his arrival.11 I have, in accordance with the Most Gracious order given me, sought to encourage the establishment of coffee plantations here, by proclaiming the promised loans, but all to no effect; the people are altogether without enterprise, everyone thinks only of obtaining as much as he needs to subsist, and they ridicule the industrious European and cannot comprehend why he wishes to work more than they. Richelieu had himself purchased a plantation and was growing coffee; he had a notion to cultivate indigo, but did not know how to proceed. He was having work done on the old road to Bibease, which was now overgrown and impassable; he was also taking steps to restore the old cotton plantation at Frederiksberg, which had fallen into ruin. Richelieu’s health was bad, however, and he left the coast in May, 1925.12 Government assistant Niels Brock, Peter Thonning’s nephew,13 who had arrived on the coast with Peter Steffens and Matthias Thonning in 1820, was left in charge for the time being.14

11 GJ(S) 512/1825, Richelieu, Christiansborg, January 25, 1825, filed at GJS 559/1837. 12 Larsen, p. 137. 13 Christensen’s journal, June 4, 1831. 14 GJ 1870/1820, the king, July 30, 1820; GJ 13/1821, Council on the coast, January 20, 1821. 348 chapter ten

Richelieu’s handling of government monies was called into question in Copenhagen and his reputation did not survive the official inquiry into the matter,15 but, shortly after his return to Copenhagen, he made a number of suggestions regarding the colonization of the Guinea enclave. At about the same time, Philip Wrisberg sent in rather an elaborate colonial proposal. Both men directed their letters to the King, who forwarded them to the Chamber of Customs for its opinion.16 Richelieu17 recommended that twelve poor Danish-African children be brought to Denmark from the Guinea establishments to be trained as craftsmen and then repatriated. In addition, Richelieu suggested that a cadre of Danish orphans of both sexes, similarly trained in the crafts, should be sent from Denmark to the coast while in their teens, when they would be most likely to survive the climate sickness and become acclimatized; these young people would when of age be assigned plots of land and form the core of an agricultural colony. Finally, Richelieu reported that useful timber and dyewood could profitably be exported from the establishments. Wrisberg’s scheme, according to the entry in the Guinea Journal,18 was to plant an agricultural colony on the banks of the Volta near Ada. The colonists would also supply the royal shipyards with timber and, making use of abundant but lesser wood products along the river, burn potash, make soap, and tan leather. The colony would be populated by felons. The project could be set on its feet with “little support”, Wrisberg argued, and he offered to have charge of it. He proposed to place the colony southwest of Fort Kongenssteen, at Eibo, where there were still a few overgrown old coffee trees. The colony’s close proximity to the fort will give them more standing among the negroes, from whom, however, there is nothing to fear, as this nation is known for its attachment to the Danes and does not permit any other than the Danish flag to fly on the Volta River, which, together with the soil’s fruitfulness, richness in woods, provisions, water, and easy access by the river makes this place especially suited to a colony,

15 Nørregård, Danish settlements, pp. 195–196. 16 GJ 630/1826, the king, November 29, 1825, forwarding Richelieu’s and Wrisberg’s proposals; GJ 629/1826, Richelieu, Copenhagen, December 3, 1825, filed at GJS 226/1836 with the Guinea Commission’s marks on it (Designation V, No. 2). See copies and related documents at GJS 171/1831. 17 Allerunderdanigst Beretning, May 23, 1826, copy, filed at GJS 226/1836. There is another copy of the document in GTK, Dokumenter o. l. vedr. Guinea. 18 GJ 630/1826 [Wrisberg’s plan was dated November 19, 1825]. See Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 512–514. conflicting colonial schemes 349 the Chamber’s abstract of Wrisberg’s proposal read. Farther up the river, African mahogany was to be had. Islands in the river could be cultivated, those lying lowest with rice, others with cotton, provision crops, and sugar, for the islands were free of ants and termites, which were otherwise so destructive. With this proposal, Wrisberg submitted for the king’s edification a couple of fine watercolor views, one above the other on the top half of a sheet of paper, of forts Kongenssteen and Prindsenssteen, “drawn from nature” in 1817, with, on the lower half of the sheet, a map centered on the Volta. (Figure 14) It was quite a striking bit of colonial propaganda. The map was “[d]rawn by Philip W. Wrisberg” and dated Copenhagen, 1825. Wrisberg did not name a source, but he stated in the map’s legend that portions of it central to his proposal had been “drawn up ocularly by myself”. The map otherwise appears to have been drawn rather faithfully from one version or another of Thonning’s maps. Cape St. Paul, which Thonning has as a pronounced spit, is here less prominent, and Wrisberg has soundings in the river that do not appear on Thonning’s earlier maps. A small box on the map marked a-b-c-d, encompassing the land for four or five miles on either side of the mouth of the Volta and extending to a few miles north of Fort Kongenssteen, is identified in the key as “the place where the colony could be planted”. It is not clear whether the king sent the map along to the Chamber of Customs with Wrisberg’s colonial proposal or kept it by him; Wrisberg’s map and fort views are at any rate now to be found in the royal family’s collection of maps and geographical drawings in Queen Margrethe II’s Reference Library.19 The Chamber took no immediate steps on Richelieu’s or Wrisberg’s proposals, and the king found himself obliged to send along more than one reminder of his interest in the matter.20 (It was at this time, in 1826, according to Georg Nørregaard, that King Frederik, having sought for some time to dispose of the Danish possessions in Africa and India to various foreign powers, experienced a change of heart, for which the historian could not account: “perhaps the old monarch, in whose time Norway had been lost, had after all not wished to further diminish his patrimony. Certain it is that

19 Her Majesty the Queen’s Reference Library, GK M8 No. 17, Philip W. Wrisberg, “Kaart over de kongelige danske Besiddelser i Guinea”. The fort views are dated 1817, but the map is dated Copenhagen, 1825. 20 GJ 677/1826, royal rescript, March 21, 1826; GJ 696/1826, Chamber of Customs secretariat, May 6, 1826. 350 chapter ten conflicting colonial schemes 351 for the rest of his life no word of disposing [of the establishments] was ever again mentioned”.21) At the end of May, 1826, the Chamber of Customs made its report on Richelieu’s and Wrisberg’s proposals.22 Richelieu had deplored the lack of a priest in the establishments, and the Chamber provided the king with a summation of the administrative and budgetary developments that had led to this state of affairs. The Chamber favored the idea of permitting the Danish Mission Society to send missionaries to the coast at its own expense, and in June the king granted such permission.23 Richelieu’s suggestions regarding Danish-African children and Danish orphans would both pose almost insurmountable difficulties, in the Chamber’s view. The orphans it was proposed to send to Africa would, after all, be children, unable to practice the skills they had learned without supervision. Children raised in orphanages would know nothing of agriculture and would be altogether incapable of establishing plantations and maintaining them “without expert direction, which is altogether lacking there”. Furthermore, the Chamber argued, to send children overseas in such a way “would not be consistent with the natural freedom that Your Majesty by law has Most Graciously commanded that all the country’s subjects enjoy”. Certainly the orphans were the wards of the state and subject to its authority, but the government was not on that account free to pack them off to an “uncertain fate” in Africa. Bringing Danish-African children to Denmark, on the other hand, and providing for them while they learned trades, would be very expensive. “To think of such details before a general and comprehensive plan for the establishments’ better utilization has been drafted the Collegium can only regard as wasted toil”. Here Peter Thonning’s influence on the Chamber’s policy can with some confidence be made out: he had drafted just such a plan for Ernst Schimmelmann twenty years earlier and doubtless had little patience with Governor Richelieu’s rather vague colonial half measures. ←—— Fig. 14. Views of Forts Kongenssteen and Prindsenssteen, 1817, with, on same sheet, a map of the lower Volta, 1825, by Philip W. Wrisberg. H. M. the Queen’s Reference Library, Copenhagen, GK M8 No. 17. (By courtesy of H. M. the Queen’s Reference Library.)

21 Nørregaard, “Englands køb”, pp. 398–399. 22 Allerunderdanigst Beretning, May 23, 1826, copy, (the Guinea Commission’s Designation V, No. 3), filed at GJS 226/1836. 23 GK III, Diverse, Materialier, a note (not, it appears, in Peter Thonning’s hand), regarding a royal resolution of June 3, 1826. 352 chapter ten

The establishments would be of no use to the Danish state until they were “transformed into planting colonies”, the Chamber wrote,

for which they by nature are particularly fitted. But for this will in the beginning be needed significant expenditure of effort and large sacrifices of money, which far exceed what is set aside for the maintenance of the establishments in the standing budget, namely 24,000 rdl. silver. We must therefore for the time being limit ourselves to maintaining the possession, upholding our territorial sovereignty, and cultivating the present friendly understandings with the adjoining and neighboring negro tribes. As for Richelieu’s ideas regarding exports of wood, the state could not advantageously expect to extract timber from the establishments, when the expense of felling it and transporting it to the coast was taken into consideration. Private undertakings would deserve support and encouragement, “but of business ventures of that kind there is for the time being no hope”. The Chamber then passed on to Wrisberg’s plan. The same obstacle was encountered: its execution would demand far greater sums than were budgeted for the establishments’ maintenance. Even if the king was moved to commit new capital to colonization on the Guinea Coast, however, the Collegium could never recommend Wrisberg’s plan, which would rely on the “coarsest criminals”. Wrisberg had drawn his ideas from the British penal colonies at Botany Bay and in Van Diemen’s Land, the Chamber wrote, but circumstances there were so different that this means of proceeding would be of no use on the Guinea Coast. The British felons were transported to islands and coasts “behind which lie an unknown and uncultivated interior, inhabited by entirely raw and wild peoples”. There was no escape from such a place. “Nor can the example of their crimes become dangerous”.

In the Danish possessions on the coast of Guinea the arriving colonists meet native negro tribes who stand on a not entirely low cultural stage, whose moral capacities, and among these the sense of honor especially, are awakened, who have property and know its worth, who maintain and respect domestic connections and relations, who practice certain technical arts, and who are united under certain established administrative forms. Here particular consideration would have to be taken upon the sending out of colonists of the latter’s moral character, which would have to be of such nature that respect for the whites was preserved and even increased. Criminals, who would soon rob and plunder among the negroes, disturb their domestic peace and thereby not only expose themselves to destruction, on account of the conflicting colonial schemes 353

reprisals that in accordance with the negroes’ concepts of blood vengeance and rules consequent thereupon will be carried out, but make the Danish name hated and despised among the colored people. Such conflicts might even lead to revolt among Denmark’s African allies. It would at any rate be impossible to prevent these convicts (the Chamber used the word slaver, which in Danish means both ‘slaves’ and ‘convicts’) escaping, and the wages of their wardens would greatly increase the expense of a colonization. The Chamber therefore was of the opinion that no action should be taken on Wrisberg’s plan until such time as the king was pleased to order the preparation of a detailed plan for the colonial development of the Guinea enclave. Wrisberg’s ideas would then doubtless be of use. King Frederik did not rise to this bait, but he took a number of measures that appear to have had the intent of drawing the African establishments a little more closely into the affairs of the Danish state. By late in the summer of 1826, the Chamber of Customs, having for the time being deflected interest in Richelieu’s and Wrisberg’s colonial proposals, was working on legislative language creating a special Commission of Investigation of the state of affairs on the coast: the two-man commission was to study a range of mainly administrative matters on the coast, but also to assess Wrisberg’s Volta plan, and, more generally, according to preliminary notes, to investigate “how an agricultural colony could be planted on the coast, and where in the Danish territory”.24 If indeed this investigation represented new official interest in the colonial future of the enclave, it was apparently not unmixed with caution: when the king signed his charge to the commission, this latter more general and open-ended question had been excised.25 The Commission was furthermore to investigate the education and religious ministration available to the small white and Danish-African community in the forts. A pious new tone was clearly creeping into the upper ranks of Danish society by this time, and it had its part in the metropolis’s views of the African possessions. It seems to have been quite different, in its more explicitly and narrowly religious emphasis, from the more general sentiments regarding the spread of enlightened, humane, Christian civilization that for decades had been so characteristic of the movement to plant colonies in Africa and thereby extinguish the Atlantic slave trade. In this connection, the Commission of Investigation was to

24 Guineiske Resolutioner, 1827–28, among material regarding the Undersøgelses Commission, a slip of notes. 25 GJ 795/1826, royal rescript, September 28, 1826; Guineisk Resolutions Protokol, 1816–1850, No. 123, April 3, 1827, to Findt and Hein. See Kea, pp. 486–493. 354 chapter ten report on whether the Accra or Asante languages “could be made written languages, which would much promote the reception of proper instruction”. The two commissioners were both military men. Jens Peter Findt (later one of the members the Guinea Commission), was a naval officer. He had made a number of voyages to the Danish West Indies, but nothing to connect him to the Guinea establishments or to suggest that he was in any other way particularly suited to this task has emerged from the record.26 To facilitate the commission’s investigation, Findt was appointed interim governor in the establishments, replacing Richelieu. His fellow-commis- sioner, Ludvig Hein, was a young military prosecutor; he was appointed first councilor on the coast for the duration of the commission’s investigation.27 At the time of their appointment, in September, 1826, according to an annotation in the Guinea Journal, the Chamber of Customs was concerned that it was too late in the year to contemplate sending a ship to the coast: it would be unable to get away until the middle of November and thus would be subject to the worst winter storms and would not arrive on the coast until the middle of March the following year, “which is, for the health of newly arrived Europeans, the most dangerous time”.28 Findt and Hein did not leave Copenhagen until the summer of 1827. In the meantime, in October, 1826, Richelieu asked to be permitted to retain ownership of his coffee plantation and slaves at Bibease: if he was forced to dispose of this property to pay his debt to the treasury, he argued, he would not get an eighth of its real value. Richelieu had been bitten by the African bug, or at any rate claimed to have been so for his present purposes: he intended as soon as his health permitted to return to the coast to take over the management of his plantation, which he had left under the supervision of Assistant Brock, and he undertook to make regular payments against his debt in tropical produce. The Chamber was noncommit- tal: word was sent to the Government on the coast a week later that Richelieu had been relieved of his appointment and that an inventory of his property was to be taken.29 The question of exports of corn from the Guinea establishments to the West Indies was re-opened late in 1826. Interim Governor Findt’s opinion

26 “Findt, Jens Peter”, T.A. Topsøe-Jensen and Emil Marquard, Officerer i den dansk- norske Søetat 1660–1814 og den danske Søetat 1814–1932 (Copenhagen: H. Hagerup, 1935). 27 “Hein, Ludvig Vincent”, Vilh. Richter, Den danske landmilitæretat 1801–1894 (Copenhagen: Antikvariat Richard Levin & Co., Dansk Historisk Håndbogsforlag, 1977). 28 GJ 795/1826. 29 GJ 807/1826, Richelieu, October 20, 1826; letter to Coast October 28. conflicting colonial schemes 355 of the matter was that the maize could most advantageously be shipped ground, and he recommended to the Chamber of Customs that a mill- builder named Jørgensen be employed to construct a pre-fabricated mill. His estimate of the cost ran to well over seven thousand rigsdaler.30 The Chamber wrote back to say that his plan might be feasible if regular shipping connections existed between West Africa and the Antilles, but that until such time as they did the Chamber dared not apply to the king for such a large sum, which was certainly not to be found in the Guinea budget. Once again, however, the new military appointee to the command of the Guinea establishments was able to take advantage of some other channel of communication to the crown. In January, 1827, the king demanded the Chamber’s opinion of Findt’s suggestion regarding a mill, wishing also to be presented with “the main content of the earlier correspondence with the Government in Guinea regarding this matter”.31 This time the king was not to be put off: in March, 1827, he ordered a windmill built and shipped to the Guinea Coast. The finance minister was instructed to make the necessary funds available, up to a limit of eleven thousand rigsdaler (a very large sum, relative to the establishments’ annual budget), in the form of an interest-free loan. The Chamber was to report further when the mill had been erected and had been in use for a time.32 This African windmill appears to have loomed rather large in the royal imagination. Denmark is a low-lying country and few of its streams fall so far in their courses as to allow the exploitation of the energy of flowing water, but it is windy there, and, at the time, these romantic old engines remained the last word in mechanical technique; the steam engine was still in its squalling and belching infancy.33 There were windmills all over Denmark and in the heart of Copenhagen, and King Frederik’s West Indian islands were covered with great grey masonry mills, grinding out the profits of the sugar industry in the trade winds. Published maps of St. Croix were dotted with tiny windmills.34

30 GJ 825/1826, Findt, December 5, 1826; letter to Findt, December 23, 1826. See Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 491–492. 31 GJ 834/1827, royal rescript, January 2, 1827. 32 GJ 856/1827, royal rescript, March 6, 1827; GTK, Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, royal rescript, March 6, 1827. 33 See, for example, Handels- og Industrie-Tidende, No. 22, March 16, 1822, p. 123, and No. 29, April 9, 1822, p. 168. 34 See Frederik C. Gjessing, The tower windmill for grinding sugar cane (U. S. Virgin Islands: Government of the Virgin Islands, Bureau of Libraries, Museums, & Archaeological Services, 1977), pp. 1, 12–13, and Daniel Hopkins, “Jens Michelsen Beck’s map of a Danish 356 chapter ten

Findt next proposed that “two coast negroes here in town should be engaged to learn the miller’s craft” under miller Jørgensen’s roof and supervision.35 To this the Chamber of Customs had no objection, and Findt pressed his advantage, inquiring what wages he could offer two other men to supervise the construction of the mill on the coast and to operate it. The Chamber threw up its hands: “The Collegium must completely leave it to the Interim Governor himself to engage and negotiate with the miller’s journeymen in question”.36 Findt hired three men, including a miller named Grønberg.37 Early in 1827, Interim Governor Niels Brock’s report on the battle of Dodowa, where a European force had decisively beaten an Asante army in August, 1826, arrived in Copenhagen.38 King Frederik ordered news of this stirring national victory on the uttermost frontiers of his domains to be published in the Danske Statstidende.39 The Commission of Investigation received its formal charge early in April, 1827.40 Soon thereafter, Ludvig Hein applied for royal funds with which to purchase books “dealing with plantations in general and with the coast of Guinea and Africa in particular”. The king approved expenditure of the substantial sum of 250 rigsdaler,41 and twenty-one books were purchased from various dealers in Copenhagen and sent down to be incorporated in the library at Fort Christiansborg.42 The books included,43 among a number of other travel accounts, Monrad’s book about the Danish establishments; C.B. Wadström’s book on Sierra Leone, Archibald Dalzel’s book on Dahomey, two French accounts of explorations in Senegal, Thomas Winterbottom’s “account of the native

West Indian sugar-plantation island: eighteenth-century colonial cartography, administration, land speculation, and fraud”, Terrae Incognitae, Vol. 25, 1993, pp. 99–114, on p. 100. 35 GJ 873/1827, Findt, March 23, 1827; Jeppesen, p. 62, identifies the two as Sebastian Joseph and Peter Accra. 36 GJ 903/1827, Findt, April 8, 1827. 37 GJ 925/1827, Findt, May 2, 1827. 38 GJ 869/1827, Brock, August 24, 1826; Ole Justesen, “Henrich Richter 1785–1840: trader and politician in the Danish settlements on the Gold Coast”, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, New Series, No. 7, 2003, pp. 93–192, on p. 119. 39 GJ 910/1827; Nørregård, Danish settlements, pp. 196–197. 40 Guineisk Resolutions protokol, 1816–1850, No. 123, April 3, 1827, to Findt and Hein. 41 GJ 912/1827, Frederik VI, April 14, 1827; ad GJ 912/1827, Hein, Copenhagen, April 10, 1827. See Hopkins, “Books, geography and Denmark’s colonial undertaking in West Africa”. 42 GJ (S) 987/1827, Hein, Copenhagen, July 9, 1827; ad GJ 987/1827. Reitzel’s supplied most of them, Brummel’s some others, but some of the titles requested were not to be had in Copenhagen, and there was actually money left over. 43 See Hopkins, “Books, geography and Denmark’s colonial undertaking in West Africa”. conflicting colonial schemes 357

Africans in the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone”,44 and Denham’s, Clapperton’s, and Oudney’s account of their travels in North and Central Africa, very recently published—all of these in German editions. There were also Bowdich’s Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee and Captain Tuckey’s Narrative of an expedition to explore the River Zaire, usually called the Congo, both in English; and a Historical account of discoveries and travels in Africa, from the earliest ages to the present time. There was an edition of Humboldt’s Reise in die Æquinoctial-gegenden des neuen Continents; a French work on Saint Domingue, containing, according to the commission’s list, “a précis of the history of this island, the art of manufacturing sugar & indigo, of harvesting & preparing coffee, cotton & Cacao &c”; and a German description of British, Dutch, and French Guyana. The list also mentions an account of the English colony in New South Wales, four volumes in German of Baron von Cuvier’s natural history of the animal kingdom, and an early edition of Adolf Stieler’s Hand-Atlas. (Hein found himself unable, even at the steep prices he paid, especially for Bowdich, Humboldt, and the atlas, to spend all the money allowed him.) Findt and Hein also felt that their administrative investigation would require access to standard works on Danish law, which the king also allowed them to purchase on the royal account.45 Hein was an admirer and amateur practitioner of natural science. According to an annual review in the scientific proceedings of the Royal Danish Society of Sciences and Letters of recent scientific work, by no less a scientific figure than H.C. Ørsted, in 1829,46 “Councilor Hein took with him to Guinea a set of instruments, with which he during his stay there made observations”. A Professor Hansteen had made use of Hein’s observations of “magnetic intensity” at Madeira on his way out to the coast in an article in Norsk Magazin for Naturvidenskaberne, 1827.

44 Thomas M. Winterbottom, Nachrichten von der Sierra-Leona-Küste und ihren Bewohnern, T.J. Ehrmann [transl.?] (Weimar, 1805): quotation from the title of the original English edition. 45 GJ(S) 948/1827, Hein, Copenhagen, May 26, 1827; Guin. Kopibog, June 7, 1827, to Hein; one of these was a set of Jacob Henrik Schou’s and other compilers’ Chronologisk Register over de Kongelige Forordninger og Aabne Breve, published in Copenhagen under various titles between 1795 and 1850; another was some portion or edition of Laurids Fogtman’s and subsequent compilers’ collections of laws. 46 Review article by H. C Ørsted, in Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs naturvidenskabelige og mathematiske afhandlinger, fourth part, 1829, under “Meteorologisk Committee”, pp. XXXI-XXXII. 358 chapter ten

Findt and Hein, with a number of other new officers, arrived on the coast in September, 1827.47 In October, Findt reported that the new mill was being erected a short distance west of Prøvesteen, Christiansborg’s small outfort. The Laurine Mathilde, a sloop sent out for such uses as the Commission of Investigation might put her to, had arrived in October, having stopped at Bonavista in the Cape Verde Islands to pick up nine donkeys, all of which, however, had died on the voyage down into the Gulf of Guinea.48 A month later, the Government on the coast reported that the new surgeon, Christopher Mundt,49 had been sent back to the hills with Brock to investigate the state of the Danish plantations there; his report was enclosed.50 Mundt and Brock had counted about fifteen hundred coffee trees at Richelieu’s plantation, of which they thought two thirds were large enough to bear two to four pounds of beans each a year; the soil was so rich, however, that the trees were choked by weeds. “The soil in the valley especially is fertile in the highest degree”, Mundt wrote, loose and rich in mold, and is therefore to a high degree suited to most of the plants that can thrive in tropical climates; I can therefore not omit to close my respectful report with the warm wish that it might soon be in accordance with the High Government’s plans to make use of the many advantages that nature offers here.51 Dr. Mundt’s enthusiasm came to nothing: he was dead within a few months. He asked on his deathbed that his books be sent home to his brother: there were 84 items on the list of these books, including, besides works on medicine, pharmacy, botany, chemistry, geography, and geog- nosy, Gibbon’s famous work on the Roman empire, Juvenal’s satires, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a volume of Petrarch, a history of the French revolution, a couple of Arabic grammars, the Bible in Arabic, the Koran, a Hindustani

47 Henny Glarbo, Fonden ad Usus Publicos, aktmæssig bidrag til belysning af dens virksomhed, Vol. 3, 1827–1842 (Copenhagen: Rigsarkivet, 1947), p. 295. 48 Guineiske Resolutioner 1827–28, Findt, Christiansborg, October 24, 1827 (GJ 5/1828). See also GJ 274/1829 and GJ 39/1828, Krenchel, Copenhagen, May 22, 1828. 49 Mundt also came from a military background and was perhaps another of General von Bülow’s protégés: GJ 860/1827, royal rescript, March 10, 1827. 50 GJS 6/1828, Findt and Brock, Christiansborg, November 28, 1827; GJS 6/1828, Mundt, Christiansborg, October 18, 1827. (These documents are just a little out of place in the files, coming before numbers 3 and 4.) 51 The Chamber of Customs laid this report before the king early in 1828: Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner for 1828, No. 147, Allerunderdanigst Indberetning, February 7, 1828; it was sent back a month later without comment: GJ 20/1828, the king, March 4, 1828. conflicting colonial schemes 359 dictionary, a German encyclopædia, a German edition of Walter Scott, and the works of Byron in six volumes.52 Among the officers sent down to the coast with the Commission of Investigation was Lieutenant Henrik Gerhard Lind, of the navy. His father was a ship-owner, Captain Jens Lind, who sent the occasional ship to the Guinea establishments around the turn of the century; it is doubtless not without bearing on the matter that Lind’s mother was a Wrisberg.53 He had been enrolled in the naval academy at the age of eleven, and his naval career had carried him to the Baltic, New York, Madeira, the West Indies, the Levant, and the Guinea Coast, where he had been stricken with fever and had spent quite some time ashore, “the first occasion of his enthusiastic interest for this so little known, so ill-treated, and yet so richly endowed land”, as an obituary later put it.54 In December, Lind took the Laurine Mathilde up the Volta River, with a crew of six Europeans and nine Africans, to attempt to sort out the differing opinions that have been put forth regarding the great advantages that would be associated with planting colonies by the Volta River, and especially the assertion that in the woods found in the vicinity of its banks there will be found significant quantities of trees serviceable for ships’ timbers, as he wrote in an article, drawn from his official reports, that was published several years later in a journal of naval affairs.55 Writing from the Laurine Mathilde, at anchor at Fort Kongenssteen, Lind reported that nothing but ignorance prevented vessels from entering the Volta. He had sounded his way in over the bar in a canoe, finding thirteen or fourteen feet of water, and had then brought the ship in, running briefly aground on a bank56 but encountering no surf at all. There were four channels through the bar, which did not break the surface of the sea over most of its length, and five, six, and seven fathoms of water in the estuary, which opened out inside the bar but was filled with islands.57

52 GJ (S) 108/1828, Hein, Copenhagen, August 9, 1828, submitting a copy of the Registrerings og Vurderings-Forretning i afdøde Regimentschirurg C. Mundts Stervboe, 13–14 Febr. 1828. 53 Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 178; “Lind (Hendrik Gerhard)”, Erslew, Almindeligt Forfatter-Lexicon. 54 Obituary of Henrik Gerhard Lind, unsigned but attributed by Erslew, Almindeligt Forfatter-Lexicon, to Balthazar Christensen, in Dagen, Nr. 278, November 21, 1833. 55 H.G. Lind, “Undersøgelser, foretagne op ad Floden Volta i 1827 og 1828”, Archiv for Søvæsenet, Vol. 6, 1834, pp. 1–16, on p. 1; see Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 487–490. 56 ad GJS 34/1832, Lind, at Kongenssteen, December 31, 1827, copy. 57 Lind, “Undersøgelser, foretagne op ad Floden Volta”, pp. 1–3. 360 chapter ten

He and Dr. Mundt had visited Eibo, where Jens Flindt had had his plantation, of which there was no sign beyond a few cotton plants; they judged the soil there unsuitable for any cultivation.58 The west bank of the river was sandy, and there were a few fishing camps here. The east bank was forested. The “so-called Qvita channel” ran off to the east between the coast proper and a long, sandy barrier island to past Fort Prindsenssteen. This channel was navigable only for small boats. On the north shore of Princesse Wilhelmine’s Island, in the Volta, there was “a little creek, in which there is found 3 fathoms of water close to the land, and where there could conveniently be established a wharf”. The islands were mostly overgrown, with only here and there a few clearings planted with maize. On Truelsen’s Island “there is said to be a well in which the water remains fresh even when the river is at its lowest and the water in it salt”.59 Fort Kongenssteen, built in 1783, now lay completely in ruins. On a creek here lay Ada, “the largest of the so-called river towns. The houses in this town lie very irregularly and packed close to one another”; the people lived from fishing and salt-production, and there was not much agriculture. They sent salt up the river in canoes to “the Aquamboes”, who in turn sent it on up the river; slave transports came back down. A good deal of dried or smoked fish was also traded inland. Lind understood that a number of plantations had been laid out in this area by Europeans, but these had all disappeared by now.60 Lind informed Governor Findt in his letter from Fort Kongenssteen that he was proceeding up the river. He was assured that the river was at its lowest stage, so he was certain he would be able to get the Laurine Mathilde out again.61 Lind’s description of the lower course of the river largely corresponds with the report Jens Flindt had sent to Copenhagen in 1816, of which, it is safe to say, Lind knew nothing. (The Commission of Investigation conducted no such historical and archival investigation as the Guinea Commission embarked on a few years later.) Lind discussed the navigation of the river in great detail, and each river town rather briefly. At one point, the riverbank was quite steep and made up of layers of oyster shells, as Flindt had noted years before. Lind had it from local informants that a town had stood here long ago and that these were middens, the leavings of what he called “the Indians’” meals for generations.62

58 ad GJS 34/1832, Lind, at Kongenssteen, December 31, 1827, copy. 59 Lind, “Undersøgelser, foretagne op ad Floden Volta”, pp. 3–4. 60 Lind, “Undersøgelser, foretagne op ad Floden Volta”, pp. 4–5. 61 ad GJS 34/1832, Lind, at Kongenssteen, December 31, 1827, copy. 62 Lind, “Undersøgelser, foretagne op ad Floden Volta”, p. 7, footnote. conflicting colonial schemes 361

At Mlefi, a matter of twenty-five miles up the river, every effort was made to dissuade Lind from ascending the river further. He continued on nevertheless, but the river soon became too shallow for the Laurine Mathilde. He then pressed on by canoe as far as the town of Asjotale. Lind reported that he was the first white person to have set foot in this town, and he went no farther up the river than this.63 Here the king of Akwamu took tolls on all goods passing up and down the river. The river negroes bring their salt and fish here; but the Aqvamboes do not allow them to carry their wares higher up, but on the contrary take them themselves up to Dodi, a town that lies three days’ journey from here, and where the merchants from Asotjale are treated in the same fashion. Quau and Asabi lay a day from Dodi and were the last of the Akwamu towns. From there it was four days to Akoroso, which “lies in a landscape called Quau Rodjabæ, and belongs to the Assiantes, and from here they are taken farther up into the Donko-Land, a name they give to all the country they do not know the name of”. Lind reported that trade on the river had been considerably depressed since the Asante wars. “The supply of ivory, hides, skins, wax, honey, palm oil, yams, maize, etc. was very small and the prices high. Slaves were the only thing that could be bought with profit, but the number of these, however, was also only slight.”64 On the Aklappa creek, across the river from Mlefi, “one could see on the trees that the water had been 24 feet higher than it now was”. Floods of this magnitude, Lind suggested, explained the rapidly shifting course of the river and the formation of new islands. “Property rights to such an island are obtained by striking one’s mattock into the ground three times in the presence of witnesses”.65 He reported from Mlefi that he and the ship’s carpenter had studied the timber carefully all the way up the river. They had found some good wood, but mainly in small sizes and quantities. “In all I don’t think that there could be procured here more than 200 pcs. of tolerable timber for frigates and ships of the line, for the latter, probably scarcely 30 pcs. of importance”. The usable timbers were so dense that they would not float, so transport to the coast would be difficult. Lind doubted that a lumbering operation, which would be very expensive to set on its feet, could be sustained for more than a year.66

63 Lind, “Undersøgelser, foretagne op ad Floden Volta”, pp. 9–12. 64 Lind, “Undersøgelser, foretagne op ad Floden Volta”, pp. 12–13. 65 Lind, “Undersøgelser, foretagne op ad Floden Volta”, pp. 14–15. 66 ad GJ 34/1828, Lind, aboard the Laurine Mathilde at Malfi, January 12, 1828, copy. 362 chapter ten

There was not much cultivation to speak of along the river, but Lind judged the area suitable for all sorts of tropical crops, including sugar, rice, and indigo. “The transport can occur very quickly and easily with flatbot- tomed vessels from the river-mouth to Foedjoku” (Fotjuka, on Thonning’s map), where rapids closed the river to large canoes. Ships drawing ten to twelve feet of water could reach Fort Kongenssteen, and there was six feet of water up as far as Bato, near Mlefi. The river was full of fish, and there was plenty of game. The land along the river was very fertile, because of the annual floods, and three harvests a year were taken here. It can be subject to no doubt that there can be produced much for export here, and that the salt trade could be significantly improved; but all these advantages must fall away, for the climate is so unhealthy and destructive for the Europeans. He went on, “One can with security assume that of the newcomers the 9/10 die. It would perhaps best succeed to colonize it with creoles, born in the country”.67 Lind submitted with his report an excellent hydrographic map, of which he was quite proud: Several years ago an English frigate stationed here on the coast sent its boats into the Volta and published thereupon a guide to sailing in over the bar, but it is in part incorrect, in part incomplete; the map that I constructed, on the expedition I was ordered to make up the river, is thus the first that with accuracy has been put on paper.68 The Guinea Journal recorded that time and the unfortunate circumstances that arose at the end of the expedition did not permit him to extend himself farther than to the river itself and its banks, but what there is on the map, he remarks, is not drafted from reports but is the fruit of his own investigations. Manuscript copies of the map appear to have been studied in the offices of the Admiralty and by the King himself.69 (Figure 15)

67 Lind, “Undersøgelser, foretagne op ad Floden Volta”, pp. 11, 12, 15–16. 68 ad GJ 127/1828, Lind, Christiansborg, April 23, 1828, copy, addressed to the Admiralty, filed among the Chamber of Customs’s archives at GJ 7/1831. 69 GJ 141/1828, Lind, dated only April, 1828, report on his voyage up the Volta; see also GJ 142/1828, Hein, Copenhagen, August 9, 1828, sending in a copy of Lind’s map of the Volta. A copy was sent to the Admiralty, March 29, 1829: Guin. Kopibog, March 12, 1829. The map is archived in RAKTS, Söetatens Restsamling, No. C 483 and as Rtk. 337,706 and 337,32; there is another manuscript copy at the Queen’s Reference Library. conflicting colonial schemes 363

Fig. 15. Lieutenant Lind’s map of the Volta: “Kaart over Floden Volta (Sjrau) optagen af Henrik G. Lind . . . 1828”, detail, showing the mouth of the river. RAKTS, Rtk. 337,706. (By courtesy of the Danish National Archives.) 364 chapter ten

Lind marked soundings on this map from a spot two or three miles off the mouth of the river in to Princesse Wilhelmine’s Island, a mile or two into the river. From there, a dashed line broken every so often by anchors marks his way up the river. A great number of towns and villages are identified, and there are truncated tributaries out to either side of the river. Stretches of woods are marked, and there are indications of the open plains along the river, with trees scattered here and there on them. Five or six miles of the coastline are represented to either side of the river’s mouth. Lind’s map differed in every geometric detail, but not at all in its broad outlines, from Peter Thonning’s rendering of the course of the river. Thonning had indulged himself in quite a number of rather dramatic meanders, doubtless in the interest of geographical verisimilitude, when he had originally made his map in 1802, and Lind smoothed most of these out considerably. The Chamber of Customs inquired of the Admiralty if it would be advisable to attempt to extract some of the timber Lind had found, but the naval authorities found themselves unable to arrive at a decision on the basis of the information at hand; it would have to be left in the hands of Governor Findt to arrange the matter as he saw fit. The Admiralty asked to be informed what size ship should be sent out, and at what season, if a decision was taken to undertake a lumbering operation.70 In April, 1828, the Commission of Investigation submitted its reports directly to the king, who, after a time, forwarded them to the Chamber of Customs. According to the Chamber’s abstract,71 Findt reported that the conduct of the various offices and accounting procedures in the establishments had now been brought into proper order. (Findt had a few nice words for Hein’s diligence in the execution of this charge.) The windmill had been completed on March 9; the wind was not as strong on the coast as in Denmark, and it had been found necessary to enlarge the sails. Findt calculated that a Danish ship-owner would now be in a position to realize 75 to 100 percent on a cargo of rifles, spirits, beer, and cowries; to then take corn meal to the West Indies, clearing four piastres per barrel on a sales price he understood to be 16 piastres or more; and then to ship sugar to Europe from St. Croix. He was personally subsidizing the corn-grinding

70 GJ 44/1828, Admiralty, June 7, 1828. 71 GJ 93/1828, the king, August 5, 1828, forwarding Findt’s missive to the Chamber of Customs. The report is filed forward at GJS 671/1833. A copy of the Guinea Journal entry for this communication was examined by the Guinea Commission as Designation VI, No. 1. See Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 514–515. conflicting colonial schemes 365 operation, he said, and wished to be allowed to buy more corn out of the standing budget against the next ship’s arrival, so as to prime this pump. A species of fish available in the enclave, similar to the herring, might be serviceable as slave food, Findt thought, and he undertook to try to salt some of these down and send them to the West Indies. Findt promised to submit in due time a proposal to establish more plantations at Bibease and asked permission in the meantime to send four wealthy men’s sons with the first ship to St. Croix, “there to train them as plantation overseers” under the supervision of the Danish West Indian Government. The colonial dream was thus alive and well, but the Commission of Investigation’s judgment of Wrisberg’s plan for a penal colony was not kind.72 “Experience has taught the Europeans that Guinea is one of the unhealthiest places in the world, especially for the northerner”; few people sent down here would live to see their homes in Europe again. Colonists would have to be young people of good health and habits, and they would first have to be acclimatized at Christiansborg; they could neither work nor travel until they had survived a bout with the climate sickness. Wrisberg’s plan would merely waste money and “instill in the negroes hate and contempt for the Europeans”, particularly if the colony was placed on the Volta, “the unhealthiest place on the coast, where these unfortunates will perpetually be tormented by insects and at no time find rest, which in these climates is absolutely necessary for the health”. In the four weeks the Laurine Mathilde had been on the river, half the crew had died, and some of these men had already undergone the climate sickness. How then were European criminals to tolerate conditions there? The Commission of Investigation appealed to the expertise of Peter Thonning, who would surely agree that it would be wasteful, purposeless, even cruel to attempt to execute Wrisberg’s plan. It was clear from Lind’s report, the commission went on, that there was no significant timber along the Volta. Wrisberg’s own soap factory on the river had long since failed, and a potash operation had little chance of succeeding, either. Tanning might profitably be attempted, for hides were available cheaply and there was an abundance of bark, although, since it is a generally accepted proposition that colonies, to be of true use to the motherland, shall only produce raw products thereafter to be

72 GJ(S) 264/1829, Undersøgelsescommissionen, April 14, 1828. This assessment of Wrisberg’s plan was read by the Guinea Commission as Designation V, No. 5; copy at GJS 7/1831; see Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 492–493. 366 chapter ten

fabricated in the motherland, we could not even advise this, as it in time could be damaging to the motherland. Oranges and lemons grew wild here, the commission said, but Wrisberg “is much mistaken in intending to trade the country’s oranges and lemons to the Baltic, for they have the same nature as the West Indian and will not keep for half the journey”. Commerce, formerly healthy, was now at a standstill, and without regular trade, a colony would be unable to obtain the necessary supplies, to get its products to market, or indeed to survive. The depressed state of the trade was something of a mystery to Findt and Hein, however: the English and the Americans were doing well in the absence of competition from Danish ships. Inexpensive Danish flintlocks were to be had from the Schimmelmann factory north of Copenhagen; Swedish iron was in good demand on the coast, as were Danish spirits, beer, and other provisions, which could be obtained more cheaply in Denmark than in England or America. Knives, beads, canvas, mirrors, and other such German manufactures could also be sold advantageously. The conditions for Danish trade on the coast were in fact quite favorable, and it was the more regrettable that regular shipping connections had lapsed. European war and war with the Asante had of course disrupted the trade, but it was now hampered by long desuetude and inexperience: voyages had been poorly organized and participants ill-informed, so cargoes had not been suited to the market. On the other hand, the commission could not agree with Wrisberg’s characterization of the potential of trade on the Volta. “Ivory is not to be had before past the waterfalls high up in the Aquambo country; wax we have gone to great trouble to get”, and Lind had sought it out on his trip up the river, but they had not so far obtained two pounds of it. They presumed that honey was in equally short supply. No rice was to be had until up the river past Asjotale, and there was no significant quantity of cotton on the market. Palm oil was a significant article of commerce, but European prices were so low that it could not at present be exported from Africa at a profit. Neither hides nor maize could be obtained cheaply.

It is known to us that General War-commissary [Johan] Wrisberg has at a sacrifice of his own [the word is underlined in red, with an exclamation point in the margin—it is doubtless Peter Thonning’s mark] fortune laid out a cotton plantation with various improvements, such as the road to Bibiasée, etc., but if it was so easy to colonize here as [Philip Wrisberg] assumes and if the plantations gave returns already the first year … then General War- commissary Wrisberg would have made a profit thereby. conflicting colonial schemes 367

Neither the Dutch nor the English seemed very eager to colonize the Guinea Coast. Indeed, it appeared that the English would prefer to turn their forts over to private merchants and were moving “everything that the forts can be without, both soldiers and craftsmen and ammunition and tools, to the island Fernando Po, which they are trying to colonize with all their might”. The Volta could never equal the commercial potential of the Sierra Leone River: it was impossible of entry in August and September and difficult the rest of the year, because the shoals at the mouth shifted from year to year. There were no great woods as at the mouth of the Sierra Leone. For that matter, the commission was not convinced that Sierra Leone had been so very profitable, and they referred to articles in the Times in 1826 and 1827. Sierra Leone was unhealthy, and the colony had been poorly managed. The present governor, “the famous Denham”, had visited Christiansborg and had complained to them of the many missteps taken, among them that they had brought colonists from the West Indies to Sierra Leone [underlining in pencil sic] to make coffee plantations, but as soon as they had arrived they had sought the easier means of enriching themselves by trade, and had not cultivated the soil. Nonetheless, the commissioners went on, the Volta was navigable for small vessels 9 or 10 months out of the year, and “the inhabitants along the west bank are some of the best negroes in whose midst one could wish to found a colony”. However, according to the late Dr. Mundt, who had visited former Commandant Flindt’s plantation by the Volta as well as those at Bibease, the soil here was not as rich as at Bibease, but sandy. Old coasters had informed the commission that Flindt had harvested only a little coffee here, because the sun had scalded the blooming trees. “Another evil is the numbers of apes that consume almost everything that is planted, as well as the crabs”, which occurred in great numbers by the Volta. Above all, the deadly climate was the greatest obstacle to colonization on the river. The islands would no doubt be suitable for rice and sugar, but, as they were small and very unhealthy, the commissioners could not recommend putting plantations there unless they were to be worked by people born here or brought out at such a young age that they were fully acclimatized and felt themselves at home here. Furthermore, Fort Kongenssteen would have to be rebuilt, and a new fort would have to be put on Princess Wilhelmine’s Island a couple of miles inside the mouth of the river. The spectacle of European criminals would not be edifying for the Africans, in the commissioners’ view. According to Wrisberg’s plan, each 368 chapter ten criminal was to be supplied with clothing, bedding, and a parasol each, and two convicts would share the services of a servant. The convicts were to receive plots of land fifty feet wide and a hundred and fifty feet deep on which to build thatched houses of clay large enough for two whites and their servant, the latter supplying the building materials and carrying out the construction. Find and Hein wrote that anyone who had seen buildings going up here would know that it would take six to eight Africans as many weeks to build such a house. In the meantime, what provision was to be made, since it was well known that one night in the open here was enough to kill a European newly arrived on the coast? Wrisberg’s plan had suggested that a plantation of 100 workers would cost a tenth what it would in the Danish West Indies, because the land could be obtained for nothing. However, the commissioners said, the slave here was permitted two “fetish days” and two days in which to work for himself. (Here Thonning wrote in the margin, “but feeds himself”.) If he is asked to work more “than he himself likes or by his indolent nature is accustomed to, he flees to the nearest fetish hut (idol’s temple) and deliv- ers himself over to the fetish priest”. It was of no use to buy the fetish priests off: the runaways would simply go farther. Besides the climate, this was the greatest hindrance to the establishment of plantations here in this land, and one can in no way prevent this nuisance, without altogether subjugating the negroes and by force destroying their religion and laws. Fetishism will not cease until the young negroes, through the school system and good dispositions, have been given better understanding and a suitable education. Nor could a colony depend on the labor of free Africans until “they become more educated”. The Africans were “altogether too indolent and indifferent and never think of the next day, for they can always find food”. They were furthermore jealously afraid that Europeans might draw some profit from their land. The inhabitants’ gratitude and affection should not be relied upon; their strongest passions are greed and avarice, and thereafter cruelty and falseness; there are also, to be sure, very faithful and good negroes, but they are rare, and the above-named passions are the dominant. The commissioners now came to a rough calculation. They limited their analysis to the African situation, presuming that the Chamber of Customs could obtain all the information it needed regarding the Danish West Indies. Wrisberg had proposed plantations of four hundred and twenty- five acres of land (and here, it should be noted, Wrisberg, who was born in conflicting colonial schemes 369 the West Indies, made use of the unique St. Croix acre, which had arisen out of the unusual patterns of landholding in that highly Anglicized society, to measure plantation land in this entirely new colonial situation; no acre has never been used as a measure of land in Denmark itself).73 Each of these plantations would be worked by 195 slaves. The commissioners disagreed with some of the costs Wrisberg projected, but agreed that a plantation would not be as expensive here as in the islands. However, the shorter work week would require the maintenance of a larger work force than on a plantation of similar size on St. Croix. More overseers would be required, too, and these would have to be men of “Conduite”, so as not to drive the slaves off. It would be better to begin with coffee and indigo plantations, which involved less work and technical proficiency than sugar. The Commissioners did not wish to criticize Wrisberg, but they had all experienced what it was to work with these lazy people; “indeed, even the Europeans become lethargic here and cannot work as they would at home”. The Commission of Investigation agreed with Wrisberg that the country produced many useful articles, including gum, ginger, pepper, dye plants, and tamarind, “which only for lack of knowledgeable men to judge their worth and have them gathered are altogether lost”. The medicines Wrisberg had mentioned the Commission professed itself not competent to judge of; Dr. Mundt’s death was the more to be regretted. The commissioners were uncertain how widespread the English and French trade in gums might be. In the time they had been there they had seen only one French ship, which appeared to be a slaver, and, indeed, that trade was still one of the most profitable on the coast. Wrisberg had overstated the extent of the African lands at the king’s disposal, the commission said. They were not convinced that the crown owned “any other extents of land than that bought by Dr. Isert where the colony Fredriksnopel’s plantation was begun, besides the plots of land His Majesty’s Danish subjects have bought over the years”. (This statement raised a marginal eyebrow in the form of a large question mark in pencil.) Land eighty miles inland could not be claimed as Danish, “for the inhabitants do not even allow the Danish subjects to travel there”. Few Danes ever traveled farther inland than to Bibease or Fort Kongenssteen.

73 The St. Croix acre, which was derived from the standard St. Croix plantation lot, covered forty thousand square Danish feet, or about three percent less than a standard English acre: Daniel Hopkins, “The eighteenth-century invention of a measure in the Caribbean: the Danish acre of St. Croix”, Journal of Historical Geography, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1992, pp. 158–173. 370 chapter ten

Craftsmen were lacking on the coast, and Europeans would have to be sent out to construct all the buildings and manufacture all the tools plantations would require. Supervisors for the plantations at Bibease were not to be found among the Africans, “which we consider the reason for the slow progress of the existing plantations there”, for the plantation owners were all merchants or officials whose business on the coast prevented their residing regularly out in the country. The Commission of Investigation also reported that the schooling of the fort’s children was in the care of two Danish-Africans, one named Christian Fleischer, the other simply Benjamin. Since these teachers “cannot even speak proper Danish, not to mention read or write it, the instruction, which takes place in the Danish language, is accordingly only mediocre”. An effort was being made to apply the Lancastrian system of mutual instruction, making use of the books sent out from Denmark, but the Commission complained of “the lack of a sufficient number of reading tables”.74 Finally, the Commission submitted a long report on the various officers in the establishments and their professional histories.75 The commission’s work done, Hein left the coast in April, 1828, sailing in an English ship from Prampram. He was apparently some time on his way home, and in January, 1829, the king ordered the Chamber of Customs to pay him a salary until a suitable office became available for him.76 Findt departed the coast at the end of July, 1828, having installed Lieutenant Lind as interim governor.77 King Frederik, apparently well pleased that a Danish mill was already grinding corn on the Guinea Coast, ordered a cargo of the meal transported to the West Indies and authorized the Government on the coast to spend five hundred rigsdaler a year to keep the mill in corn.78 It was beyond the king’s powers, however, to order a private merchant ship to the coast and thence to the West Indies.79 Cargoes were simply not to be had: at the Chamber of Customs’s instigation, a query was circulated among the great mercantile houses of Copenhagen in September. One after another, the merchants declined to take part in the venture.80 (Even

74 GJ 147/1828, Undersøgelsescommissionen, April 1, 1828. 75 GJ 98/1828, Undersøgelsescommissionen, April 22, 1828. 76 GK III, Diverse, Materialier, Thonning’s notes on a letter from Brock of July 30, 1828; Guineiske Resolutioner 1829–31, the king, January 10, 1829 (GJ 240/1829). 77 Larsen, p. 137; GK III, Diverse, Materialier, Thonning’s notes on letter from Brock. 78 GJ 150/1828, royal resolution, October 7, 1828, copy among Guineiske Resolutioner 1827–28. 79 GJ 121/1828, royal rescripts of September 4 and 6, 1828. 80 GJ(S) 144/1828, Grosserer Societet, September 20, 1828. conflicting colonial schemes 371

Henrik Richter was obtaining his wares from England rather than from Denmark at this time.)81 The king was not to be put off, however, and ordered extraordinary budgetary steps taken to cover the cost of sending a cargo of maize meal from the Guinea Coast to the West Indies.82 The Chamber of Customs warned the king that Governor Findt’s proposal to send free Danish-Africans from Africa to the Danish West Indies to be trained as plantation supervisors might have undesired racial and social consequences; the king accepted this advice but instead decreed that his West Indian Government was to “seek out 4 to 6 free colored or manumitted negroes of that place who, after having obtained the necessary expertise in setting up plantations, could be sent over to Guinea as plantation overseers”.83 The Chamber accordingly wrote to Governor Peter von Scholten in the West Indies in October, 1828.84 After a long delay, von Scholten reported that no free coloreds skilled in the workings of plantations and willing to betake themselves to Africa were to be found in the islands. No further action was taken for the time being.85 The Commission of Investigation’s conclusions regarding Philip Wris berg’s proposal to found a penal colony at the mouth of the Volta were endorsed entirely by the Chamber of Customs when it laid the commission’s report before the king in the spring of 1829. This is not to say that the idea of an African colony was being abandoned, however: the king’s decision was that “The plan for the establishment of an agricultural colony on the coast by the Volta River is to be set aside until a more convenient time might arrive”.86 At the end of 1828, the Danish government sent another man of science to the coast to replace the unfortunate Dr. Mundt. This was J.J. Trentepohl, who, late in 1827, had returned to Copenhagen after a voyage to China as

81 GK III, Diverse, Materialier, Thonning’s notes on a letter from Brock; Ole Justesen, “Henrich Richter, en afro-europæisk mellemhandler og foretager i de danske etablissementer på Guldkysten i det 19. århundrede”, in Festskrift til Kristof Glamann, pp. 187–211, on pp. 194, 198. 82 GJ 149/1828, royal resolution, October 7, 1828. 83 GJ 150/1828, royal resolution, October 7, 1828 (Designation VI, No. 2), filed at GJS 671/1833; copy among Guineiske Resolutioner 1827–28. 84 A draft of the Chamber’s letter to von Scholten, October 23, 1828 [ad GJ 150/1828] is filed at GJS 671/1833. 85 GJ 270/1831, Scholten, [in the Danish West Indies,] November 14, 1831 (Designation VI, No. 3), filed at GJS 671/1833. A copy of the Chamber’s report to the king on this matter, January 3, 1832, is filed at GJS 536/1848. 86 GJ 325/1829, royal resolution, June 9, 1829 (Designation V, No. 6); copies at GJS 7/1831 and GJS 226/1836. 372 chapter ten ship’s surgeon in the Danish Asiatic Company’s ship Christianshavn.87 Early in March, 1828, his application for two years’ support of zoological research on the collections he had brought home from the East was laid before the king by the Fonden ad Usus Publicos. He also for good measure applied for the post of doctor in the Guinea establishments should the position come open. His application was supported by Professor Rein hardt, of the Natural History Museum, and Professor J.F. Schouw, the plant geographer, who bandied the names of Cuvier and Humboldt about in praising Trentepohl’s promising oceanographic work.88 The king quickly granted him the handsome sum of 400 rigsdaler a year for two years, and in October, Trentepohl having been appointed surgeon on the coast, the grant was extended to cover four years, provided he remained on the coast so long.89 Trentepohl arrived on the coast in January, 1829,90 and by March had purchased a plantation at Bibease, possibly the same that had by now been owned by Schiønning and Richelieu; the Government reported that he was fired by a “particular desire and eagerness for colonization”. This was a highly desirable development, the Government wrote, as no progress with plantations could be expected “as long as no Europeans or [a] reliable man can make same his main place of residence”. The slave trade, which the Government described as “lively”, occasioned “particular difficulties in obtaining workers to cultivate the earth”.91 Trentepohl wrote home a few months later92 to suggest, since such an excellent foundation had recently been laid for a small but select library at Fort Christiansborg, that Krynitz’s German economic encyclopedia and the complete run of the proceedings of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters would be very useful additions; he regretted that such books would be quite beyond his own means. “These two works would not only be interesting reading for a man of science here on the coast”, he

87 Henriksen, p. 201; Nørregård, Danish settlements, pp. 199–200. 88 Glarbo, Fonden ad Usus Publicos, Vol. 3, pp. 63–64; GJ 60/1828, Trentepohl, July 7, 1828; ad GJ 60/1828, Reinhardt, [Copenhagen,] Febr. 5, 1828, and Schouw, Copenhagen, Febr. 5, 1828, filed among Guineiske Resolutioner 1821–26. Reinhardt also apparently provided Trentepohl with financial help, for Trentepohl arranged to have part of his salary docked in Copenhagen and sent directly to Reinhardt: GJ 333/1829, Trentepohl, March 22, 1829. 89 Glarbo, Fonden ad Usus Publicos, Vol. 3, p. 64; GJ 148/1828, royal resolution, October 7, 1828. The king also funded C.F. Ecklon’s scientific expedition to the Cape, again on Reinhardt’s and Schouw’s and also J.W. Hornemann’s recommendations: Glarbo, Fonden ad Usus Publicos, Vol. 3, pp. 52 ff., grant of March 25 1828. 90 GK III, Diverse, Materialier, Thonning’s notes. 91 GJS 332/1829, the government on the coast (Lind and Magnussen), March 22, 1829. 92 GJ (S) 414/1829, Trentepohl, [Christiansborg,] July 23, 1829. conflicting colonial schemes 373 wrote, “but particularly appropriate and useful for any of the colonists who found occasion for skills that most of them, to the general detriment of the colony, lack”. He thought the books would be especially useful to agriculturalists and craftsmen; both these arts, he said, “stand at quite a low stage” on the coast, and if one didn’t know how to do something oneself, there was simply nowhere to turn. “The tropical colonial plants, like coffee, indigo, cotton, sugar, cacao, rice, and others”, he wrote, “require, as is well known, a particular and to us Europeans altogether unfamiliar process”, and they remained uncultivated here because “one can obtain no information about how one most economically and most advantageously goes about cultivating same”. (The Africans among whom they lived knew nothing of these crops, either.) He presumed that the two works he recommended would be very valuable in this regard, and he hoped that others unknown to him might also be purchased for the fort’s little library. The Chamber of Customs passed this request to Professor Hornemann at the Botanical Garden and to Ole Rawert, a leading technocrat in the ministry of commerce and one of the publishers of the Handelstidende.93 Hornemann responded94 that it was difficult to recommend a single work that would provide the desired information on the cultivation of colonial crops, as such information was only to be found in very expensive books or widely scattered in various publications. Hornemann recommended Sir Hans Sloane’s Voyage to the West Indies,95 which was by then a hundred years old, and Patrick Browne’s Civil and natural history of Jamaica (London, 1756). Both books, he feared, would be difficult to obtain; Sloane’s book, especially, which was well-illustrated with copper engravings, would be very expensive. He further recommended F.R. de Tussac’s Flore des Antilles, ou Histoire générale botanique, rurale, et économique des végétaux indigènes des Antilles, et des exotiques qu’on est parvenu à y naturaliser …; this work, which would have to be ordered from Paris, had by now been published in more than sixty costly parts, with 240 plates, Hornemann said. Philip Miller’s Gardeners Dictionary,96 which Hornemann called “an

93 GJ 414/1829, annotation regarding letters to Hornemann and Rawert, November 19, 1829; “Rawert, Ole Jørgen”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 2nd. ed. 94 GJS 462/1830, Hornemann, at the Botanical Garden, Copenhagen, January 19, 1830. 95 See Hopkins, “Books, geography and Denmark’s colonial undertaking in West Africa”. 96 According to Hornemann, the book had first come out in 1724: a 2nd ed. of Miller’s The gardeners and florists dictionary, or A complete system of horticulture … was published in London in 1724. A later title, which expresses the usefulness of the book in this context, was The gardeners dictionary, containing the methods of cultivating and improving all sorts of trees, plants, and flowers, for the kitchen, fruit, and pleasure gardens; as also those which are used in medicine. With directions for the culture of vineyards, and making of wine 374 chapter ten essential work in the art of gardening” and which was available in many editions and languages, could surely be found in Copenhagen and would be less expensive. “Regarding the colonial plants, Miller has very thorough accounts. taken from the best sources and collected from the colonists’ observations”, Hornemann wrote. He also recommended the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des etablissements et du commerce des deux Indes, published in Amsterdam in 1770, of which a Danish translation had been available for many years.97 This work contained “very reliable accounts of the cultivation of the tropical commercial productions”, and Hornemann cited specific pages dealing with indigo, cocoa, cotton, sugar cane, and what he called the cochineal cactus. Ole Rawert had the opportunity to inspect Hornemann’s list before he compiled his own,98 and he added a French work on the cultivation of cotton, and in fact enclosed a copy of it for the fort’s collection with his letter.99 He pointed out that, the year before, he had published an account of sugar cultivation on the Danish West Indian Island of St. Croix in the Handelstidende; two Danish books on the islands contained material on sugar cane, and these also should perhaps be sent to the coast.100 Rawert also recommended the fifth part (newly published, he said) of Humboldt’s Reise in die Æqvinoctialgegende. He doubted that the books Trentepohl had requested would actually serve his purposes very well and suggested instead a couple of recent books on mechanics, a new German translation of a French handbook of chemistry, and Cuvier’s Geschichte der Fortschritte in den Naturwissenschaften seit 1789 bis auf den heutigen Tag. He also drew the colonial office’s attention to the “Annales maritimes et coloniales” which, according to his description, was published monthly by the French Marine and Colonial Departement. “It is a publication as interesting as it

in England. In which likewise are included the practical parts of husbandry, 4th ed. (London: printed for the author, 1754). 97 Guillaume Thomas Raynal, Raynals philosophiske og politiske Historie om Europæernes Handel og Besiddelser i Ost- og Vest-Indien, Matthias Nascou, transl. (Copenhagen: published by the translator, 1804–1808). 98 GJS 481/1830, Rawert, Copenhagen, March 12, 1830. 99 GJS 481/1830, Rawert, Copenhagen, March 12, 1830. C[harles] de Lasteyrie, Du coton- nier et de sa culture, ou, Traité sur les diverses espèces de cotonniers, sur la possibilité et les moyens d’acclimater cet arbuste en France, sur sa culture dans différens pays…. (Paris: Chez Arthur-Bertrand, 1808). 100 These were Peter Lotharius Oxholm, De Danske Vestindiske Øers Tilstand i Henseende til Population, Cultur og Finance-Forfatning … (Copenhagen: Johan Frederik Schultz, 1797), and Hans West, Bidrag til Beskrivelse over Ste Croix med en kort Udsigt over St. Thomas, St. Jean, Tortola, Spanishtown og Crabeneiland. conflicting colonial schemes 375 is useful”, although he admitted that it would be “more suitable for the Collegium’s than the fort’s book collection”. (Neither Rawert nor Hornemann thought to mention Peter Thonning’s Guinea flora in this connection. It was perhaps regarded as too purely a botanical work for the agricultural purpose at hand.) From Rawert’s list the colonial office selected Humboldt, the two books on mechanics, and Cuvier; and from Hornemann’s list Raynal’s history of the Indies; these and the book on cotton supplied by Rawert were bound in Russia leather (the tanning process imparts resistance to insects), stamped Ft Christiansborg, and sent out in the East Indiaman Alexander in 1830; the Government on the coast was ordered to add them to the inventory of the fort’s books.101 Long before the books arrived on the African coast, Trentepohl was dead.102 As the Government wrote, in announcing this news, “His consci- entiousness in his office and eagerness for the plantation enterprise makes his loss very regrettable”. Henrich Richter bought his plantation, but Brock doubted that even he had the wherewithal to take up plantation agriculture.103 In October, 1829, the Government on the coast (the signatures were Lind, Brock, and Magnussen) reported that it had spent several weeks at the Akuapem plantations and had sowed several tens of thousands of coffee beans. “Some of the plantations are beginning to take on a more promising appearance. We cannot sufficiently recommend Aquapim as a place for the Europeans to live”; indeed, they recommended moving the seat of the government to Akuapem. At the beginning of September, the Laurine Mathilde had returned from a voyage to the Cape Verdes with 17 donkeys, a horse, and some goats. These had been rather expensive, all in all, but the Government had it mind to send the sloop back again, for these animals would be “indispensable for communications with the Aquapim plantations”.104 The Government had set the Danish-African schoolchildren to instructive work in the royal gardens in their free time, the boys working the land and planting cotton seeds, the girls picking, cleaning, and spinning the

101 GJ 558/1830, Pakhusforvalteren, July 20, 1830; Guin. Kopibog, July 24, 1830, to the government on the coast (No. 566). 102 GJ 615/1830, government on the coast, March 16, 1830. A box of insects he had collected was sent in by the government and appears to have ended up at the Natural History Museum: GJ 602/1830, the government on the coast, April 14, 1830. 103 GK III, Diverse, Materialier, Thonning’s notes. (It was Thonning’s understanding that this plantation had once been Peder Meyer’s.) 104 GJ 613/1830, the government on the coast, October 21, 1829; duplicate at GJS 622/1830. 376 chapter ten fiber, “whereby we hope to win a double advantage, partly to teach the children the way of processing this useful plant and important product, partly to by degrees accustom them to not being unoccupied”. The Chamber of Customs filed this communication away without comment for the time being when it arrived in Copenhagen in August, 1830. CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE LITERARY IMPULSE: A YOUNG COLONIAL OFFICER’S ESSAYS ON DENMARK’S AFRICAN FUTURE

Late in 1829, Balthazar Christensen (who was for several years the Guinea Commission’s secretary and went on to make quite a name for himself in Danish politics1) was appointed government assistant on the Guinea Coast. A student of law, he was politically inclined in a society still without any formal, institutional public outlet for such energy.2 Christensen had not taken the highest marks on his examinations, and had in fact found it advisable to sit for his law exam a second time, but the Chamber of Customs noted, in approving his application for employment on the coast, that he had “good ability in the living languages and bodily constitution suitable to the Guinean climate”.3 Christensen’s eldest brother Laurids Christensen was the governor of Tranquebar, and this may have inspired the younger Christensen’s decision to try his hand in the colonial service.4 One John Wilhelm Veith was given a similar appointment at the same time, but he is a far more obscure figure; the king is recorded to have been concerned about the possibility that he might succeed to the governor’s post, for he was a Catholic.5 His young wife was engaged to teach at Christiansborg, at the same pay as her husband.6 On July 31, 1830, they embarked in the Alexander, commanded by a Captain Rabe, who, according to the first entry in the extraordinary journal Christensen kept until late in 1831, was to make a sort of mercantile reconnaissance along the Guinea Coast on his way to his ultimate desti nation in the East Indies. Rabe was acting in this errand for the great

1 “Christensen, Balthasar [sic] Matthias”, Dansk biografisk lexikon, C.F. Bricka, ed. 2 Harald Holm, Balthazar Christensen [Studentersamfundets Smaaskrifter, Nos. 57–58] (Copenhagen: Studentersamfundets Forlag, 1887), pp. 3–8. 3 Guineiske Resolutioner 1829–31, royal resolution, December 29, 1829 (GJ 448/1830); GJS 448/1829 [so marked on the documents, but GJ 448/1830 in the Guinea Journal itself], filed at GJS 595/1838. 4 Privatarkiv Nr. 5262, Balthazar Christensen, Box 2 (C-F), C. Sager vedr. Balth. Christensens Ophold i Guinea 1830–31, Koncepter og biografiske Optegnelser af Laurids Christensen [Guvernør i Trankebar, ældste Broder til Balthr Chr. (1793–1831)] 1828–29. 5 Guineiske Resolutioner 1829–31, a document in association with royal resolution, December 29, 1829 (GJ 448/1830). 6 Christensen’s journal, first undated entry. 378 chapter eleven merchant Matthias Wilhelm Sass, who had begun to establish himself in the China trade in the mid-1820s, and whose fleet at its greatest extent numbered almost thirty ships; his firm was one of the richest in Copenhagen.7 The brash, self-absorbed, and rather callow young Christensen, proud of the “rocket in the behind” ascribed to him by his friends,8 wrote in his journal quite regularly and at some length and clearly took considerable pleasure in seeing his pen scratching out his thoughts on paper. The entries are dated, but his account jumps ahead from time to time, so it is clear that he was sometimes writing well after the fact; there are marginal annotations here and there, some of them added considerably later. Christensen sent portions of the journal home to his family and friends every so often, and it appears that he drafted much of his correspondence here in his journal. He seems not to have had a consistent idea of whom he was writing for, and the material is in places remarkably unreserved. Christensen’s African sojourn was quite brief, but he was intelligent and articulate, and when, after his return home, he was appointed secretary to the Guinea Commission, he presumably enjoyed as much of Peter Thonning’s confidence as could be expected given the differences in their ages, education, rank, and temperament. He completely lacked Thonning’s natural historical and ethnographic curiosity, but Christensen’s diary is nevertheless a very lively record of life at Christiansborg. He visited Akuapem a couple of times, but he saw little of the rest of the territory. Christensen was seen off on his African adventure by his friends Ludvig Moltke and Ove Thomsen. (Moltke was educated in the law, but is best known as a translator, and a bad one, of Dickens, Washington Irving, and many other authors.9 Thomsen had in 1826 succeeded A.E. Boye as the editor of Nyt Aftenblad.10) Besides Christensen and the Veiths, there were on board the Alexander a scion of the Sehested family (Ove Sehested was at this time the head of the Chamber of Customs) on his way to India in the colonial service, and a Miss Kofoed, with her piano, which, Christensen seems to intimate, and without much enthusiasm, she actually played on

7 Christensen’s journal, September 26, 1830; “Sass, Matthias Wilhelm”, Dansk biografisk lexikon, C.F. Bricka, ed. [at runeberg.org/dbl]. 8 Holm, p. 8. 9 “Moltke, Adam Ludvig Joachim”, Dansk biografisk lexikon, C.F. Bricka, ed. [at runeberg.org/dbl]. 10 Søllinge and Thomsen, Vol. I, p. 144. the literary impulse 379 the long voyage to Tranquebar. Christensen records that he was reading Las Casas, the great eighteenth-century Danish dramatist Ludvig Holberg, Schiller, Goethe, and Wieland. Two months after departing Copenhagen, on September 21, the ship had passed the Cape Verdes Islands and was expected to raise Cape Mount, which, at 6° 46′ north of the line, Christensen called the northernmost point on the Guinea Coast, in two days.11 It was very hot and humid, and Christensen feared that the rainy season, so dangerous a time on the coast, had not yet passed. It was not as hot as he had expected, however, although adjustments in dress that wouldn’t occur to one in Denmark had to be made. He described a magnificent storm at sunset and indulged himself in a long poem, remarking that he expected that there would now be no time for “verse-making” for quite some time. He found it “a lucky portent that the first sight of my second home to be is so smiling as Cape Mount”. He looked forward to the days to come, because Captain Rabe had appointed him his secretary and “wing adju- tant”, and he was to accompany the captain everywhere. The Alexander sailed on past Cape Mount and anchored at Cape Mesurado, at Monrovia, thirty miles farther along the coast,12 where a couple of canoes came off to the ship. Their occupants offered to serve as pilots, but Captain Rabe, content to sail by the lead, declined their services. What these men really wanted, Christensen said, was spirits. Their fine figures, filed teeth, wild eyes, and nudity made a strong and unpleasant impression on him; all the ladies withdrew from the deck, except Miss Kofoed. Christiansen declared that he wished he could take up residence on the summit of the Cape, a very romantic situation.13 The ship’s boat negotiated the surf the next day without any of the party’s becoming wet, which, Christensen noted, would have been extremely dangerous in this climate, and “the entrancing view of the romantic nature that opened before us did not fail to make a deep impression on us all”. They stormed cheerfully up the bluff on which the town was laid out, “right in the heart of a wood as entrancing as anything can be in the Old World”: Christensen’s first experience of Africa was colored, in other words, by imagined scenes on New World frontiers.14

11 Christensen’s journal, September 21, 1830. 12 Christensen’s journal, September 26, 1830. 13 Christensen’s journal, September 27, 1830. 14 Christensen’s journal, September 28, 1830. 380 chapter eleven

Monrovia not yet ten years old; it owed its existence to a philanthropic-mercantile trading company in Vashington and Philadelphia. The colonists are almost exclusively manumitted negroes \and almost [all] Americans/, who, released from their condition of slavery in the southern portion of the United States and also, most usually, previously provided the education that first makes freedom an appreciated good, were sent out to the banks of the Mesurado, where a luxuriant nature and few needs make it easy for them, with the little help they receive in advance from the company, to establish themselves, \among the negroes, who already from olden times lived here/ and successively work their way up to prosperity and happier circumstances. Christensen suggested that his readers could obtain a good idea of the appearance and layout of the town in James Fenimore Cooper’s novel Die Ansiedler (The pioneers, or the sources of the Susquehanna), which had been published in Leipzig in 1823. This—an educated Danish traveler, referring, if a trifle ironically, to Cooper’s frontier romances—is indeed the stuff of early nineteenth-century African colonialism. Both the precedents and the potential of the Americas figured centrally in African colonial thinking at this period: notions drawn from historical or purely literary constructions of the colonial experience of other times in other continents were being projected back across the Atlantic to Africa. Christensen wrote of the governor, the sheriff, and the agricultural committee: In short: all the elements of a budding state are present, and it requires no particular prescience to be certain, already now, that here in few years there will bloom a state, which in refinement and culture will not yield to any European. It was reported that as many as six hundred more slaves of good character and “education” would soon be emancipated and sent over from the United States. “Strange, that it does not occur to the Europeans to emulate this colonization system, which has so much of an advantage over that hitherto prevailing with colonists from Europe”.15 Trade to the interior and to America were already of “great significance”, with the rather unfortunate result that everyone here “throws himself into the almost instantly extremely profitable trade, and thus does little or nothing for agriculture in general or for the cultivation of colonial crops in particular”.16

15 Christensen’s journal, September 29, 1830. 16 Christensen’s journal, September 28, 1830. the literary impulse 381

Mr. Williams, the Governor, and all the important dignitaries and merchants were black “or at the most mulattos”, with the exception of C.M. Warring, who had been there seven years, first as a missionary and subsequently on his own account, and his partner, an American named Francis Taylor (from whom Christensen was pleased to receive the gift of a copy of Milton’s “lost Paradise”, which he looked forward to reading in the original English, a language of which he had hitherto had little experi- ence17). The government secretary, Mr. [John Brown] Russwurm, was a Jamaican of mixed African and European parentage. “The latter was above all a particularly handsome and cultured young man, who would have done any company honor, if one disregards his color”. Russwurm put out the local newspaper, a biweekly, edited, Christensen wrote, quite in the North American manner, in which private affairs were matters of public discussion.18 Christensen mocked this little colonial society mercilessly: the sight of black men in tailcoats he found a trifle ridiculous, and he urged his friend Moltke to seek out Captain Rabe when the Alexander returned to Copenhagen for an account of the “grotesque-comic” garb of the black women at the governor’s dinner, and especially of “a black affair” in a yellow dress with a feather fan. Christensen called the formal presentations a “burlesque”.19 Christensen reported that there were at any time between one and two hundred South American and Spanish schooners engaged in the slave trade along the coast, particularly from Cape Mount (where evil tongues let out that various of Monrovia’s Gentlemen quite sub rosa have an interest)”, and piracy was rampant.20 The Alexander sold a few “insignificant” wares on the Monrovian market—some brass kettles, gin, Edam cheeses, and a little St. Julien. Only luxury articles from northern Europe would be profitable for Danish ships, Christensen thought; rum, tobacco, and cottons could be brought to this market far more profitably by American ships.21 The Alexander’s small profits here were largely eaten up by expenses—harbor fees, ferry-men, commissions. “Altogether what I have seen with my own eyes has given me a new proof of” how unreliable had been the accounts he had received, “third

17 Christensen’s journal, October 1, 1830. 18 See Amos J. Beyan, African American settlements in West Africa: John Brown Russwurm and the American civilizing efforts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 35, 70. 19 Christensen’s journal, September 30 and October 1, 1830. 20 Christensen’s journal, September 29, 1830. 21 Christensen’s journal, September 30, 1830. 382 chapter eleven hand”, from former governor Findt and Lieutenant Krenchel, who had sailed the Laurine Mathilde to the coast in 1827.22 The remark lets slip, as through a briefly opened door, a snatch of the formal and informal discussions and conversations, in circles encompassing the Chamber of Customs’s colonial office but no doubt extending well beyond it, that attended the return of such men from West Africa. Alexander sailed on down the coast, trading a little as she went. They picked up interpreters who “had at home been recommended to our captain”. Here again, Christensen wrote, Krenchel’s information proved unsound. There were not many tusks to be had, and they were held too dear. There was no tobacco in the ship. “Also razors were demanded of us in vain”.23 There was not much wind, and it was mainly the current that carried them along. Christensen felt healthier than ever. The land and sea breezes were beginning to make their diurnal alternation felt, “just as the description represents it”. (Christensen did not further identify this source.) The barometer was not at all reliable in these latitudes—nor, according to Captain Rabe, for 28 degrees on either side of the Equator: the weather was fine, but the “barometer continues to fall below Changeable. Is it because the thinner air here can not lift the quicksilver so well?”24 They passed fort after fort, of which the Dutch establishments, at least, all appeared to be in good repair. One day they saw an African town go up in flames. The coastline was “beautiful, vegetation luxuriant”: the forest came down to the water except where it had been cleared around the forts and towns. The Alexander called at the Dutch fort Elmina, where Christensen rode for the first time in a carriage drawn by human beings,25 and at Cape Coast Castle, where Captain Rabe and his party were entertained by the charming young English governor George MacLean, who complained, “over a vast quantity of wine, about Richter’s preponderant influence” over the Africans.26

22 Christensen’s journal, October 1, 1830; Christensen spelled the name Krænckel, which would be indistinguishable from Krenchel in spoken Danish. 23 Christensen’s journal, October 5–8, 1830. 24 Christensen’s journal, October 9, 11, 12, and 13, 1830. 25 Christensen’s journal, October 14–19, 1830. 26 Christensen’s journal, October 19–23, 1830. Here—in his original text—Christensen refers to Henrik Richter’s own confirmation, considerably later, of MacLean’s assessment of him: the journal is thus no journal at all, or is at any rate thoroughly corrupt. See Metcalfe, Maclean of the Gold Coast. the literary impulse 383

When they arrived at Christiansborg on October 23, 1830, “everything appeared to us, in comparison with what we had seen, somewhat cheer- less, sordid and dispiriting”. One of Christensen’s first literary concerns was to characterize the men whose lives he would be sharing: it quickly became clear to him that the only respectable and cultivated person in the fort itself was Governor Lind himself, although it “unmistakably reveals itself to the slightly attentive observer that his intellect and talents in no way answer” to the complexity of the post.27 “He likes it so well here that his wish assuredly is to remain here until his dying day”. However, at present Lind wanted to travel to Denmark as soon as possible to secure himself a regular appointment as governor, and had already sought the Chamber of Customs’s permission to do so. After only a few days in the place, Christensen was speculating that he himself might be appointed acting governor in Lind’s absence. Brock, although he had already served as acting governor, was only twenty-seven, and Christensen thought him harm- less to his own ambitions. Assistant Magnussen, on the other hand, “will no doubt arrest my fortunes for a space of time, as he also does not think of going back”. Under assistant Chenon was “good-natured” but weak; Christensen regarded him as Brock’s spy. Brock was an intelligent man, and Christensen thought he was leading Governor Lind around by the nose without Lind’s ever knowing it. In September, 1830, King Frederik informed the Chamber of Customs that word had come to him that Interim Governor Lind was ill and wished to leave the coast to reconstitute his health in Denmark: the king, although he had not yet heard from Lind himself, therewith authorized him in advance to travel home.28 However, Ludvig Hein, who had been drawing a stipend since his service on the Commission of Investigation had ended, was at the same time appointed governor, dashing Lind’s hopes.29 According to Balthazar Christensen’s account of the matter in his diary, a military friend of Lind’s in Copenhagen had been dumb enough to lament to the king about Lind’s health and his wish to recover at home. The king asks Capt. Find [i.e. Findt] whom [‘naval officers’, Christensen inserted] he should send out, and gets only the suggestion of Hein, who takes advantage of the circumstances to make himself precious. Only as actual governor will he go out.30

27 Christensen’s journal, October 19–23, 1830. 28 Guineiske Resolutioner 1829–31, Frederik R., September 19, 1830 (GJ 642/1830). 29 Guineiske Resolutioner 1829–31, Frederik R., September 19, 1830 (GJ 643/1830). 30 Christensen’s journal, January 31, 1831. 384 chapter eleven

The king had also learned that Dr. Trentepohl was dead and ordered the Chamber to find a replacement, “and if possible We would wish that he had good knowledge of botany”.31 Governor Hein appears to have been thinking along the same colonial lines as Lind, and he seems also to have had the ear of the king. In October, at Hein’s instigation, the king ordered the Chamber of Customs to make three thousand rigsdaler available for the construction of a building at the foot of the Aquapim Mountains in the vicinity of the already existing plantations, which building’s purpose should be in part to serve as a residence for the governor, who is thus assumed will easily attract other Europeans with him to permanent residence there, in part to be a place of refuge for the sick Europeans that there may be at the fort, who here, according to experience already obtained, dare be expected to be cured sooner”. The King furthermore ordered “that there for the same building will be procured a piece of land, which immediately, to the degree possible, should be planted with coffee trees, cotton bushes, and maize”; the gover- nor was to be directly responsible for the maintenance of this plantation. Finally, the king commanded that

some planters from America, who have knowledge of the cultivation of indigo and sugar cane, etc., by the Most Grac. promise of certain advantages, are to be encouraged to settle on the coast, there to introduce said agricultural efforts, wherefore it would in addition be desirable if these could transfer cochineal to make experiments with its production, besides, as well, such remunerative tropical plants that might possibly be expected to be cultivated on the coast with success but do not already occur there.32 Three thousand rigsdaler was not a very large infusion of funds, but it seems clear that his African territory remained a matter of some interest to the king. The economic potential of tropical crops was understood to be enormous. Shortly before King Frederik issued these fairly ambitious colonial orders, the Handelstidende published an article extolling the virtues of cotton, one of the world’s most significant articles of commerce: Districts become rich by its cultivation; fleets sail the oceans to transport it; cities are built on the profits of the commerce in it; and at least one large

31 Guineiske Resolutioner 1829–31, Frederik R., September 19, 1830 (GJ 642/1830). 32 ad GJ 662/1830, royal rescript, October 2, 1830, copy, filed at GJS 702/1849; see ad GJ 629/1833, filed at GJS 539/1844, for Hein’s proposal to the king. the literary impulse 385

empire, although it sits on sacks of wool, rests nevertheless with its strongest arm on cotton. The newspaper published a table demonstrating the huge growth in the trade in the past eight years, most of it coming from the United States. Prices had fallen 65% in the last fifteen years, and so had manufacturing costs. There were spinning mills in Manchester and Paris driven by twenty- horsepower steam engines.33 The king also ordered the expenditure of five hundred rigsdaler to send the prefabricated iron plates of a corn-drying oven down to the coast with the necessary drawings for its construction there. The king forwarded to the Chamber of Customs a letter from Governor Hein, who reported that it appeared that maize had to be soaked, to soften it, and then dried again, before it could be ground.34 The Chamber of Customs consulted Fabriksdirecteur Lehmann about the matter, and he sought the advice of Johan Dyssel, an up-and-coming young teacher at the Polytech nic Institute who served the Chamber of Customs and the Commerce Collegium in an advisory capacity.35 Lehmann and Dyssel took a dim view of the designs sent them by the Chamber of Customs, and recommended instead an oven described “in one of the latest issues of the Landhuusholdningsselskabets [the Agricultural Society’s] Skrifter, as well as in the Handelstidende.36 Christensen complained in his journal that Interim Governor Lind (who remained on the coast awaiting permission to travel home, still unaware that he had been replaced by Hein) was allowing the missionary Hencke far too much influence in the life of the little Danish society.37 Late in the 1820s, the Basel mission society’s attention had been turning to Africa; it had approached the Danish Mission Society, which had been founded in 1821 by Bone Falck Rønne, of Lyngby, north of Copenhagen, regarding the possibility of establishing a mission in the Danish territory on the Guinea Coast.38 Governor Richelieu had advanced the matter at court, and in 1827,

33 Handels-og Industrie-Tidende, No. 78, September 25, 1830. 34 GJ 662/1830, Frederik R, October 2, 1830, forwarding two proposals from Hein; ad GJ 662/1830, Hein, undated, filed at GJS 702/1849. 35 “Dyssel, Johan Arndt”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 3rd ed. 36 GJ 46/1831, Fabriksdirecteur Lehmann, March 23, 1831; Handels-og Industrie-Tidende, No. 31, April 17, 1830, p. 123–24. 37 Christensen’s journal, October 199–23, 1830. 38 C.N. Lorenzen, “Sønderjyden Andreas Riis, Missionær paa den danske Deel af Guldkysten fra 1832–45”, Nordisk Missions-Tidsskrift, Vol. 3, 1892, pp. 289–340, on p. 290–291. 386 chapter eleven four Basel missionaries were ordained in Copenhagen by the Bishop of Sjælland, whose see extended to the coast of Africa; the four men arrived at Christiansborg late in 1828.39 Three of them were dead within a year. Hencke was the fort’s catechist and schoolteacher at the time Balthazar Christensen was there.40 “It is much to be regretted”, Christensen wrote, that the Basel Mission, that floods these coasts with missionaries, is not careful either to impart to its ambassadors somewhat more humanity and knowledge of the world or to provide them with a little more theological and philosophical knowledge than [Hencke] possesses. The priest seemed capable only of the “crassest orthodoxy”.41 Hencke “attacks Richter to the Governor these days, and will no longer greet him, because ——— [sic] he has for 2 Sundays been absent from church”. Christensen feared that Hencke’s influence on Lind would increase the apparent tension that was beginning to develop between the governor and Richter, “and this will react extremely unpleasantly and unfortunately on all conditions here, as these two men are the only ones that are of significance and interest”.42 Of Richter, Christensen wrote that he was “the next richest and perhaps the wisest man on the coast and keeps a princely house”. (There can be little doubt that the slave trade was the main source of his wealth.)43 Indeed, his influence was decisive; he was perhaps more powerful even than the Danish, Dutch, and English governments on the coast. Christensen praised him for a man of culture, upbringing, wisdom, and “worthy demeanor”. Christensen was of the opinion, which he emphasized with a good deal of underlining, that no Danish government could accomplish anything here without allying itself closely with him.44 Outside the fort live the merchants Lutterod[t] and Svanekjær, both former assistants and proper but limited folk, who have no fortune and occupy themselves only with a bit of trade and, for three years, with coffee-planting in Aqvapim, where also the governor has started a plantation and where

39 See Kwamena-Poh’s chapter on the Basel Mission’s activity especially in Akuapem, pp. 111–123. 40 Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 199. 41 See Metcalfe, Maclean of the Gold Coast, p. 118. 42 Christensen’s journal, October 19–23, 1830. 43 See Ole Justesen, “Henrich Richter 1785–1840”, pp. 151–152. 44 Christensen’s journal, November 14, 1830. the literary impulse 387

Trentepool’s recently established plantation is now owned and run by Richter, since the former’s death. However, there is still little or nothing to say with regard to these plantations for certain. Only this I know, that the quality in and of itself is excellent, and it is likely that the hindrances there are to the plantation enterprise in general, namely the insecurity of the plantations, ignorance of the processing and cultivation as well as lack of capital, will in large part be swept aside, if our colonies here are finally organized in such a way that their condition does not depend alone and solely on one—the Governor—who can be incompetent or perhaps be taken from us too soon, and who most often is the governor and has established his views before he knows the localities. When first the government personnel is successively formed of young, informed, effective, and self- respecting men —young men like himself, in other words—the cultivation of colonial crops could undoubtedly be pursued with success, “as our establishments’ situation is advantageous in many respects”. “The climate here is recognized to be healthier than anywhere else on the coast, and everyone I have seen here on the coast, with very few exceptions … is, despite a rather merry life, of an ample and healthy appearance”. In a margin, Christensen inserted that Trentepohl had died because he had insisted on bathing while still hot after a twelve-mile march, contrary to everyone’s advice.

Danish ships could also be well served to sail here. Rabe came at the unhealthiest time in every respect, was in a hurry to continue on his way, and still … sold so much of his not too well calculated cargo, and so profitably, that the voyage paid for itself, and that even though it was arranged mainly by Capt. Find[t], who from his 10 months’ residence here thought he knew just about everything. Findt’s ideas about the market for various trade goods had proved unreliable, however, and, in some cases, simply stupid. It was indeed because Findt had allowed non-fast textiles to be sold from Fort Christiansborg that certain Danish cloths were at present unsalable, but for cloth of good quality there was always a market. There were almost always ships in the roads here or a couple of miles away at English and Dutch Accra. Even as he wrote, there were two brigs from Liverpool, an American, a Brazilian, and the Alexander. Christensen recorded that he had been seriously ill for 3 days, with “violent diarrhea and vomiting”. Now, on November 10, he was out of bed and busy writing letters to send home with the Alexander (rather a long way around, via Tranquebar). On November 12, the Alexander sailed on, taking with her all the people “who in the foregoing days animated our 388 chapter eleven solitude … and—we are reduced to ourselves”. Christensen sent two fascicles of his journal home in the Alexander and started a third.45 He was recovering nicely from his illness, he now wrote. “Altogether I continue more and more to be confirmed in my conviction that people in Europe entertain very exaggerated ideas of the unhealthiness of the climate”. It was true that the nights were extremely cold and one had to dress warmly when out in the evenings, and, at home, have it tightly closed to keep out the extremely dangerous sea wind and the dampness it brings with it. One must furthermore not lightly walk in the open air without a hat, and the mid-day sun and the moon one must as much as possible avoid being exposed to. But if one observes this, and in addition is a little moderate in food and drink, I dare also maintain that one here will, as in Denmark, preserve one’s unweakened health. Christensen described his daily routine a little. He rose at five, “when 6 very able drummers and 6 do. do. pipers at reveille, who go round the premises of the whole fort, have extremely unpleasantly interrupted my sleep”. He attended to his duties from eight to twelve, took lunch at Lutterodt’s home (for five dollars a month), and worked again from two to five. From five to six in the evening was the appointed hour of the general promenade, and dinner was at seven. His evenings were busy, Sundays at the governor’s regular reception, Wednesdays and Saturdays at Richter’s, and other evenings with the Veiths. Every step of his way seemed exotic and intriguing: he took wry delight in the “paraplui” with which he warded off the noonday sun. He was fascinated by the contemplation of what he was doing—his diary is full of advice on how others emulating his extraordinary step out into the world should most wisely and profitably proceed. By moderating one’s consumption one could “pretty well make it through on one’s salary”, but “to take money instead of goods is in any case connected with loss of profit…. Above all, anyone leaving home should try, if possible, to take with him a complete set of household goods of everything possible”; most of it could be obtained second-hand. He himself had not brought the most suitable trade goods. Rum, gin, sugar, Cognac, Guinea rifles, and powder were all that was really needed. Furthermore, there were plenty of people in Copenhagen, he thought, who would be willing to venture a shipment

45 Christensen’s journal, November 14, 1830. He was unable to find the time to make copies of them before sending them off, he said: the diaries at the Rigsarkiv are presumably these originals. the literary impulse 389 of goods with someone on his way to the colony. Major “Riesberg”, he wrote, was good at finding people “whom his chatter will soon lure into making an offer”. The best thing would be to get a year’s advance from the Chamber of Customs and then to try to buy as much as possible on credit. For all his interest in the matter, however, Christensen intended to do no trading for the first year, but to keep his eyes open. “The Government’s book collection here, of which Schmidt Phiseldeck told me at home with much unctuousness, is insignificant in quantity and with few exceptions also in quality”. (Schmidt-Phiseldek was now the head of the colonial office at the Chamber of Customs.)46 Christensen urged his friends at home to organize a public subscription for a good library, which the fort’s officers sorely felt the lack of. “If we at this moment had books that could bring me to the point of being able to write a single letter in comprehensible Arabic”, he wrote, he was confident that cordial relations could be established with the kingdom of Asante.47 Christensen asked his friend Moltke to send him the seeds of European trees. The first young shoot of a Danish tree would at least for some days be the occasion of rapture and all days of interest. I continue to recover completely. The climate continues to seem to me pleasant, and I surely have my much discussed “rocket in the behind” to the seem degree as at home, although I had feared that the thing one most easily lost here was the fieriness and energy of the spirit. He could with “conviction” say, “ ‘This is a good place to be’ ”, especially now that he and Veith had broken a trail—presuming, he added carelessly, “that we do not kick the bucket too soon”. “I very much fear that in time I will find it a little difficult to maintain sincerely good understanding with Governor Lind”.48 He (and others, he

46 Schmidt-Phiseldek was himself the author of the widely translated Europa und Amerika, in which he foresaw the rise of the Americas to predominance in the affairs of the world: see C.F. von Schmidt-Phiseldek, Europe and America, or the relative state of the civilized world at a future period, Joseph Owen, transl., facsimile ed. (Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rhodos, 1976 [Copenhagen: Printed by Bernhard Schlesinger, 1820]); “Schmidt-Phiseldeck, Conrad Georg Friederich Elias”, Dansk biografisk lexikon, C.F. Bricka, ed. [at runeberg.org/dbl]. 47 Thomas Bowdich and his wife, preparing in Paris for his famous expedition to Asante, studied Arabic together, as well as natural history, under the eyes of Cuvier and Humboldt: Donald deB. Beaver, “Writing natural history for survival—1820–1856: the case of Sarah Bowdich, later Sarah Lee”, Archives of Natural History, Vol. 26, No. 1, 1999, pp. 19–31, on pp. 19–20. 48 Christensen’s journal, November 17, 1830. 390 chapter eleven said) found some of the governor’s many plans for the establishments “a little bizarre”, but no one cared to criticize him. The Government reported from the coast in September, 1830, that of the coffee shrubs recently planted in Akuapem only about six thousand had survived, whereof it will be seen that the plantation enterprise proceeds, like everything here, only slowly, but it proceeds nevertheless, and we sincerely hope that it soon may come so far that it can constitute a man’s sole and exclusive occupation; only then will these establishments become of interest and importance to the motherland.49 All but two of the draft animals and all of the goats imported from the Cape Verdes had died. It had appeared at first that the donkeys would do well, but now they had sent the last two back into the country from the coast to try to save them: possibly it will go better when they are first acclimatized at the Aquapim plantations and thereafter gradually are accustomed to the coastal air …. Draft animals are, however, an indispensible necessity if this land is ever to have the least interest for Denmark, for commerce will always remain unimportant as long as the land’s productions are so few and insignificant as now; a change in this can only be expected with the rise of farming, which will never be possible without draft animals.50 The cotton planted by the fort’s schoolchildren in the “royal garden here by the shore” had failed on account of “drought and exhausted soil”, but the Government intended to repeat this important experiment elsewhere.51 Christensen wrote in his diary in November52 that Lind appeared to proceed solely from the premise that only plantation enterprise and agriculture ought to be the main object of his care and protection, and that the Government can and should fundamentally be in and of itself indifferent to whether trade flourishes or not. Lind apparently felt that efforts to improve trade would benefit only one man, namely Richter. “It is undoubtedly right53 and praiseworthy to advance the plantation enterprise; but to me it seems—and I have in this the last 30 years’

49 GJ(S) 7/1831, the Council on the coast, Christiansborg, September 29, 1830. 50 GJ(S) 13/1831, the Council on the coast, September 29, 1830. 51 GJ 14/1831, the Council on the coast, September 29, 1830. 52 Christensen’s journal, November 17, 1830. 53 Possibly “important”. the literary impulse 391 experience on my side”—that until there was some assurance of security, plantations could never be an “an exclusive and principal occupation”. Security depended on the guns of the forts, however, and the plantations can only be established up in the country, e.g. in Aquapim, 12 miles from here, where the negroes, just as here, always are our secret enemies and could unpunished be so openly, and where, besides, any war they conduct with their neighbors, and which ends unfortunately, brings about their country’s destruction, and with it also the plantations’. In a note Christensen added, “This is one of the points in which Monrad writes a patent untruth, without doubt denying his own conviction therein to adulate the views that are more in fashion”. The work could only be done by slaves, in Christensen’s opinion, under expert and constant supervision. Plantations would be

both difficult and expensive, and even presuming what I, however \by what I have seen and tasted/ must doubt, that the coffee produced will be of the first quality, it will always, however, with the so monstrously widespread coffee production in other regions, be a question, which cannot, in advance, be answered with certainty, whether the final sale will yield a profit to the entrepreneur. Until commerce put the colony on a better footing, the Government should indeed support plantation agriculture, but only as a

secondary occupation and respectable amusement. Anyone who knows the natives here will in addition admit that it is impracticable to get them to apply themselves to plantations whose proceeds must be expected in several years. It is thus, in the beginning or in the first generations, only Europeans or mulattoes that can begin such projects, but these can only be brought here by commerce and only in that way obtain the means that would be required in advance. The governor’s main concern should therefore be to improve the state of trade. The Dutch, whose governor was an intelligent man, enjoyed good relations with the Africans. The English, on the other hand, were thought by the Africans to talk “out of both sides of their mouths”, and the Danes were not much better respected. Handy diplomatic work might undercut the English commercial position and drive more trade to Richter and his factors. In time “we will make our name and our influence here among the natives so great and respected that beginning a formal colonial establishment could be thought of”. At present, the governor, especially compared with Richter, had essentially no influence even among the groups formally allied with the Danes, 392 chapter eleven

and still it is thought of to colonize in the interior with the means that are now available. To me at least this is absolutely incomprehensible. It is my conviction, however, if I already now dare have it in this regard, that our establishments here, with forceful, wise, and insightful direction, can, precisely in the current circumstances … be elevated to a colony that by trade and the agriculture produced thereby, can already, in few years and with the means that are available, become of significant and naturally steadily increasing interest for the fatherland. The Danes could count on the support of a large population of the “brav- est” allies, and Richter’s special relationship with these people—and his good understanding with the Asante, in particular—was a very favorable circumstance.54 Christensen recorded one day55 that he had taken part in the auction of various articles of the late Trentepohl’s movable property, including some things that had been brought down for him in the Alexander. “They went very high, with the exception of some scientific works, which, however, I persuaded the governor to buy for our library”. Christensen took exception to some of the procedures: the auctioneer himself was allowed to bid, for example. It reflected the whole of administrative practice here, which he characterized as not merely irregular but chaotic. He was not one for form, he said, “but it is also obvious, however … that law, without forms, becomes in its exercise completely arbitrary, and this arbitrariness is to be seen altogether too much everywhere here”. He had been warned that he wouldn’t be able to obtain a loan in Copenhagen, for example, because no one had ever heard of a properly executed probate proceeding on the coast: there was not merely the risk that the interest might be eaten up in the course of a protracted and uncertain process, but that the capital might disappear forever into the disorderly maw of an opaque colonial bureaucracy. Such a legal environment did not encourage investment. “My stomach will not rightly acclimatize itself”, Christensen admitted to his diary. He was resolved to be stoic, but permitted himself some mor- bid (if not very convincing) speculations on his own death.56 What devastates me is that everyone, without exception—everyone, as far as I can see, is stark raving mad here. Only Richter is a light point on our horizon. If I live two years longer, I will live as long as Methuselah, and if I do, I will owe it to Richter, who is a man of distinction.57

54 See Justesen, “Henrich Richter 1785–1840”. 55 Christensen’s journal, November 20, 1830. 56 Christensen’s journal, November 23, 1830. 57 Christensen’s journal, November 28, 1830. the literary impulse 393

He drew a little circle around a drop of perspiration that had fallen from his brow onto his paper, with a wistful remark about the pleasant fires on chilly days at home in Denmark. After some further complaint, he wrote: However, I continue to hold the conviction, that I never did anything more sensible then when I … decided to come here, and I dare add that in the first decades there will be so much here to get to work on that no stout fellow with his head and heart in the right place could have any other view. This was quite a odd perspective the fever-wracked young man called up before his mind’s eye as he sat at his desk in his quarters at Fort Christiansborg, lost in his silent monologue, and attempted to convince himself that his friends, who, even as he wrote, were enjoying everything he held dear in Denmark, should envy him his enormous folly in coming to this place, where he himself knew he was likely to lay his bones.58 Christensen found himself responsible for most of the paperwork of the establishments, he wrote,59 and “all the farm work”, as well, “for the simple reason that everyone except myself suffers from an emptiness in the upper story that is edifying and complete”. The Government’s records and ledgers were for him terra incognita, and he had plenty of tedious amusement with them, he wrote. “Everyone, besides, while they still have me, wants to make wills, deeds, … and God knows what all”. He was working hard, and probably harder than was good for him, he thought. “Lind must certainly have been bored by never in 2 years having heard anything from his Council than Brok’s ‘yes, sir’ or Magnussen’s ‘Oh, yes, just as the governor says’ ”. Now the governor was asking Christensen’s opinion about everything under the sun, but his ideas had to be offered with circumspec- tion and a show of reticence. My farm gives me more to do, although it only consists of 3 bullocks, that are both too young and too wild to wish to work, 5 negroes, an American plow, harrows. etc. etc. and a few score boxes of earth, with which I have filled the fort’s land battery, therein to raise Danish grain and garden plants to be planted out again, plus a half an acre of land at Frederiksberg, which is now deserted. Although the season, the harmattan, corresponded to the winter at home in Denmark, “the soil’s hour of rest”, he worked “in this great undertaking” from 5 o’clock in the morning until 9 and for another couple of hours in the evening. “Every day I employ several hours on French, English, and

58 See Nørregård, Danish settlements, pp. 170–171. 59 Christensen’s journal, December 3, 1830. 394 chapter eleven

Accra, and Ashante will soon be added to that.60 I devour all English writings about this land and all colonial authors in general, which Richter owns in great numbers”. Christensen had it in mind to send Johan Dyssel a “draft of a detailed instruction for Danish ships’ masters here on the coast” for the Handelstidende; this will assuredly be found useful to whoever might come here in the future; for I dare say, that, without such further detailed guidance, it is impossible for a stranger here to avoid being taken by the nose again and again or to enjoy the sales that could be had. Besides that, he wrote, he and Richter were working on a historical essay on the Asante’s relations, in war and peace, with the peoples of the coast and the European establishments, which they had it in mind to publish in both Danish and English. The effort involved in this work will roundly repay itself for me … because I will thereby acquire for myself a clear view of these relations, which, for the first century at least, will determine and [underlie] all enterprise here on the coast. Their sources, “besides that little, for the most part mendacious or mistaken, that has been printed on the subject”, would be Richter’s own recollections and materials left him by his father the governor.61 In December, 1830, Christensen traveled to Akuapem with Brock, Magnussen, and Lutterodt and his son, to auction off Svanekjær’s plantation “den nye Prøve,” [the New Trial], which was now being sold to settle debt.62 Governor Lind came out on foot to his own plantation “Bikuben” [the Bee Hive]. Christensen and the others stayed at Lutterodt’s plantation “the Two Brothers”, about three miles east of Svanekjær’s place. “Our conveyance was both hammocks and hanging baskets, which are carried by 2 to 4 negroes”, whom Christensen jocosely called “cavaliers”.

60 In a letter published later, Christensen said that he had found the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask’s recently published book on the Accra language, Vejledning til Akra-Sproget på Kysten Guinea, med et tillæg om Akvambusk (Copenhagen: Trykt i S.L. Møllers Bogtrykkeri, 1828), very helpful in this connection: “Breve fra og om Guinea”, 3rd letter, Christiansborg, [April 30], 1831, Valkyrien, 1831, No. 3, pp. 56–63, on p. 57. See Scandinavians in Africa, p. 127. 61 Christensen’s journal, December 14, 1830. No such essay was ever forthcoming from Christensen’s or Richter’s hands; the reader is referred instead to the works, already cited, of the Asante scholars R.A. Kea, Ivor Wilks, M.A. Kwamena-Poh, J.K. Fynn, and Larry W. Yarak. 62 Christensen’s journal, December 22, 1830. the literary impulse 395

He described the hammock, suspended from a pole the size of a small sailboat’s mast: one sat in it sideways and leaned on the pole. “Le voila”: he put a little cartoon of it into his text, with letters identifying the various elements and an arrow pointing north, in mockery of the traditions of the scientific traveler. The Europeans were obliged to walk that portion of the way that lay over Legon Hill, where Christensen took a few shots at some birds, but without success: he appears to have been much pleased with his little parody. I must admit, however, that I really did not enjoy myself on this tour or rather during this stay at the foot of the so highly advertised Aquapim Mountains. At night I was often harassed by the close-by howl of leopards and hyaenas, and he was plagued by many other smaller creatures besides. He did not retire to bed without seeing that there was a ring of ashes around his hut to keep ants out, and that there was a good fire going outside his hut door, which he propped shut with a chair, in the hope that it would fall and wake him should anything attempt to enter the hut. Over all, the necessity of such measures makes, in the beginning, a peculiar and in fact indescribable, not entirely pleasant impression on the newly arrived. However, this impression vanishes unbelievably quickly, and soon one feels secure in a conviction, though in fact scarcely justified, of one’s own superiority in the moment of danger. One strolls through ‘the valley of tigers’ and sees with indifference its spoor or its ravages. Perhaps a bit of van- ity contributes to it, but certain it is that even the possibility of at any moment finding oneself in battle with such an animal incontrovertibly for me gives the stay here a new magic …. The area itself has been proclaimed a paradise. The soil is fertile to a high degree, and the mountains are beautiful, that is certain; but … of our old Denmark’s lakes, hills, streams, and dams there are none whatever. The water is fetched with difficulty far in between the mountains from a couple of springs, which fortunately were discovered there, and instead of the bil- lowing fields of corn that grace the lovely plains of our native land, there is seen here only an impenetrable scrub with a few large trees and a few cleared fields or so-called plantations. Coffee was cultivated in “insignificant” quantities and at great expense on only five plantations. They were Den nye Prøve, formerly Schiønning’s plantation, which had been described in Monrad’s book; “Forsynet” [Providence], Meyer’s old plantation at Bibease, which had since passed into first Richelieu’s, then Trentepohl’s, and now Richter’s hands; Lind’s and Lutterodt’s farms; and Christian Balck’s plantation. (Balck embodied quite an interesting mix of blood and culture: he was a Eurafrican from the 396 chapter eleven

Danish West Indies, representing a tenuous and isolated but nonetheless highly suggestive connection between the two hemispheres. His experience of the Atlantic plantation world was not unlike that of the Wrisberg brothers.)63 Christensen was unimpressed by these plantations, with their mud huts, their all but independent slaves, and their trifling production of coffee; all of them were assuredly being run at a loss and with little hope of improvement for the first five or six years at least. On the other hand, there was said to be gold here; even the hardnosed and realistic Richter was convinced of it. However, the same applies to this as to the plantations. I see no sensible speculation therein possible or advisable, before everything is different or, in other words, before we stand here as respected, strong, owners of land, sufficient for our self-defense. He had tried to drill for water and limestone, which would be goldmines indeed, he said, but his earth auger had immediately broken. In the meantime I am experimenting with the distillation of palm wine, lemon juice, etc. etc. and am trying to discover a means of processing the country’s own products that could serve to make them articles of export. He had sown small beds on various of the plantations with wheat, rye, barley, oats, beans, clover, and garden seeds provided by the Chamber of Customs and brought out in the Alexander, but he feared he would get little return, because the seed had been collected during the harvest of 1829. “I would much appreciate a present of some bags of such with the next Danish ship”. In December there was word that an embassy from Governor Maclean had arrived at the Asante capital of Kumasi, and Christensen feared that unless the Danish Government asserted itself the English would succeed in pulling all of the trade of Asante to their forts.64 “Only in the private

63 He appears to have been the master of the government’s schooner Maria in the 1810s. In 1829, he sued for his share of the estate of the late Johan Gotlib Balck, whose estate had been settled in the West Indies in 1800. In December, 1830, shortly before Christensen made his tour of the Akuapem plantations, the government on the coast reported that it had made a loan of one hundred rigsdaler to free-trader Balck towards the maintenance of his plantation; he had already paid back part of this loan with thirty-two pounds of well- cleaned coffee: GJS 1766/1819, Reiersen, Christiansborg, March 20, 1819, regarding a bill from Skipper Christian Balck dating to 1816 for sails for the Maria; GJ 422/1829, royal resolution, November 21, 1829; GJ(S) 37/1831, the Council on the coast, December 10, 1830; GJ 426/1829. 64 Christensen’s journal, December 28, 1830; see Wilks, Asante in the nineteenth century, pp. 189–190. the literary impulse 397 man Richter have they a really dangerous opponent”. The Akyem, in whose land Christensen understood gold was indeed mined, were also being lured away. Lind, he complained, was only interested in Akuapem, “where his projected towns of criminals, free colonists, and orphans [from Denmark] are to be laid out”. Christensen once again reported himself happy, satisfied with himself, and full of energy, which he attributed to “the fortunate, mild, and cheering climate” and the general excitement of life here. He started a fresh notebook on the first of January, 1831,65 with a note that “It is presumed that all who read these lines have previously read Monrad’s description of the coast, which, although much here has changed since he was here, nevertheless has much worth”. In another ink he added, “but Isert’s is the best of all”. “Christmas has now gone, and gone well. Conditions here interest me more every day, and the climate strikes me as far more cheering than at home…. It was first here that I found myself again”, he said, but he admitted that this was doubtless in part because he was so busy.66 Christensen was dismayed that Lind had allowed two of his servants, whom he had accused of theft, to face traditional trial by ordeal. Christensen felt that the Europeans had too much to lose by “entering into such a game”; Lind had in fact lost the case and had been obliged to pay damages. He now appeared a fool in the eyes of the Africans, which Christensen regarded as the worst possible upshot. A huge drunken feast was thrown to celebrate the acquittal of the two servants, who were carried through the streets. Insolent remarks were now shouted at Lind when he passed by. Christensen was on increasingly bad terms with the missionary Hencke and had indeed threatened to throw him down the stairs to his quarters when the latter had presumed to advise him on some aspect of his comportment.67 Christensen characterized himself as a rationalist with, he said modestly, some small theological education. Hencke “is a narrow man without any culture whatsoever, and, as priest, the crassest orthodox and on top of that the most arrogant and tyrannical clerk one can imagine”. Christensen deplored the growing social and political influence of the evangelist Rønne, whom he called “that Lyngby goose-plucker”.

65 Christensen’s journal, January 1, 1831. 66 Christensen’s journal, January 6, 1831. 67 Christensen’s journal, December 28, 1830. 398 chapter eleven

People here feared the missionary because of Rønne’s influence at home, and for fear of being disparaged in mission newsletters. Christensen fully expected to see his name in print in such a context soon, and he hoped his friends in Copenhagen would defend him.68 Hencke had recently gone so far as to deny the public here that is … married after the fashion of the land, which everyone is except him, Lind, Chenon, Veith, and me, access to communion, as this relationship stamped them as heathens. He is regarded as one of the better of these starved and affected Basel missionaries, Christensen said, but “assuredly, it is a great absurdity to believe it possible to advance the mission work with pple so entirely raw and devoid of all knowledge and all understanding of the world and pple.”69 None of the missionaries had learned the local language, which Christensen regarded as an essential first step. “But to begin with frequent and long prayers, of which the listeners understand not a word and the missionary himself perhaps few enough”, would not get them far with anyone here. The relationship between Africans and Europeans here was of very long standing, Christensen pointed out: Above all one does not forget that at least the coastal negroes taken altogether are not simple raw and wild pple., but also … a to an unusually high degree corrupt folk and, besides that, schooled for centuries, commonly superior to the Europeans in shrewdness and sagacity, and who with reason, to be sure, find occasion to have the strongest prejudice against the Europeans, their god, and everything else they wish to introduce among them. Late in January, 1831, Christensen recorded that they were all making preparations to celebrate King Frederik’s birthday.70 Madame Veith’s new girls’ school and a school for the male children of the inventory slaves were to be opened to mark the occasion, and Lind had already shown Christensen his speech. The governor’s little speech, “as we on this day open two new springs to prepare the Africans for better fortunes”, was published in Copenhagen in the first number of Valkyrien, Christensen’s friend Ove Thomsen’s new magazine, which billed itself as “A monthly for cultured readers”.

68 Christensen’s journal, January 18, 1831. 69 Christensen’s journal, January 6, 1831. 70 Christensen’s journal, January 20, 1831. the literary impulse 399

This part of Africa has, for as long as we have known of its existence, been the home and seat of ignorance and all its inseparable foster children. Until this is cleared away, no one would be right to expect anything good of the country or the numerous clans that inhabit it. Time and again, without doubt, things have been done to effect a change in the country’s and the people’s condition, but probably the first failed attempts, the inevitable difficulties that accompany all improvements, have deterred from an undertaking that was begun without consideration of local circumstances, advanced with tepidity or, perhaps, with a planless enthusiasm, which was more damaging to the cause even than tepidity. We will begin a slow but steady and unstoppable progress. Let it take however long, the seed would sooner or later sprout, to the honor of the king of Denmark. Teach the African children Danish, expose them to Christian teaching, said Lind, and “the time will also come” when they “will be able to distinguish between right and wrong, and unite obligation with right”.71 According to Christensen’s journal, however, the instruction at the school for the fort slaves’ children would not extend to such arcane subjects as reading, writing, or arithmetic. Late in January,72 Christensen wrote in his journal that a ship carrying Governor Hein, “form. member of the wretched and here despised Comm. of Invest.”, had arrived at Christiansborg, where Interim Governor Lind, presuming himself safe in his office, was still awaiting permission to travel home. It was an uncomfortable situation, and it was reported in a letter from the Government on the coast that “considering conditions on the coast the Government has thought it useful to the r[oyal] service that interim governor Lind continue in his function for some time yet”.73 In February, Christensen recorded in his journal that he, Lind, Hein, and a newly arrived officer, Helmuth Ahrenstorff, had recently spent five days up at the plantations.74 He now for the first time traveled up into the Akuapem hills: “and now I, too, know what an impression the sight of and acquaintance with the mountains makes on us dwellers of the plain”. His health remained good, although he could feel that his strength had faded since he had arrived on the coast. He hoped to be subjected to the

71 “Correspondents-Efterretninger. A. Fra Christiansborg, paa Kysten af Guinea, den 30te Januar 1831”, Valkyrien, 1831, No. 1, pp. 172–177. Dagen (of which Thomsen was also the editor), No. 116, 1831, ran an account, doubtless supplied by Balthazar Christensen, of the ceremonies at Fort Christiansborg; “Thomsen, Ove Thomas”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 2nd. ed. 72 Christensen’s journal, January 31, 1831. 73 GJ 78/1831, Government on the coast, January 30, 1831. 74 Christensen’s journal, February 15, 1831. 400 chapter eleven

“climate fever” soon; in anticipation of this inevitable ordeal, he had completely avoided “The Paphian goddess”, not wishing to undermine his health in any way. He planned to travel to Kumasi sometime in the near future with one of Richter’s agents. He made a note that he had at last begun to trade on his own account, disposing of Danish spirits he had drawn as wages at a profit of sixty percent.75 Hein formally took up his post in February, 1831.76 The residents of Osu quickly demanded of him regular payments that Lind had cut off on account of their failure to clear the road to the Akuapem plantations annually as they had contracted to do.77 To more forcefully register their displeasure, the Osu went up to the plantations and drove most of the Danes’ slaves down to the coast. The Danish Government rattled its arms, and the affair was quietly settled, but Christensen felt that a great opportunity had been missed to administer the correction he thought the Osu deserved. A few days later, the fort troops deserted in a body, with their weapons, because of harsh treatment by their commander, Meiner. This was a promising beginning to Hein’s regime, Christensen remarked: it was clear that Hein was not equal to his task in these strange surroundings.78 Hein had become quite intoxicated at a social gathering, Christensen recorded, and had threatened a number of the guests not only with the power inherent in his rank but with his connections in Copenhagen. According to Christensen, Richter had been so appalled by this display that he had notified his friend Peter Thonning of it in a private letter.79 Before leaving Denmark, Hein had drawn 750 rigsdaler for building materials against the royal grant for the construction of a new seat for the Government in Akuapem.80 Now, in April, 1831, he reported that he had been unable to make any use of these materials because of the impossibility, for the lack of draft animals, of transporting them to Akuapem.81 He therefore intended to sell the material and apply the proceeds to the “Building Fund”. In the meantime, he had bought Lind’s

75 Christensen’s journal, March 15, 1831. 76 Christensen’s journal, February 20–28, 1831. 77 See an annotation in the Guinea Instruction of 1820 regarding a communication from the Chamber of Customs of September 30, 1830. 78 Christensen’s journal, March 15, 1831. 79 Christensen’s journal, February 20–28, 1831. 80 GJ 676/1830, Hein, Copenhagen, October 15, 1830; GJ 685/1830, Hein, Copenhagen, October 22, 1830. 81 GJ 118/1831, Hein, on the coast, April 17, 1831. the literary impulse 401 plantation towards the ends outlined in the royal rescript of October 2, 1830.82 In May, 1831, an article by Balthazar Christensen promoting Danish trade to the coast, “A few remarks regarding voyages from Danish ports to the coast of Guinea”, appeared in the Handelstidende.83 It was every citizen’s and in particular every official’s duty, he opened the article, “to pay and call attention to every possibility that might show itself in his sphere for new or expanded sources of business for his fellow citizens”. Christensen could not speak from the depths of his own experience, for he had little, but he was voracious in his appetite for information, and the article can be thought to incorporate considerable expertise in the African trade, drawn from dependable and knowledgeable sources, and in particular from his conversations with Henrich Richter. The trade to the Guinea Coast deserved “our merchants’ attention, and it can be thought to be, in its detail, too little known to them and our ships’ masters”. London and Liverpool ships were the only European vessels that frequented the coast, and their only competitors were North Americans and a few South American and Spanish slavers. The Dutch, the French, and the Danes “appear to have lost the closer local knowledge” so necessary in this trade. However, Christensen was certain that “already now at least a couple of Danish vessels” could advantageously be kept in regular service to the coast, and that this could be the foundation of a more extensive trade. Nordic commodities such as iron and tar, which were in steady demand, and other northern European articles could be brought to the coast at competitive prices. It was essential that cargoes should be well assorted, even if that meant shipping goods that could not be sold at profit, such as English gunpowder and American rum and tobacco (which last was all but indispensable).84 The market could be divided into two classes of buyers, namely the merchants established on the coast and the Africans themselves, and cargoes should be assorted accordingly. For the latter market, part of the cargo should consist of good West Indian rum, Danish flintlocks, Swedish iron “of the usual dimension and stamp”, steel, knives, brass kettles and

82 GJ 117/1831, the Council on the coast, April 9, 1831; GJ 119/1831, Hein, May 7, 1831. 83 Balthazar M. Christensen, Christiansborg, January, 1831, “Et Par Bemærkninger om Expeditioner fra danske Havne til Kysten Guinea”, Handels-og Industrie-Tidende, No. 60, May 26, 1831, pp. 238–240, and No. 61, May 28, 1831, pp. 243–244. 84 See Brooks, Yankee traders, pp. 222–259. 402 chapter eleven beakers, lead bars, and small and medium-sized glass beads of all colors. The cargo should include at least small portions of leaf tobacco, gunpowder, files, horn combs, mirrors, cloves, sabers, parasols, tallow, iron and steel rings and chains, clay pipes, as well as a carefully-chosen selection of textiles, of which he named almost a dozen kinds. It would be a good idea to carry some American rum and cowries, if the prices were right, and an experienced captain should also do well with a small sample of just such gaudy chintzes and silk cloths that at home are sought by farm wives for bonnets and other adornments, and which here would find a number of admirers among the richer negresses and mulatto women. The assortment of wares for the coast’s white or Eurafrican merchants, on the other hand, should consist of small quantities of tar; planks; “elegant furniture and kitchen utensils of both modern and old-fashioned but splendid style”; fine weapons of all kinds; tableware; glasses; lamps; shaving gear; fine foods; Parisian tea services; excellent liqueurs, wine, and spirits; raisins, prunes, almonds, and the like; snuff and cigars; elegant hats, shoes, summer clothes, stockings, and linens; beer; and housewares, the quality of all of which must be excellent and the selection limited. It can be imagined that Christensen was here describing the tastes that obtained in Henrik Richter’s household. Such a cargo could be disposed of profitably by a person “who at no moment forgets that here he must and should prevail on himself never to disdain even the more insignificant opportunities to dispose of wares”. Christensen recommended putting “a couple of excellent sailing and in all respects well equipped brigs or schooners of 40 to 60 [commercial] lasts” on the route, which could (as is often the case with English ships) follow one another without interruption, so the shipper could without interruption be informed of what changes possibly might occur unexpectedly in local conditions and influence commercial undertakings. The ships would have to be armed and specially outfitted for this trade, and the captains would have to be very well informed of the nature and costs of their cargoes before they sailed. It would be useful to keep a book listing the purchase price of every article, adjusted for various predictable costs. The captain would have to be well prepared, because he would have no time to make such calculations as he went. “Looking ahead to the healthiest and least stormy season, such a voyage would doubtless best depart from home in October, so as to make its stay the literary impulse 403 here in the harmattan season”. Apart from that, however, “it might perhaps in general, because of the smaller competition of ships at that time, be more profitable if one arrived here at the beginning of the rainy season, in May or June”. This was a good deal of local geographical color Christensen was injecting for his cultured metropolitan audience, doubtless to good effect. If circumstances permitted, Christensen went on, it would be best to stop at Madeira, Tenerife, and the Cape Verdes, “where there most often is an opportunity to make favorable trades in provisions etc. for cash or wines, which last are in much demand on the coast, where they are consumed in significant quantity”. The first place to stop along the coast was Cape Mount, “where one will find a very rich negro town and several natives who can speak English”. In consideration both of pirates and of the negroes themselves, it will be necessary, at least from this place on, especially for smaller ships, to have the armament of cannons and rifles in good condition, and the watches must be strictly and scrupulously kept day and night. Only a few Africans should be allowed on board at a time, also in consideration of their thievishness”. On the other hand, it would not do to display too much “mistrust”, or the customers would not come aboard at all. Ships were never attacked if it was seen that proper attention was being paid. The slave trade was still carried on from Cape Mount, as well as from the whole lower Coast east of the Volta, and there would

in general be found an unusual number for the coast of doubloons and piastres, and as the negro towns also seldom will lack supplies of teeth and gold dust, a stay of several days there will surely be appropriate, and so much the more so, since nothing for the negroes is of less value than time, and they can therefore neither understand nor bring themselves to quick exchanges. Just as the skipper thus must put up with their examining and rejecting everything, just about the same as our ladies at home in the fashion bou- tiques, and that they almost never omit to point out at great length the shortcomings of the wares or their prices, he must on the other hand be carefully prepared to be able to tell them, quickly and certainly, how many fathoms of cloth, numbers of knives, etc., he can at once give them for the sum they have brought with them in tusks and gold. Gold, ivory, and palm oil, which was sought more and more by the English, were “the only means of payment on the coast”. Captains had to know how to judge these commodities, so as not to be taken in by tricks “which almost all negroes try to employ on such occasions”. One had to buy the large tusks first, to establish a ceiling from which to bargain downward: 404 chapter eleven otherwise, what one paid for the smaller tusks would drive the price of the larger ones to exorbitant levels. The buyers must always be given a small gift of spirits or some such, after they have settled on terms, and in proportion to the significance of the transaction; but before that, they should only be poured a single schnapps, and even that only after they have declared for how many ounces of gold or pounds of ivory they will buy, and in which wares they wish to be paid. The captain should announce his departure from a place a day in advance, as this would stimulate trade; he could then always delay his departure a little. From Cape Mount the ship could sail down to Cape Mesurado and anchor in the roads at Monrovia. Here it would be best to deal with the missionary Warring and Francis Taylor, although their commissions were high. Here the trade would mainly be in the luxury articles in the cargo, and the mark-up should be at least one hundred percent because of the cost of doing business here. Warring and Taylor could be trusted with credit, and goods could be left with them on commission, and indeed the only place where this could be done along the coast was at “this, to be sure still less significant but to an astonishing degree blooming trading station”. As it sailed on down to Cape Three Points, the ship should anchor at the most “significant negro towns” every fifteen or twenty miles; the most important of these towns, according to Christensen’s article, were “Buttoa, Settra Krou, Grand Sesters, Cap Palmai, St. Andreas Bay, Cap Lahois, Grand Bassam, and Assiné”.85 Much of the Asante trade that formerly had gone to Danish and English Accra was now said to be moving through Assiné. It was to be hoped that the connection with Asante and the interior would soon be re-established, “and it is certain enough, that the trade, in such case, would increase here so significantly that, in the first couple of months at least, just about any voyage here, even if carelessly equipped, would pay extraordinarily well”. However, Christensen wrote, his recommendations were not based on such an eventuality; indeed, he did not believe that a lasting peace was likely. It was essential to drop anchor, even if wind conditions indicated that the ship should carry sail. “For the negroes, … frightened by painful experience, do not lightly venture on board with their tusks, etc.”

85 See Brooks, Yankee traders, pp. 315–317. the literary impulse 405

Past Axim and Dixcove, the ship would finally arrive at Elmina, the main Dutch establishment.

From this place until our Christiansborg the trade now takes on quite another, and for the skipper incontestably more comfortable, form, for on this stretch one usually will be able to conduct little or no trade directly with the negroes, but must content oneself partly with the various governments’ local officers (who all, with the exception of the English governor-in-chief at Cape Coast, are entitled to and, perhaps excepting some subordinate and newly arrived officers, in fact occupy themselves more or less with trade) and partly with the merchants established along the coast, of whom some are very wealthy, and just about all very reliable in their commercial affairs. Except at Elmina, where there were anchor fees, and where other costs were very high, the captain’s main expense along this stretch would be for small gratuities and gifts, such as “salmon, Brunswick sausage, hams, etc.” for the Europeans, and rum and such for the Africans. The best commercial opportunities for a Danish ship would be at Christiansborg, if sufficient notice of the voyage was given. The advantage here was attributable to Henrich Richter, whom Christensen introduced to his readers in Denmark as the former governor’s son, “a man who in education, energy, and means stands incontestably above most of the coast’s other Danish and non-Danish traders.” If a captain was unable to dispose of the last of his cargo here at Christiansborg, he should, depending on the information available there, trade on down to Cape Formoso and then, if necessary, call at Principe, “where it will scarcely fail him to barter his cargo for coffee”. Failing even that, however, he should sail back around with the winds and currents to Christiansborg and sell the balance of the cargo at reduced prices or leave it there on commission. Such a voyage out would take three months, “and now there remains only to decide how the ship should thereafter make its return”. Christensen stressed that the shipping firm absolutely had to see to it that the captain was fully authorized to act on fresh information as he went along. He should also be allowed to sell the vessel itself if opportunity offered. In general, however, the ship should sail home by way of Brazil and the West Indies to obtain a return cargo, as English skippers to the coast often did. Christensen closed with the hope that his remarks would be endorsed by Captain Rabe of the Alexander, a man whom he wished other Danish traders would emulate. Two unsigned articles on the subject of the Guinea trade appeared in the Handelstidende in the course of the year. It seems likely that these were by Captain Rabe, taking up Christensen’s invitation to comment. 406 chapter eleven

According to this author,86 the first port of call on a voyage to Guinea should indeed be Madeira, mainly to rest the crew, but also to trade salt fish, beef, pork, gin, and shoes for wine. The author cautioned at great length of the cost of doctors’ visits on board ship, the risk of contagion, the consequences of bad morale among the crew, the difficulty of working the ship short-handed, and the expense of burials. The crew had to be properly fed and given a portion of wine every day. It was therefore essential to stop at Madeira, even if trading there was not profitable. On the other hand, he did not think it worth while to delay the voyage by calling at the Canaries or the Cape Verdes, where the people were very poor. The next stop, he said, in the opinion of many African and English merchants, should be Gorée, at Cape Verde. The French carried on an enormous trade to the interior and required fresh inventory at all times. It had often happened that a ship arriving there in the rainy season or just after, when there were no goods to be had in the colony, was able to dispose of its cargo in only three weeks. To be sure, a captain occasionally found no market here at all. Nothing was lost in that event, because the place was not out of the way. Beyond that point, Balthazar Christensen’s advice was sound. (Danish gunpowder, this writer also pointed out, was now being produced at a better price than English powder.) When trading with the Africans, It is of importance to appear to show them all possible trust and affection. One should now and then go ashore in the places one anchors and be the king’s guest for 4 or 6 hours, without allowing the slightest fear to be noticed. The Captain should by all means take with him a few pistols and a stout member of the crew, similarly armed. “Such a landing is very beneficial to the trade. He who shows me confidence, I can fasten my own trust in, says the negro; and without fright he will go aboard the next day to barter his ivory or gold”. This correspondent is aware that many have in vain striven to induce bold merchants to send out a ship in a commerce that has for such a long time been miscredited here. It is altogether very well, they say, with your glittering pictures of the African trade, but if the prospects are so grand, how comes it that all voyages since the war have failed. Until this remark can satisfactorily be answered, it cannot be expected that those concerned will place any trust in any treatise, however good, that promises the earth and the sky. But who can, or rather who will dare answer it?

86 “Bemærkninger om Expeditioner fra dansk Havne til Kysten Guinea”, Handels-og Industrie-Tidende, No. 81, July 9, 1831, pp. 323–324. the literary impulse 407

The most recent trading voyage had been made by a schooner, the Afrikanske Paquet. “That it failed is understandable, as the ship was wrecked twice on the voyage out, which lasted 9 months, and was condemned in the end at Prince’s Island”. The voyage of the Mercurius had also been a financial failure, but for reasons that remained mysterious to everyone. It had perhaps sold its cargo too cheaply at Christiansborg, the writer suggested. There were three essential rules: 1) “The cargo must be well assorted; nothing must be lacking; one must not have too much abundance of single articles, and everything must be or have the appearance of being new”. 2) The ship must not be too large, for otherwise it glutted its own market, dragged out the duration of the voyage, and increased the risk of sickness. 3) Quick turnover was the key: when there was an opportunity to sell, one must do so. It was important not to yield to the temptation, when trade was going well, to buy new wares from other, later-arriving ships. The writer was convinced that if these rules had been adhered to, the most recent voyages would have been profitable. In the continuation of this article in the Handelstidende,87 it was reported that the public papers inform us that peace as been concluded between Ashantee and the Europeans; a consequence thereof will be that the trade to the Guinea Coast will be revived anew … which deserves to attract the Danish merchants’ attention.88 The author provided a list of goods, worth a total of about 6,000 rigsdaler, corresponding largely to Christensen’s; this would not fill a ship, however, and the author recommended filling out the cargo with spirits. However, the ship should not be otherwise loaded than that every article of wares can be got at with ease and convenience; for it must be remembered that the ship in this commerce is to be regarded as a retail boutique, where one must sell in small parcels from the entire cargo’s contents, as the buyers request it.

87 Handels-og Industrie-Tidende, No. 96, August 11, 1831, p. 382. 88 The author refers to the treaty with the English signed at Cape Coast Castle on April 27, 1831; the corresponding treaty with the Danes was signed on August 7, 1831: Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 200. 408 chapter eleven

The ship must be properly provisioned, so that nothing except fresh food would have to be purchased on the entire trip. The captain’s pay should be low, but, on the other hand, his interest in the success of the voyage should be stimulated by the prospect of a percentage of the proceeds. The return cargo should be brought not to Copenhagen but to London, where the best prices for gold and ivory were to be obtained. Valkyrien also published a series of Christensen’s letters from Christiansborg, with an introductory note:89 any contribution from such an unknown land would be of interest, the editor (Christensen’s friend Ove Thomsen) declared, but especially to Danish readers, since the territory in question was a Danish possession. The editor had therefore not hesitated to publish these few fragments of a correspondence that, to be sure, was not so intended by its author—a Danish official on the coast—in the conviction that he will not unwillingly see them thus, with suitable regard for persons and circumstances, published. Not calculated for the public, they bear the stamp of simple, artless representation. (Nothing could be farther from the truth, but no matter.) The first letter was addressed to M**, doubtless Christensen’s friend Ludvig Moltke. At Accra, Christensen related, the European forts stood very close together, and the old Overconstabel at Christiansborg, given the chance, would point out to a newcomer the old 24-pounders, no longer serviceable, one of which had once fired a cannonball right over Fort Crevecoeur onto the African town under the walls of Fort St. James, at English Accra. Fort Christiansborg was “on the whole not just in fine, but also in incomparably better and more respectable condition than one could hope, considering the small means available for it”. Christensen credited Governor Lind with “having in his three-year administration worked endlessly to found here a somewhat orderly and secured basis for possible colonization in the future on a large scale”. Furthermore, Lind had done it without public expense beyond the establishment’s normal budget. However, you can easily grasp, that there must all the same be much still to be wished for, and that there on the whole will be an open field to romp in for his successors for perhaps several generations, in so far, that is, that they follow the path that he, in the spirit of Governor Steffens, altogether too

89 [Balthazar Christensen], “Breve fra og om Guinea”, Valkyrien, 1831, No. 2, pp. 262–69; the first letter is dated Christiansborg, Danish Accra, March 27, 1831. the literary impulse 409

soon taken from us and here still warmly regarded, has broken. You are aware that we have for the time closed down all of our forts, with the exception of Christiansborg. Kongensteen by the great and fair Rio Volta is thus said to now be completely a ruin”, and Fredensborg and the well-built Prindsenssteen were also said to be quite dilapidated. Watchmen kept the flags flying at the other forts to maintain the territorial claim, while the Danes “concentrate our everything in the Akkra country at Christiansborg”.90 Christensen devoted considerable space to a description of the fort, its armaments, and its rooms and accommodations, “the old fort that for the time houses your old friend, and that truly, like everything here, deserves much more interest than the common judgment, at least hitherto, has been willing to bestow upon it”.91 In the next letter,92 he described the fort’s surroundings. Accra was so healthy that people from Cape Coast and other places on the Upper Coast came there to reconstitute their health, [although] this could seem in contradiction to the numerous deaths that at home have allowed these our possessions to be regarded almost as an open grave…. [W]ith regard to the mortality among us, it is to be hoped that this also will be reduced as we become more and more able to live less uninterruptedly in the unhealthy, comfortless, and unsuitable residences in the fort, where assuredly more than one newly arrived person loses his health or his life, while he probably without much difficulty could have tolerated the climate, if he at the first had been able to acclimatize himself higher up in the country on the plantations by the romantic Aquapim mountains, where the air and all is undeniably both healthier and more comfortable.93 Christensen reminded his correspondent that Monrad had discussed these plantations in his book, and in particular Meyer’s plantation at Bibease (which now belonged to “H.R.” [Henrik Richter]) and Governor Schiønning’s at Dacubie. When Governor Steffens had arrived on the coast, there was scarcely a trace of them left. He began immediately, however, with the wisdom and energy that to such a high degree marked his work here, to reawaken the desire to plant, and while he himself bought the Schønning plantation, already overgrown with thick underbrush, he also got a number

90 [Christensen,] “Breve fra og om Guinea”, first letter, pp. 263–265. 91 [Christensen,] “Breve fra og om Guinea”, first letter, pp. 267–269. 92 [Balthazar Christensen,] “Breve fra og om Guinea”, second letter, Christiansborg, April 1, 1831,Valkyrien, 1831, No. 2, pp. 269–78. 93 [Christensen,] “Breve fra og om Guinea”, second letter, pp. 269–270. 410 chapter eleven

of the residents here to similarly once again take in and work other extents of land. His all too early death halted the matter again, however, and not until later years, and then especially by the encouragement and example of our now returned Governor Lind and the deceased Dr. Trentepohl, has it again come so far that planting, if I may so say, has veritably come into fashion. Christensen trotted out the old idea that, just as the Danes had been the first to ban the slave trade, they remained the only Europeans who had taken an interest in introducing “culture” in this “by nature so richly endowed country”. The plantations lay on the near side of the Akuapem hills, where the soil was good and rainfall quite adequate. “On the whole this landscape lacks only our old Denmark’s friendly streams, brooks, and lakes, to be perfectly paradisiacal, and it is acknowledged among us—you remem ber Molbech’s prophetic words at the end of his foreword to Monrad’s description—that it in all respects in natural [luxuriance] measures up to the best of the colonies that for the moment produce our colonial necessaries”.94 At present there were only seven plantations, owned by Europeans and Eurafricans, on which, besides many local crops, they had begun to cultivate coffee, among “the country’s own magnificent palm trees, whose rich juice resembles and tastes like the finest Champagne”. There were now altogether twenty thousand healthy young coffee trees, that already produce perfectly sufficiently for our own not entirely insignificant consumption, and by the annually increased transplantings will soon be able to yield significantly for export. It is undoubtedly very desirable, however, to introduce also the cultivation of sugar, rice, and cotton, which in part already grow wild here in the vicinity, and above all of indigo, two kinds of which are similarly to be found growing wild, and cacao, for which the localities here should be especially favorable and which Governor Lind therefore and from various places has tried to obtain. For lack of capital to get started with, it dare unfortunately be said, however, that the prospects for these plantations’ expansion to any actual significance are assuredly long, and it is undeniable that the planter, as long as our establishments are not themselves put on a more respectable and imposing footing, inwardly and outwardly, has only exceedingly little encouragement to sacrifice his time, his work, and his capital on enterprises that until then are in many respects associated with extremely many and altogether too discouraging difficulties.95

94 [Christensen,] “Breve fra og om Guinea”, second letter, pp. 270–271. 95 [Christensen,] “Breve fra og om Guinea”, second letter, pp. 272–273. the literary impulse 411

These plantations were simple affairs, and the life of the plantation slave was not so bad, Christensen said, “for his level of education”.96 The slave’s main fear was of being sold abroad, and as long as he was spared that, “he finds nothing hard in being a slave”. They served their masters with “much attachment, if not faithfulness”. When Richter, fighting the Asante at Dodowa, had been wounded by a bullet in the thigh, he had given command of his slave soldiers to his Bomba, and it was his slaves, fighting hard, who had rescued him from the battlefield.97 Sounding rather like the fox who had lost his tail in a trap and boasted to his brothers of his trim new condition, Christensen, in the third of the letters published in Valkyrien,98 insisted that “no young man with head and heart in the right place could find himself here without feeling himself mightily interested in the wonderfully motley and yet in so many regards magical world in which we here must tumble”.99 “I have more than once since my arrival here wondered at the unwillingness with which we in Denmark think of an appointment here. It is especially true of our theologians and doctors”. Referring to “the strange pictures one daily hears expressed at home about the coast”, he wished to assure his correspondent that he and his friends the Veiths “far from shared the common opinion of the seaminess or discomfort of life here in this place”.100 Word had it, he wrote, that there would soon be special legislation regarding probate procedures on the coast. This and various other important civil matters indeed demanded to be ordered by law. It seems to me inarguable that we, because we live removed from the motherland, should not therefore lack the benefits that flow from a community governed by law, and it seems to me also inarguable that the flourishing of any greater or smaller society essentially depends on such order.101 Here Christensen’s legal training was expressing itself, but it is to his credit that he appreciated its application in a colonial outpost: it was not just cap ital and settlers and enterprise that were required here, but law and the dispositions and social expectations that arise from such a foundation.

96 [Christensen,] “Breve fra og om Guinea”, second letter, pp. 274–275. 97 [Christensen,] “Breve fra og om Guinea”, second letter, p. 276. 98 [Balthazar Christensen,] “Breve fra og om Guinea”, third letter, Christiansborg, [April 30], 1831, Valkyrien, 1831, No. 3, pp. 56–63. 99 [Christensen,] “Breve fra og om Guinea”, third letter, p. 56. 100 [Christensen,] “Breve fra og om Guinea”, third letter, pp. 58–59. 101 [Christensen,] “Breve fra og om Guinea”, third letter, pp. 59–60. 412 chapter eleven

Christensen recorded in his journal in May, 1831, that the whole of Osu had sent Gerhard Lind off with volley after volley of rifle shots.102 Governor Hein, who had succeeded in alienating himself from everyone of consequence in the establishments, believed that Lind must have paid for this manifestation in order to undercut his, Hein’s, own authority and subjected the town elders to what Christensen called an inquisition on the matter. Christensen had completely withdrawn himself from all but official association with Hein and Ahrenstorff. He got along well enough with Brock and Magnussen, with an officer named Pløtz “(who in numerous ways seems to me to resemble Cooper’s Hawkeye or Long Rifle)”, with Richter’s agent Ridley, and with his friends on the Upper Coast, “with whom I correspond diligently”. He and Veith had still not been seriously ill. He expressed some skepticism of the new peace between the English and the Asante; he reckoned that a few kegs of powder and some brandy would be all that would be required to persuade the Akyem to close the newly-opened paths from Cape Coast to Kumasi.103 (The Asante had previously been obtaining their European goods through Assiné on the Upper Coast, he said, but that route was long and expensive.) He understood that Richter was receiving information from an Anglo-African named Carrs [or Carr],104 whom the English had sent to Kumasi. If Lind had still been governor, Christensen would have proposed traveling to the Asante capital, where he was confident that a great deal could be done to counterbalance the British dominance of the trade, which, after all, he maintained, was of little substance. The main rainy season had begun with a tremendous storm (a hurricane, he called it), “that spent itself in violent streams of rain almost uninterruptedly” for days. “The air is overcast and the clouds drive by approximately as at home in unsettled, sleety April or October days”.105 They were all cold, and no one had waterproof shoes.

102 Christensen’s journal, May 15, 1831. 103 Christensen’s journal, May 22, 1831. On the treaty signed on April 27, 1831, and the subsequent Asante treaty signed with the Danes, see Justesen, “Negotiations for peace”, esp. pp. 36–51; Wilks, Asante in the nineteenth century, pp. 189–90; Kwamena-Poh, pp. 103– 104; and Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 537–556. 104 Doubtless J. Carr: see Wilks, Asante in the nineteenth century, pp. 188–189. In spite of the extraordinary work done by Africanist historians to reconstruct political developments, Christensen’s passing reference to back-channel flows of information up and down the Coast is a reminder of the fragmentary nature and difficulty of the historical record. 105 Christensen’s journal, May 24, 1831. the literary impulse 413

However, I and we all find ourselves still well, and more and more I am convinced that the plurality will be able to stand the climate, if they just live properly and dress suitably. The first, incidentally, is since Hein’s arrival less the case than before. He had dosed himself with English salts, a laxative often resorted to here, and felt reborn. Christensen wished for a couple of courageous and sensible council members to check the governor’s power. It would make a great difference simply to record official proceedings properly in the protocol-book “(which is sent home to the Collegium, but in the last 10 years so to speak contains everything else but what the Collegium ought to find therein)”. Of all that have been here in the past, as governor, Steffens is the idol of my heart, if indeed I recognize that he, with all his intellectual competence, energy, and iron will, nevertheless [would] scarcely have been a great gover- nor, even if he had lived. He was namely undeniably a fantast, and finally— he regarded the whole world here, except Richter, as bandits and the scum of [humanity], and himself—as the most frightful thorn in the flesh to them all. I have gone through the papers he left, in so far as they are to be found here in the archive, but to actually search for those I thought might still exist I judged impolitic. Brock had told him that Steffens had left a diary and had one evening recalled, with tears in his eyes, after several glasses of Madeira and champagne, reading in it after the lamented governor’s untimely death; it had since disappeared from among Steffens’s papers. Christensen had bought a number of iron bars, which he expected to be able to sell for 150% above what he had paid, ten old hunting rifles, and some sabers at an auction of goods sent down by Wrisberg, who had apparently bought them very cheap at a sale of surplus weapons at the Copenhagen Armory.106 “Truly, an enterprising man with some capital can make a fortune here as well as anywhere”. Given a line of credit, he thought he might amount to something in a few years, if he lived. (As always seemed the case with Christensen’s enthusiasms, his interest in this mercantile venture was well mixed with ironic condescension.) Governor Maclean had approached him, he wrote, to ask “if I after the Ashantée peace would make a journey at English expense through Ashantée to Tombuktu … but naturally this is impossible as long as I work under a governor like Hein”. Christensen believed that with Richter’s advice and connections and his own good sense, tact, and eagerness to

106 Christensen’s journal, May 29, 1831. 414 chapter eleven learn, he might have the advantage “of all those who have yet traveled in the interesting interior country”. The trouble with British travelers was their “almost intolerable arrogance” everywhere they went. Mr. Hutchison, an independent trader at Anomabu Fort, who had traveled with Bowdich to Kumasi, thus told me with a certain bravura how he one day came walking in Coomassie just as the king’s wives were out for a stroll. Eunuchs chased all aside, as no man may see their countenance, and would have chased him too, but he briskly pulled his saber and swore to fell the first that came near him, with the remark ‘that he did not step aside for the queen of England herself, although she was better than all the Ashantee queens put together’. I, on the contrary, would surely have stepped aside, but slowly and fearlessly, and remarked that my king had laid it upon all Danes, if they knew the customs in foreign countries, to show the same respect for them that he himself at home asked of his own, and it gladdened me that the experienced Richter completely agreed with me in that”.107 (Here Christensen tossed in an allusion to the Earl of Chesterfield’s famous trove of worldly advice to his bastard son.) The British had it in mind to “impose a sort of superhuman awe”, but he doubted that the proud Asante would be impressed by such puffery. Early in July, Christensen wrote that the rainy season now seemed to be over; it was again very hot.108 It still felt cold in the shade, and experienced people predicted an unhealthy Cinquesous season in August and September. He himself had been suffering from headaches but was now feeling better. To be on the safe side, he dosed himself with a dram of gin with bitters first thing in the morning, before arising from his bed, and often took a bit more gin in the course of the day, in preference to tea, which he found weakened the stomach. He wore wool socks and usually boots. An English doctor who had lived for years in Sierra Leone had attributed his survival to keeping his feet warm at all times, he wrote. He remained convinced that a great deal could be accomplished on the coast in a decade by an effective government.109 “At home they once expressed it to me that nothing could be done here, ‘since the English, who spared no capital, had been able to accomplish nothing’ ”. He had raised this idea in a conversation with Richter and Maclean, who had reas- sured him that his own opinion was correct, and that succeeding British

107 For William Hutchison in Kumasi, see Wilks, Asante in the nineteenth century, pp. 167, 695. 108 Christensen’s journal, July 2, 1831. 109 Christensen’s journal, July 14, 1831. the literary impulse 415 administrations had been corrupt, ignorant, and inconsistent in their policies. The disastrous British venture at Fernando Po had been undertaken because Commodore Collier had got it into his head that the island could become a veritable Peru for the British. To be sure, it would be a good naval station, Christensen wrote, and, with work, could become a plantation colony,

while here, on the other hand, an enormous interior, which with sensible politics could to an endless degree be brought into communication with the coast here, offers, besides the same advantages, in a higher, more easily carried out, and less expensive way, also this: that precisely with the profits of the trade civilization and culture could be effected without particular subsidy from the mother country, not to mention that I am certain that if the country’s natural products were only known, even they in themselves would be so rich and numerous that there would be no need to create new ones through the introduction of the cultivation of the colonial products, which in my eyes always are and will remain of secondary importance here. Why must Thonning be the only natural scientist who has (and assuredly only superficially) investigated these establishments! Aquapim alone, 12 miles from here and approximately 80 miles long and 50 or 60 miles wide would perhaps be in both mineral and botanical respects a goldmine, and nevertheless it is—with all respect for Thonning—so to speak a Terra Incognita. Nevertheless, he said, one could travel there as safely “as on the heaths of Jutland”. The colonial future of the establishments would depend above all on an honest, effective, and committed civil service; at present however, no one there but himself and Veith—and certainly not Governor Hein— aspired to anything more than to serve out his term and retire on a small pension. Christensen remained in contact with Mr. Russwurm, the government secretary at Monrovia, who, he recorded in his dairy, had sent him a few numbers of the “Liberia Herald”. It is interesting to see how this North American colony progresses, and it is obvious that it will soon mark a new era in the history of the colonization of the West Coast, and contributes much more than everything that has been done hitherto to cultivate this portion of the world. One sees here yet again, as in the past in North America, what genuine civic freedom can achieve in a community that wishes to become a state. In July, 1831,110 Christensen recorded that an Asante delegation had arrived at Fort Christiansborg, together with dignitaries from Akyem, Akuapem,

110 Christensen’s journal, July 19, 1831; see Justesen, “Negotiations for peace”, p. 41. 416 chapter eleven

Akwamu, the river towns, and Accra, “and marched in an extremely burlesque parade several times around the fort”, waving flags, beating drums, and firing guns. He admitted that he had become a bit blasé about such spectacles: he was sure he would have found this one quite a bit more arresting on Kongens Nytorv [the King’s New Square] in Copenhagen. He was amazed, however, at the sight of the Akyem queen “riding” on a slave’s back. He described the soldiers’ garb, the “great gaudy parasols of silk or damask; gold- and silver-hafted dress swords”; the drums, the fifes, “and some curved horns, sounding altogether like our good cattle herders’ in old Randers. For a Bournonville or some other ballet-maker”, the sight would have been of “endless value”, and it might have stirred his own desire to understand and take pleasure in the world’s … ludicrousness a little bit more, if I had unfortunately not, for the second time here on the coast, had to prevail on myself to take a good dose of English salts, which simply spoiled for me the enjoyment of this parade.111 The climate sickness was very “severe this year, and the fever rages even among the negroes”.112 He had ordered seeds of tobacco, flax, and various other European plants from London, and hoped to receive from his friend Moltke, with the next Danish ship, the seeds of Danish trees and shrubs, such as “oak, beech, alder, poplars, birch, and even spruce and fir, for it does no harm to try”. It was now a year since he had left Denmark. By August, 1831, Lind had arrived in Copenhagen, and Crown Prince Christian recorded in his journal that Lind, Peter Thonning, and Frederik Lowzow, who had been appointed director of the Chamber of Customs in March, were received into the royal presence at the end of the month. The prince gave no indication of the substance of the conversation.113 Shortly thereafter, Lowzow directed a “most humble note” to the king, proposing various shifts and promotions among the personnel of the

111 This meeting, which, for all Christensen’s ridicule of the ceremonious preliminaries, concluded in the treaty between Asante and the Danes of August 9, 1831, is discussed in Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 552–554; Justesen, in his treatment of the matter in “Negotiations for peace”, on p. 41 identifies the queen of Akyem as Queen Dokuaa. 112 Christensen’s journal, August 1, 1831. 113 Kong Christian VIII.s dagbøger og optegnelser, Vol. 3, 1823–29, Viggo Sjøqvist, ed. (Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Selskab for Fædrenelandets Historie, Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1983), p. 51. Prince Christian, after a long period in the political wilderness after attempting to establish himself as the monarch of an independent Norway after the Peace of Vienna, had been brought into the Council of State in the spring of 1831: see Hans Jensen, Vol. 1, p. 176. the literary impulse 417

Chamber of Customs and the Commerce Collegium upon the retirement of two senior members.114 Lowzow pointed out the delicacy of the task, new as he was, and unable in this case to seek advice within the Chamber, since his reorganization “in various ways more or less encroaches on each individual’s interest”. A personal “misunderstanding” between Conrad Schmidt-Phiseldek and Peter von Scholten, the governor of the Danish West Indies, was hampering the business of the colonial office, which, Lowzow reminded the king, was difficult enough as it was. Lowzow therefore wished to give the able Schmidt-Phiseldek charge of the customs administration of Schleswig and Holstein, at a time when a revision of the customs legislation for the German-speaking duchies was being contemplated, and to replace him with Peter Thonning, who had long experience in the colonial office. Some of Thonning’s present duties would devolve upon a younger official. A week later, Thonning wrote to Lowzow regarding this “intended division of the departments in the Collegium. It is now the 10th year that I have been the head of the most important and most remunerative depart ments, namely those of Copenhagen and the Sound”: seven tenths of the Chamber’s revenues flowed through his office. When now H. Majesty commands me to take over the—assuredly not less difficult and burdensome—but incomparably less important colonial department, and to yield my office into younger hands, then something unusual is here happening, which cannot avoid notice…. From this will directly follow that those unfamiliar with the circumstances of the case (and all are, except H. Majesty, my collegium chief, and my colleagues) will find reason to assume that I must be less competent or enjoy less confidence. I am so certain that this is neither my king’s nor my chief’s opinion that I [dare] most humbly hope … that H. Majesty by a most gracious expression in his resolution regarding the division of the departments will anticipate any occasion for such offensive speculation, and as the most essential means thereto most humbly [here Thonning in his agitation chose the wrong word: for allerunderdanigst (most humbly) he should have written allernaadigst (most graciously)] provide that I only in the interim relinquish the Copenhagen department. Thonning had without question had decisive influence on African affairs all along, but now, little as he cared for the development, he was once

114 GTK, Toldkammerkancelli- og Sekretariatsager, A., Kgl. Expeditioner vedk. Protokoller og Sager, Frederik VI’s resolutioner og rescripter vedkommende Generaltoldkammerets sager 1808–39, Allerunderdanigst Note, Lowzow, Copenhagen, August 31, 1831, unnumbered, between Nos. 86 and 87. 418 chapter eleven again in a position to bring his expertise and opinions directly and officially to bear on Danish African colonial policy. Whether his personal authority within the Chamber of Customs was irretrievably compromised is uncertain, but he was not again placed in charge of the Copenhagen and Sound departments. In August or September, Lind asked Thonning’s opinion of a document he had it in mind to lay before the king. Lind’s letter to Thonning has not come to light, but, among the papers of King Frederik’s court secretariat, there is a letter from Lind115 in which he argued that the foundation upon which colonization and culture can be built in Africa is the coast’s appropriate division among the European nations that have established themselves there, but hitherto these establishments have been limited to fortified commercial warehouses scattered here and there. The extraordinary proximity of the forts at Accra to one another, in particular, endlessly complicated relations with the Africans: large sums were wasted in countervailing efforts to purchase their loyalty. No colonial development would be possible until these territorial dispositions were better ordered, and, failing some accommodation among the Europeans, “the Guinea Coast must remain a bottomless pit for all the money and efforts that in the future may be expended thereon”. Dutch and English forts were “strewn between one another” from Assiné to Accra. If some of these forts could simply be exchanged, each government’s political influence could be consolidated. Denmark “has from a very early period possessed the territorial right to the district around Fort Fridriksborg in the vicinity of Cape 3 Points”, in an area that reasonably could be ascribed to the Dutch sphere, and Lind proposed that Denmark should offer to trade its ancient rights there for the Dutch claim to the African town under the guns of Fort Crevecoeur at Accra. Similarly, Denmark had once held the old fort Carolusborg, on the heights near Cape Coast Castle: this Danish claim obviously interfered just as much with the exercise of England’s authority in Fante as did the English Fort St. James at Accra. If these zones of influence could be more reasonably ordered, Lind wrote, with rather more emphasis than was called for (he was not a sophisticated stylist), “Civilization and Christendom will reckon their beginnings from that date”.

115 Cabinetsecretariat, Frederik 6’s, Ujournaliseret Sager 1830–39, Lind, September 28, 1831, without heading or salutation. the literary impulse 419

Lind offered to travel to London and the Hague to advise King Frederik’s diplomatic representatives in negotiations to this end. He also suggested that the “so numerous philanthropic societies” in England, such as the mission and bible societies, could perhaps be persuaded to take an interest in this matter. A draft of Thonning’s response to the communication Lind had sent him is preserved among the Guinea Commission’s papers.116 Thonning agreed that “if something is to be done with Guinea it is necessary to prevent controversy about territorial boundaries”. Clearly delineated areas of political influence or administrative control are an absolute condition for the territory’s proper use for colonial production—which indeed sooner or later must be imminent in Guinea, which has climate, soil, proximity to Europe, and many other advantages in that regard, and possibly the current crisis in Brazil but especially the mood in the English West Indian colonies could hasten Guinea’s rise in an unexpected manner and furnish people and resources for colonization. (Brazil was in a state of turmoil following the abdication of the emperor Dom Pedro, and the English abolitionist movement was now close to carrying its issue.) However, Thonning thought Lind’s arguments regarding seventeenth- century Danish possessions farther up the coast were untenable. By the same line of reasoning, Portugal could claim the whole Guinea Coast. Indeed, the disposition of the European forts was evidence that there had never been a question of national territorial claims, “at least not originally and scarcely in the period of the slave trade”. The Portuguese were the only European nation that might be said to have exercised real “dominion”. Their cultural legacy was to be found everywhere, and “traditions among the native-born there hint at much power and influence”. In the event of a serious colonial undertaking, it would be important for Denmark to control all the territory around Accra west to the Sacumo-fjo, which would form “a natural and exactly determined western border”. Forts St. James, Crevecoeur, and Prampram would have to be relinquished by the English and the Dutch. On the east, Thonning felt that the Danish territory should encompass the Keta Lagoon and perhaps extend as far as Popo.

116 Two almost identical copies of Thonning’s draft in response to Lind’s letter to him survive, both dated September 21, 1831, a week before the date of Lind’s letter in the court secretariat’s miscellaneous papers. The one is filed at GJS 536/1848, the other is in GK III, in a file marked “Capt. Linds Forslag angaaende”. 420 chapter eleven

Most important of all is the western border and the unmixed possession of the territory, so magnificent for colonial production, which is encompassed by the Sacumofyo to the west, the Akvapim Mountains to the north, the Volta River to the east, and the sea to the south, and which will comprise ca. 2,100 square miles. But it is also important to be the recognized master of a good stretch on the other side of the Volta, more to distance other European nations from the colonial territory than to actually make colonial use of that country, which, being rich in grain and cattle, can in other ways be useful. With these remarks I otherwise endorse the suggestion Your Honor showed me, the carrying out of which is of the most essential importance for the Guinea establishments, and regarding which negotiations will be easier now than when Guinea has attracted the attention that this land in reality deserves. Governor Hein had complained that there were many fewer coffee trees than there had been represented to be on the plantation Lind had sold to the Government, and Lind, confronted with this discrepancy in Copenhagen, merely attested that the trees had indeed been planted and that their number could doubtless be made up in the rainy season from the plantation’s nursery beds. The Chamber of Customs forwarded his statement to the coast with a demand for more information about the purchase of this plantation, “its situation, etc., as well as how far the goal of putting up a building at the foot of the Aqvapim Mountains for the sum granted by His Majesty the king can be achieved”.117 At the end of October, the king graciously allowed this plantation be named Frederiksgave (Frederik’s Gift) in his honor.118 On the coast, Governor Hein in the summer of 1831 forbade his officers the hospitality of Henrich Richter’s home in Osu.119 (His motivation appears to have been entirely personal: in 1820, Richter, apparently in an effort to shore up his right to inherit under Danish law, had married a Danish woman—named Hein—in Copenhagen: having secured his inheritance, he had abandoned her to return to the coast within a few months. Her father, who had been the commandant of one of the forts on the coast, was Governor Hein’s uncle.)120 Balthazar Christensen’s diary

117 GJ 156/1831, Lind, Copenhagen, August 22, 1831; Guin. Kopibog, September 3, 1831, to Hein. 118 Guineiske Resolutioner 1829–31, the king, October 26, 1831 (GJ 251/1831). 119 Christensen’s journal, August 5, 1831. See Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 550–552. 120 Ole Justesen, “Henrich Richter 1785–1840”, pp. 111–112, 123 (note 93); Justesen calls attention to the tightness of the “Guinea circles” of Copenhagen; Richter’s bride was the niece of Georg Lutterodt, who was himself related to the Wrisbergs. Peter Thonning’s brother Matthias had acted as Richter’s best man. the literary impulse 421 was suddenly full of little else but this vicious affair between Hein and Richter, whose part Christensen took. So heated was the atmosphere that Christensen wrote, in a draft of a letter to Lind in his diary, that he hoped that Hein would not succumb to the fever, for he feared that he himself might be accused of having poisoned the governor.121 By the beginning of October, Hein had ordered Christensen home to Denmark. Christensen claimed to find the whole matter laughable, from a legal standpoint, but worried that the king might form the impression that he was a “hothead”. If the matter went against him in Copenhagen, he intended to publish an account of the whole affair and return to the coast on his own private account. Veith was sick at heart because of it, and Brock was predicting that he would soon fall ill.122 Indeed, a few days later Christensen recorded that everyone was either sick or convalescent.123 Five days later, Veith was dead.124 Hein also fell ill, but Christensen assumed that he would survive, since he had undergone the fever before.125 By October 21, however, the governor was dead.126 Christensen wrote in his diary,127 “It is almost vile to live here these days. I wish to God I already had been gone: not because I mourn this death. He feared that Hein’s death would probably more harm than help his own situation. Hein was buried on the 22nd:128 “What has he now for all his evilness? Not a tear, not a sad countenance in the whole row!” A “black vil- lain, a knave”, Christensen called the late governor. A couple of days later,129 Christensen wrote that Ahrenstorff was now acting governor: “Truly, a scandal!” Ahrenstorff started each day, according to Christensen, with “4 (four)” brimming drams of gin. Early in November, 1831, Balthazar Christensen left the Guinea Coast.130 He returned to Denmark by way of Fernando Po, Principe, Ascension Island, the Azores, and England.131 He never returned to Africa. Among the Guinea Commission’s papers there is a long, wide-ranging manuscript entitled “Remarks on the Danish possessions in Guinea. 1831”,

121 Christensen’s journal, August 31, 1831. 122 Christensen’s journal, October 4 and 6, 1831. 123 Christensen’s journal, October 10, 1831. 124 Christensen’s journal, October 15, 1831. 125 Christensen’s journal, October 17, 1831. 126 GJ 289/ 1832, the Council on the coast, October 31, 1831. 127 Christensen’s journal, October 21, 1831. 128 Christensen’s journal, October 22, 1831; marginal note, May 8, 1832. 129 Christensen’s journal, October 24, 1831. 130 A final marginal note in Christensen’s journal. 131 GJ (S) 285/1832, Christensen to GTK, London, Febr. 16, 1832, filed at GJS 595/1838. 422 chapter eleven signed, on the last page, “Balth. M. Christensen”.132 It is not known why or when he wrote such an ambitious description: he may have whiled away the time with it on the long voyage home. The essay is tucked into an undated letter to Peter Thonning, in which Christensen wrote,133 “I had wished in the enclosed notes to submit to the High Collegium, of which [you] are a so highly honored member, a thorough, frank, and truthful general report.” It had proved a difficult task, even with the quantity of material he had assembled. He now professed to have lost confidence in what he had written, and its imperfection, especially in style and form, as well as the, for me, who am so young and so junior an official, perhaps inappropriate—although arising only out of warmth for the subject—frankness in various of my statements and views, now strike even me as such significant lacks, that I do not dare, as I had first intended, to lay it in its present form before the high collegium. The essay was indeed highly if elliptically critical of administrative practices on the coast, and Christensen might well fear it would be taken amiss in the colonial office. He appears to have been unwilling to recraft the essay, however (which further indicates that this “general report” was not something the Chamber had required of him), but, thinking it might nevertheless be of use, and, considering Thonning’s “well-known interest in and personal knowledge of the colony”, he placed it in his hands; it was after all Thonning’s approval, he said, that most interested him. Thonning’s immediate reaction to the essay is unknown, but he doubtless examined it with interest. (A couple of minor clarifications inserted in Christensen’s text may be in Thonning’s hand.) Whether he learned much of substance from Christensen’s extraordinarily wordy analysis, is another matter. (The typical sentence structure of the day was Teutonically elaborate, but Christensen indulged himself in sentences twenty-five lines long: it is as if he was writing a parody of proper bureaucratic style.) The essay had in any case no official weight, and there is no indication that Thonning responded to it privately. The slave trade, Christensen wrote, which had been so immediately and overwhelmingly profitable, to this day directly hindered the establishment of an agricultural and commercial colony.

132 GK II, Beskrivelse af de danske besiddelser i Guinea 1831, Balth. M. Christensen, “Bemærkninger om de Danske Besiddelser i Guinea. 1831”, undated, 140 pp. 133 GK II, Beskrivelse af de danske besiddelser i Guinea 1831, Christensen, undated, to Peter Thonning. The letter appears not to be recorded in the Guinea Journal. the literary impulse 423

To be sure, our administration sought immediately, and in fact with significant pecuniary sacrifice, to transform the former slave traders into agriculturalists, but all these efforts stranded altogether on the difficulty of effecting so total a transformation in and by the same generation, whose whole prior way of life was so difficult to reconcile with the “demand ing agricultural life, so incomparably more laborious, more doubtful, and requiring more constant exertion”. The enclave’s economy was in an utterly depressed state, but it both seems possible within a few years to set on its feet an appropriate, useful, and promising colonization, and in addition it seems certain that all circumstances just now combine in favor of such, which furthermore, upon the West Indian colonies’ so probable emancipation, will be of doubled interest.134 The lower forts were a costly liability. Slaves were still exported all along the coast east of Christiansborg in Brazilian and “West Indian” ships; at Fort Prindsenssteen, they were embarked right under the walls of the fort, and it undercut the Danish Government’s credibility and authority that it was so powerless to enforce the ban on the slave trade. All Denmark’s African colonial efforts should be directed at Accra and Akuapem until such time as “we could contemplate, with a new and acclimatized generation, expanding our colonization steadily nearer the Volta River”, which in time would be of great economic consequence.135 If Denmark could obtain control of the whole stretch of coast from the Sacumo River to the Volta, Christensen wrote, it would eliminate the petty rivalry and egoism that seemed to characterize the relationships among the European establishments. These were in part territorial squabbles, and they hampered “endeavors to win for European culture a part of the world that, if not only as a sort of compensation, assuredly has a claim on at least efforts to introduce such culture”.136 Akuapem was the best place for an agricultural colony. From under the shade of a few old tamarind trees on Legon Hill, where the traces of Meyer’s plantation could still be seen, one had views both to the sea and inland over the numerous clearings that stretched along the foot of the hills for a distance of perhaps eight miles. The scale of it seemed suitable:

134 Christensen, “Bemærkninger om de Danske Besiddelser”, pp. 2–5. 135 Christensen, “Bemærkninger om de Danske Besiddelser”, pp. 8–12. 136 Christensen’s use of ‘culture’ here in the context of a discussion of an agricultural colony appears irremediably ambiguous. Christensen, “Bemærkninger om de Danske Besiddelser”, pp. 42–43. 424 chapter eleven

“a little colony” could be set on its few here within a very few years. With its varying soils, rainfall, and healthy climate, it was difficult to think of any serious natural hindrance to the establishments of plantations in Akuapem. It appeared —and all writers, both English and Danish, have indeed taken it to be completely settled—that a better place for cultivation of coffee, cacao, indigo, rice, cotton, etc., can scarcely be wished and perhaps scarcely exists in any other of the existing European colonies.137 It was the more to be regretted that the Government on the coast had abandoned Isert’s colony and allowed the treaty he had negotiated with the Akuapem to lapse: the Africans, Christensen was sure, remembered nothing of it. Colonization would therefore present more difficulty than it otherwise might have, but, he said, in a backhanded stab at the admin istration of the late Hein, “a wise, liberal, and locally knowledgeable Government would doubtless also find its way over these difficulties”.138 Christensen listed the Danish officers’ plantations, which, like the plantations of the Accra people in the same vicinity, produced mainly local foodstuffs for their own consumption. However, all of these plantations, which each in turn has its own greater or smaller town for the serf workers, give the whole area a more cheerful and interesting tinge, and in general both the natives and the Europeans prefer to live there over the unhealthy, of all vegetable beauty so naked coast. Coffee was the only cash crop being cultivated, although all circumstances seem to speak much more strongly for cacao, which pays better and without any doubt will succeed excellently, for it was introduced on Prince’s Island and everywhere there, where the author saw it, thrived in the lushest degree.139 Christensen presented a long analysis (including much tedious recitation from the provisions of the standing budget) of the costs of maintaining the establishments; great savings could be realized, he believed, by closing the eastern forts altogether and by stopping most regular payments to local African dignitaries.140 These funds could then be applied to aug- menting the Government’s military capacity, which he regarded as vital to

137 Christensen, “Bemærkninger om de Danske Besiddelser”, pp. 54–55, 46–47. 138 Christensen, “Bemærkninger om de Danske Besiddelser”, pp. 48–50. 139 Christensen, “Bemærkninger om de Danske Besiddelser”, pp. 61–62. 140 Christensen, “Bemærkninger om de Danske Besiddelser”, pp. 82, 84–85. the literary impulse 425 the further progress of the colony.141 Between a regular military force and a militia of fort slaves and the slaves controlled by Richter and the other merchants, he thought a thousand armed men could be put in the field. Only the staff of the forts and a handful of merchants in Accra could be regarded as “subject to Danish law and the authority of the Government”. Certainly the African population was not. The legal status of the Eurafricans remained problematic: “Both as a means of physical power and future colonization in this country, however, and as the descendants of European residents, it is clear enough that the mulattoes deserve careful attention”, as both the standing budget and the Instruction of 1820 well noted. “The first step in founding a sort of middle-class society on the coast must therefore doubtless be to make a register of all the Danish mulattoes of both sexes”, Christensen said; they should be provided with some sort of local administrative structure and taught Danish “and our civil arts in general”. All the men, young and old, should be enrolled in the military; and, to attempt to differentiate and actually segregate them from their African neighbors and relatives, at least portions of this force should be stationed in Akuapem, whereby they could also be made acquainted with the merits of agriculture, which they at present tended to regard as beneath the dignity of men with white blood in their veins.142 There had been eleven governors in fourteen years, ignoring or reversing their predecessors’ policies and among them accomplishing nothing. There had been no progress toward “even a somewhat ordered civil society”, despite the Danish government’s “many-sided attempts to reform the colony and although, in particular, the Instruction for Administration of [1820], written with such great local knowledge, might have permitted the expectation of something quite else”. (Christensen was assuredly well aware of who the author of this document had been.) The Instruction had had little effect, “as almost all the governors seem in all significant regards to have regarded it, if not as never written, then at least as not written for them”. According to the Instruction, the governor had supreme military authority, but every other administrative matter was subject to collegial deliberation by the Council, with decisions taken according to the votes of a majority. This fundamental governmental procedure had been ignored for years. The minutes of the Government’s deliberations required by the Instruction were not regularly kept, and thus both the Council on the coast and the administration in Copenhagen were without

141 Christensen, “Bemærkninger om de Danske Besiddelser”, pp. 84, 136, 138–139. 142 Christensen, “Bemærkninger om de Danske Besiddelser”, pp. 101–104. 426 chapter eleven an institutional memory, without a reliable legal record. This was plainly misgovernment. Colonial administration was exceedingly complex, and Christensen argued that only men of a certain class and background (gentlemen like himself, in other words), should be appointed to the Council; a law degree should be the basic qualification. Men with lesser social and educational backgrounds, trained in bookkeeping and other clerical skills, were not up to the demands placed upon them in colonial administration.143 As for commerce, Christensen, having given the matter careful study, was certain that Denmark “could advantageously keep at least some ships on continuous and profitable routes to the coast”; this was perhaps the only place in the world where Danes could compete with the English. No Danish ship-owner at present had the necessary expertise, however. Scandinavian, Dutch, and German producers could supply all the trade goods necessary, and tolerable return cargoes (which our merchants appear to find not easy to bring themselves to give up, although most English ships pay good returns by often not waiting for a return cargo but rushing back for new cargoes of wares) could perhaps for the greatest part be had without particular difficulty, besides gold and ivory, in lots of palm oil, camwood, lumber, coffee, and cacao, etc., from both the coast and from Prince’s and St. Thomé.144 If local merchants could rely on a ship from home once or twice a year, they would be in a position to place substantial orders, which could then be filled at little risk. Danish naval vessels should be ordered to call on the coast on the voyages to and from their stations in the West Indies, if only because agricultural seed and plants from the West Indies were otherwise all but unobtainable; Danish East Indiamen should also stop here on their return voyages, so as to inject quantities of cowrie shells directly into the local economy. Although some maintained that trade could never be restored to its former footing until plantations had produced something for export and that supplies of gold, ivory, and palm oil were strictly limited, Christensen believed that it was the lesson of history that the supply would expand to meet demand; an enormous hinterland, he pointed out, had been opened up by the establishment of peace with Asante.145

143 Christensen, “Bemærkninger om de Danske Besiddelser”, pp. 3–5, 94–95, 97–98. 144 Christensen, “Bemærkninger om de Danske Besiddelser”, pp. 117–119. 145 Christensen, “Bemærkninger om de Danske Besiddelser”, pp. 120–122. the literary impulse 427

An effective local government could do a great deal to promote agriculture for export, but Christensen was not convinced that Danish plantations, whose slaves produced commodity crops for their masters and food for themselves, would ever be of much real significance: “if the cultivation of colonial products is to become of importance, it must probably be set in motion in particular by the natives themselves and for their own immediate profit”. Slave families on the existing plantations in Akuapem should therefore each be assigned a piece of land and required to cultivate coffee and cocoa and such crops on part of it, under close supervision, against the promise of their freedom and the land itself when production had reached certain levels.146 A solid education system could effect the introduction of the Danish language, religion, and culture in general, but a happy result would also depend on the example and supervision “of some few competent European individuals of the working and artisan class, for which the establishment has a long-felt need”. Perhaps a dozen such men, having received a solid military training before leaving Denmark, should be provided with all the tools and materials of their trades; they should all be married, and their families should accompany them to the coast. If they were immediately settled in Akuapem, they could be expected to survive the rigors of the climate. These workers should also be given plots of land to work. There could then be little doubt that “it would soon be seen that, as in Liberia, a little colony would flourish there with an astonishing rapidity”.147 Christensen had thought better of formally submitting his critique to the Chamber of Customs, but in an article he published in Valkyrien early in 1832,148 he referred self-importantly to “a major work, not intended for print, on the Danish colonies on the west coast of Africa”. This was undoubtedly this long “general report”, which he clearly took to be a matter of state interest. In the article published in Valkyrien, he described for his readers in Copenhagen the other European colonies on the Upper Coast of West Africa. He named no source for the information he presented, but the article was doubtless well-founded in prevailing contemporary knowledge and opinion on the coast. Christensen did not travel far

146 Christensen, “Bemærkninger om de Danske Besiddelser”, pp. 133–134. 147 Christensen, “Bemærkninger om de Danske Besiddelser”, pp. 135, 137–138. 148 “Nogle Bemærkninger om fremmede Colonier paa Vestkysten af Afrika”, Valkyrien, 1832, No. 1, pp. 258–278. 428 chapter eleven and his African sojourn was brief, but he appears to have been a willing listener, and this may be the main value of his various writings. The French colonies, he wrote, appeared to be administered with great care and to “deserve the name of well ordered and hopeful colonies”. Indigo “and other valuable products” were already being cultivated and exported. Fine horses “of Moorish-Arabian breed”, one of which, in perfect health, the author had seen at Accra, were exported down the coast, especially to Sierra Leone. The French establishments carried on “an important commerce with the interior and the large Moorish towns nearby” and exported increasing quantities of gums to France.149 The British royal colony at Sierra Leone appeared, “according to all the information the author has been able to obtain thereof, to be in an inordinately flourishing condition in every respect”. So much ground had been cleared and brought under cultivation that the climate was now healthier than at any of the other British establishments on the coast, and trade to the mother country was so “lively” that one or two ships arrived from England every day between December and August. Most of these were in the business of carrying African timber to English shipyards, however, and the mortality among these vessels’ crews was frightful, for the ships ran “a long way up the river, and there some of the crews themselves work in water to their waists, despite a burning sun and little or no movement of air, loading the heavy, so-called African teakwood” [or African oak— Oldfieldia africana]. The colony was defended by a regular Eurafrican militia, and the governor and his civil servants and “a now both numerous and well-off merchant and artisan class live in a completely European manner”; the colony’s future seemed secure.150 For all that, Christensen was careful to point out, the colony had cost the English government “monstrous sums”.151 In less than ten years, the private American colony Liberia had “improved itself into a well ordered, on the whole flourishing, hopeful little state, completely European or English in manners, customs, language, and way of life”, which supported itself mainly by trade and the somewhat desultory cultivation of rice and maize. Christensen guessed the colony’s population to be around two thousand people. “The colony was immediately given the same administrative and civil service personnel as a district in the United States, and they are elected annually by and from among the

149 “Nogle Bemærkninger om fremmede Colonier”, pp. 258–259. 150 “Nogle Bemærkninger om fremmede Colonier”, p. 260. 151 “Nogle Bemærkninger om fremmede Colonier”, p. 262. the literary impulse 429 colonists themselves”. Every man of age was enrolled in a well organized and equipped militia. According to the colony’s own newspaper, schools had been established, and regular land taxes and harbor fees were sufficient to cover the colony’s public expenses. Several of the colonists are furthermore perfectly cultivated men, and the well-being that is already now unmistakable in this, so young a colony, and the enterprise and spirit of speculation that just as unmistakably prevails in it make it completely probable … that it in a few years can be expected to become the best trading place on the coast. It was only to be hoped, Christensen wrote, that the slave trade carried on at Cape Mount, only about twenty miles away, would not corrupt the colony. In this point there lies, however, at the moment without doubt one of the most dangerous reefs that could cause this so successfully begun colonization to strand, and here again there is thus a new cause to regret the poor result that so far has been achieved with regard to the final annihilation of this revolting trade.152 The Dutch fort Elmina was the most important on the coast, but the Dutch appeared to be making little effort to turn its establishments into “fruitful colonies”.153 Cape Coast Castle, scarcely ten miles farther along the coast, and the other English establishments were at present administered by a London company. Christensen thought it would be decades before the English could overcome the animosity borne them in West Africa, especially by the Asante. (The Dutch assiduously exploited this ill-will.) As long as these establishments were run solely to benefit the commercial operations of at the most a score of merchants, it is natural that little or nothing is done to introduce a regular civil constitution in the colony itself and still less to spread true culture and enlightenment in the country. This constitutional disorder would be a serious hindrance to colonial undertakings. The elimination of the slave trade was scarcely advanced by this administrative arrangement, either, because many of the British merchants owned large numbers of slaves, although in the names of their African connections, and many of these slaves made their way to the Atlantic market.154

152 “Nogle Bemærkninger om fremmede Colonier”, pp. 262–265. 153 “Nogle Bemærkninger om fremmede Colonier”, pp. 265–266; see Yarak, pp. 103–105. 154 “Nogle Bemærkninger om fremmede Colonier”, pp. 270, 272. 430 chapter eleven

On the island of Fernando Po, where there was an excellent harbor and no surf to contend with, the English navy had a station. The soils were reckoned to be good, there was rain at all seasons, and, after forests of teak were cleared, the island “appears capable of becoming a profitable and excellent colony for tropical cultivation”. The mortality there was fearsome, however: there had been a funeral on each of the twelve days Christensen was there.155 From Fernando Po, it was eight or ten days’ sail to Principé. Only about half of the island was cultivated, the rest of it said to be occupied only by a few runaway slaves, but the population took a strong interest in planting. The main product was coffee of excellent quality, “but in recent years they have also cultivated cacao with eagerness and success, [and it] is already being exported in some quantity”. One planter was experimenting with indigo, “which, under the supervision of a Spaniard from Cuba, seems to prosper particularly. Because of the unmistakable similarity to be seen in all respects between this island’s natural condition and our Aquapim’s”, plants and seeds from Principé would presumably thrive on the coast, although, unfortunately, the winds and currents were not favorable for such exchanges: almost all ships trading down the Guinea Coast called at Principé, but few came back again.156 In another article, in Valkyrien early in 1832, on the slave trade,157 Christensen wrote that Henry Meredith had been quite right when he had postulated as the first condition for and the first step toward the general civilization of West Africa: the total annihilation of this shameful trade. So long as there is always occasion enough to sell slaves or to make a fortune with the help of such means, civilization and industry can never be enduringly established in the land, or its mercantile interest for Europe take on the superior importance that it in the normal order of things should have. As long, that is, as the natives can obtain their European articles of luxury for so easily obtainable a commodity as—slaves, they will naturally never make an effort to send any other of their country’s rich natural products to market.158 Portugal had been permitted by the terms of the Congress of Vienna to continue to supply Brazil with slaves from the African coast south of the

155 “Nogle Bemærkninger om fremmede Colonier”, pp. 275–277. 156 “Om Colonien: Princes-Island”, Valkyrien, 1832, No. 2, pp. 46–50. 157 “Om Slavehandelen”, unsigned, Valkyrien, 1832, No. 1, pp. 251–58. The editor noted that the essay had been written on the coast the year before. 158 “Om Slavehandelen”, p. 251. See Meredith, p. 214. the literary impulse 431

Equator, and, because Principe and the Cape Verdes fell outside the limits of the ban but lay so close to the coast, a huge trade still flourished there. The British navy did its best to suppress this traffic, but ships seized and condemned were simply bought at auction for a bagatelle by slavers’ agents and sent back down the coast.159 One saw dozens of slavers, under all manner of flags, in the larger rivers. These fast vessels always carried two sets of papers and were well-armed and -manned. They were not only slavers but pirates, raiding along the coast while awaiting their cargoes and in this manner destroying “almost all lawful trade with the natives of the coast”. Christensen reported that slavers commonly threw their slaves overboard when closely pursued rather than risk seizure of the ship. He saw no way that the trade could be eliminated so long as slavery existed in America or, for that matter, in European colonies on the African coast.160

159 “Om Slavehandelen”, pp. 252–253. 160 “Om Slavehandelen”, pp. 245–256.

PART FIVE

CONFLICTING VIEWS OF THE COLONIAL WORLD: THE GUINEA COMMISSION AND THE CLOSING OF AN ERA

CHAPTER TWELVE

PLUMBING THE ARCHIVES: THE COMMISSION FRAMES ITS DEBATE

In January, 1832, and again in April, Crown Prince Christian recorded in his diary, without elaboration, that he had discussed the Guinea establishments with Gerhard Lind.1 In July, King Frederik appointed Lind governor of the establishments; it is a doubtless an mark of the administration’s lack of complete confidence in him that the appointment was only ad interim. (Niels Brock was once again in temporary charge on the coast at this time.)2 On the day of his appointment, Lind put his signature to a long, strangely oblique statement of his views of the colonial situation on the coast, which he addressed directly to the king.3 The underlying assumption of Lind’s essay is that the establishments on the coast should be transformed into an agricultural colony, but, if only because he was not accustomed to bureaucratic forms, Lind provided his monarch with no clear statement of his ideas for the establishments’ future, outlined no historical background, and alluded to no established policy. The presentation is unpolished, imbalanced, repetitious, vague, clumsy, and indeed all but incoherent in many a paragraph: Lind was simply stringing words together. Central elements of his plans are referred to almost in passing, while the king was burdened with a great deal of inconsequential detail. There is no indication that the king had asked Lind to submit these proposals, and, indeed, Lind closed his statement, which he fondly asserted embodied a set of governing principles, with the hope that he would soon learn whether his ideas in general met with the royal approval or whether some of them

1 Kong Christian VIII.s dagbøger og optegnelser, Vol. 3, 1823–29, pp. 58, 62. 2 Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 203. 3 GJ 429/1832, royal rescript, September 30, 1832; two attachments, A and B, ad GJ 429/1832, Lind, Copenhagen, July 7, 1832, to the king, were to be found among the Guinea Commission’s files (GK III) until they were removed by an archivist and filed at GJS 506/1832 (but a little out of place in the bundle of files, falling before GJS 502/1832) with one of the Guinea Commission’s file folders, Designation VII; the two documents bear the Commission’s numbers 1 and 2. (There are copies in GK II, also in a file designated Designation VII.) Lind apparently laid his thoughts on the colonial development of the establishments before Crown Prince Christian, as well: see Kongehusets Arkiv. Christian VIII, Number 247, 1803–1834, Sager vedr. kolonierne, documents dated August 12 and 18, 1832. 436 chapter twelve should be dispensed with altogether “or be modified toward the achievement of an end unknown to me”.4 Lind cannot be blamed too much for his uncertainty: King Frederik may have been leaning toward a fairly substantial colonial undertaking, but Denmark’s African colonial policy was by no means firmly defined at this point. Lind urged a forceful investment in colonizing the enclave, but he warned his sovereign that the establishment of a viable overseas territory peopled by Danes, Eurafricans, Danish-speaking Africans, and immigrants would be the work of generations. Lind took a broad view of Danishness, and racial equality and legally sanctioned interracial marriages were fundamental to his view of the colony’s future.5 He did not think that the promise of land, free passage, and public support would entice many Danes to Africa. To establish a permanent core of Danish settlers, he proposed first to increase the administrative officers’ salaries in proportion to the length of their service on the coast, so that, with every passing year, returning home would render their financial prospects sensibly worse than if they remained in Africa. He argued that if, in the end, an officer accumulated such a fortune that he after all wished to return to Denmark to enjoy his retirement, the example of his success would attract ten other settlers to the coast in his place. No less necessary than this educated official class of settlers, immigrants from the Danish working classes would in time be “the link in the chain between the first class and the negroes”. These people should be recruited for military service, and, after a long period of acclimatization, they could then be relied upon to support themselves by agriculture or the practice of the skilled trades. “In time the negroes will, little by little, mix themselves with the real Danes and themselves become Danish”.6 A colonization would depend on a substantial military force, a “machine” that could be brought to bear wherever necessary, and Lind had it in mind that this force should be composed of “a hundred foreign negroes” brought to the land from some remote part of Africa or from the West or East Indies. These infantrymen were to be provided with “just as foreign women” and were to be strictly segregated “from the native negroes of the country”. Their superiors would be Danish speakers, and the soldiers and their children could be expected, even with unskilled teachers, to acquire the Danish language to a degree sufficient to “their station in

4 GK II, Designation VII, No. 1, Lind, Copenhagen, July 7, 1832, [p. 24]. 5 GK II, Designation VII, No. 1, [p. 2]. 6 GK II, Designation VII, No. 1, [pp. 2–4]. the commission frames its debate 437 life”. It would be safe enough to train a corps of uniformed artillerists from among the local Africans and Eurafricans, for in serving the cannons they would not meet their opponents face to face. Nevertheless, these should also be housed apart in barracks, and supported by the state. The resident European and Eurafrican merchants and their retainers and slaves should furthermore be organized into a well-exercised militia, armed by the Government. Beyond that, Lind recommended a small group of European Danish cavalrymen, who could also serve as a mounted police force. Under these men’s special care, horses, with the importation of which the Government had hitherto had little success, could be expected to thrive.7 He thought it would be advisable to commence with about thirty such Danish families. All of the inventory negroes’ children should be placed among these as soon as they can be without their mothers, to grow up there and be brought up as real Danish Africans, who by a common language, religion, and manners feel themselves bound to us.8 Lind permitted himself a long discussion of local African law and how it could be expected to yield to European norms as the Danish jurisdiction was slowly extended.9 Once again, generations would elapse before real inroads were made, and the education system would be crucial.10 Fort Christiansborg, because of its proximity to the surf, was the unhealthiest building in Danish Accra, Lind said. Legon Hill, on the other hand, was one of the healthiest places in the area, and was conveniently situated between the sea and the hills of Akuapem; here the Government should have its seat. Mortality among the Danish officers would decline, communications between the people of Accra and their “larder” in Akuapem could be more easily controlled (to good political effect in the area), and efforts to create a new Danish creole population would be easier here, at some remove from the influence of the towns. Barracks for the foreign soldiers of color could first be built here, and thereafter residences for the governor and those officers whose functions did not tie them to the fort and the coast.11 “Naturally”, Lind wrote, “the colony must at some point in time defray its own expenditures; but the time and the ways in which it can provide

7 GK II, Designation VII, No. 1, [pp. 4–6]. 8 GK II, Designation VII, No. 1, [p. 7]. 9 GK II, Designation VII, No. 1, [pp. 8–14]. 10 GK II, Designation VII, No. 1, [pp. 14–16]. 11 GK II, Designation VII, No. 1, [pp. 16–17]. 438 chapter twelve the motherland with cash income can only with difficulty be specified”. Perhaps the most that could be expected would be the indirect advantage to the nation’s commerce and shipping of an expanded colonial market.12 It would be important to encourage the administrative officers to practice agriculture. To improve the likelihood of their success, West Indian plantation overseers should be brought to Africa to supervise the work. By way of example and instruction, the Government should also itself be directly involved in cultivation. Every sort of tropical crop could be grown here, but it would be best to begin with those, such as cotton, coffee, and cocoa, whose production was uncomplicated and entailed little risk.13 Recent failures with imported draft animals could be written off as much to inexperience as to the rigors of the climate, Lind thought; horses and donkeys and people accustomed to caring for them properly could be obtained from Senegal, the Cape Verde Islands, Gambia, Lagos, or Principe. It would be no use to import mules, for they would be unable to reproduce themselves even if they survived, Lind sagely reminded the king, and the capital invested in them would be lost when they died. Unlike horses, which would have to kept some distance from the salt air thrown up by the surf, cattle did well near the sea; the cows at Fort Christiansborg were not milked, “but under the care of Danish farm maids” they would doubtless make their contribution to the fort’s supply of foodstuffs.14 The administration should see to it that skilled smiths, carpenters, masons, and the like were included among the military men sent out from Denmark, and these should be given apprentices from among the Eurafricans to encourage the rise of a class of craftsmen. The skilled slaves currently in the fort’s inventory should continue in their trades, but their children should be employed “in agriculture on the proposed plantations”, as canoe men, and as fishermen, supplying the other settlers and plantation slaves. The manufacture of trade goods, however, should be left to the mother country, although, for the lack of labor, agricultural machines for the cleaning of cotton, coffee, and corn would be useful.15 In all this the Government would be directly involved. Commerce, however, in Lind’s view (which here departed from those of Henrik Richter and his disciple Balthazar Christensen) “cannot be forced, but must be left to itself” to find profits proportionate to the surplus produced.

12 GK II, Designation VII, No. 1, [pp. 19–20]. 13 GK II, Designation VII, No. 1, [pp. 20–21]. 14 GK II, Designation VII, No. 1, [pp. 21–22]. 15 GK II, Designation VII, No. 1, [pp. 22–23]. the commission frames its debate 439

Communications to the wider world could be improved, to be sure, by laying out moorings and constructing a quay at Fort Christiansborg.16 A shorter accompanying statement of the same date itemized what Lind thought “first should and could be sent out and immediately undertaken in Guinea”.17 He wanted a few supernumerary Government assistants and under-assistants; a supernumerary doctor, who would reside up at the plantations and travel with the officers on their errands back and forth to the coast; and a priest or catechist, who would have to be content merely to sow this field, acknowledging that “the fruit will be first be seen and harvested by his successors”, or, failing a priest, a couple of school- teachers well-endowed with patience and of good singing voice, so as to make the religious services more inviting. He recommended sending out two artillerymen, two infantrymen, and two cavalrymen who understood something of veterinary medicine. These should be provided with all the instruments and medicines they needed “to preserve the animals that are indispensable to making the establishments a colony”; they should be assisted by a pair of young stable hands.18 “Music can perhaps be said to be unnecessary”, Governor Lind admonished the king, “but when it is considered as an essential encouragement to the spirit in a country where there is so little thereof, then I think I cannot call 2 musicians unworthy subjects”.19 These, too, would improve the tone of the church services. Two mares and two stallions of a hardy race of “charcoal-burners’ horses” should be shipped down to the Guinea Coast, and more horses and donkeys should be purchased in Senegal on the voyage down, along with “2 negro families that know how to care for them—as well as some common packsaddles”. Since the governor would doubtless be obliged to travel frequently between the hills and the coast, he should be equipped with a sturdy coach. Two large mooring anchors, chains, and zinc-clad buoys should be sent down and laid out in four or five fathoms of water off Fort Christiansborg.20 Two plantation overseers should be recruited from the West Indies as soon as possible. They should be provided with land and fifteen slaves each, with the promise that these would become their own property at the

16 GK II, Designation VII, No. 1, [pp. 23–24]. 17 GK II, Designation VII, No. 2, Lind, Copenhagen, July 7, 1832, [p. 1]. 18 GK II, Designation VII, No. 2, [pp. 2–3]. 19 GK II, Designation VII, No. 2, [pp. 3–4]. 20 GK II, Designation VII, No. 2, [pp. 4–6]. 440 chapter twelve end of six years satisfactory service.21 The Government should contract with the king of Asante or some other powerful leader to buy one hundred negro families, “to be delivered as soon as possible from such distant places that they had nothing in common” with the residents of the strand region, from whom they should be carefully segregated until they had built fortified barracks at Legon. This contract should also call for the purchase of still more horses from the interior.22 The Government’s officers, who would be spending more time away from the fort, should be provided with three tents; such a tent would also make a suitable gift for the king of Asante. All the officers should be uniformed, for appearances counted for a great deal on the Guinea Coast: Lind was particularly concerned that they should be provided with epau- lets of gold (which would keep well in this climate) as the indispensable marks of rank.23 What all this would cost “cannot very well be exactly stated”, Lind concluded a trifle blithely, but he estimated that an increase of fifty thousand rigsdaler in the annual budget would suffice. This would almost triple the establishments’ annual allotment: Lind had high hopes for his administration. He had always felt, he said, that it would be best “to make an outlay that could lead to a definitive, informative result”.24 Half measures would be ineffective and in the long run more expensive than a concerted effort from the start. There exists another version of Lind’s proposal, in which he suggests that the Guinea establishments might “reasonably one day become Denmark’s richest colony”, among the personal papers of Crown Prince Christian,25 where there is also an elaborate plan, also apparently drafted by Lind in this same summer of 1832, for the establishment of a penal colony in the Guinea enclave.26 There is no indication that this plan ever came to the attention of the Chamber of Customs. If Prince Christian was at this time taking a part in the formulation of colonial policy, his voice was not so strong that it reverberated through the administration’s colonial archives.

21 GK II, Designation VII, No. 2, [p. 6]. 22 GK II, Designation VII, No. 2, [p. 7]. 23 GK II, Designation VII, No. 2, [pp. 8–9]. 24 GK II, Designation VII, No. 2, [pp. 9–10]. 25 Kongehusets Arkiv, Christian VIII, Number 247, 1803–1834, Sager vedr. kolonierne, Lind, Copenhagen, August 12, 1832. 26 Kongehusets Arkiv, Christian VIII, Number 247, 1803–1834, Sager vedr. kolonierne, an unsigned document, apparently Lind, August 18, 1832, without salutation. the commission frames its debate 441

It appears that for one reason or another, King Frederik took no immediate action on the proposals Lind had submitted to him. Two months later, having received no response, Lind again addressed himself directly to the king: Before I leave Denmark, I must, to be able to begin and found the undertakings that should lead to the results indicated in my previous most humble memorandum regarding Guinea affairs, wish to see the following most humble suggestions subjected to royal resolution so as possibly to spare the long time that would otherwise elapse in corresponding about these matters from Guinea. In this memorandum, Lind very briefly identified twenty-three steps he hoped could immediately be taken.27 The king forwarded this letter to the Chamber of Customs, which he instructed to obtain the necessary amplification from Lind and to prepare a legislative proposal. The Chamber dutifully asked Lind for more information,28 and the governor, somewhat aggrieved, referred the Chamber to the long proposal he had submitted to the king more than two months earlier.29 The government’s guiding “principle” in the matter, he wrote, should be “that a forceful exertion, employed all at once, will always effect a more desirable result than when the same force is divided over a long time or a large space”. Once again, Lind boiled all his arguments down into a list of a couple of dozen immediate steps he hoped to see taken. On October 19, the king reminded the Chamber of Customs of his interest in Lind’s proposals,30 and on November 3, 1832, the Chamber of Customs submitted a representation sidestepping most of the concrete substance of Lind’s proposal in favor of an open-ended official study of

27 GJ 422/1832, “Allerunderdanigst P. M”, Lind, Copenhagen, September 12, 1832, forwarded by the king to the Chamber of Customs, September 21, filed at GJS 506/1832, marked Bilag C. (An archivist’s slip indicates that the original or a copy of this document was moved from a file marked Gouv. Capt. Linds Forslag angaaende, in GK III, to an unspecified location in the Guinea Journal files, and this is presumably that document; but see Olsen, “Supplement”, pp. 117–118.) This was the Guinea Commission’s Designation VII, No. 3, and a copy of it, so marked, is to be found in GK II; GJ 429/1832, royal rescript, September 30, 1832. 28 GJ 422/1832. 29 Lind, Copenhagen, October 8, 1832. This communication was apparently not journaled, but it is filed at GJS 506/1832, where it is marked Bilag Litr. D. This was the Guinea Commission’s Designation VII, No. 4, and a copy of it is to be found in GK II. GJ 429/1832, royal rescript, September 30, 1832, forwarding portions of Lind’s addresses to the king. 30 GJ 451/1832, royal rescript, October 19, 1832. 442 chapter twelve the African colonial question. This representation was Peter Thonning’s elegant bureaucratic handiwork.31 Since the Danish ban on the export of slaves from Africa in 1803, the representation opened, the establishments had produced nothing of significance to trade, “so the object of Your Majesty’s possessions in Guinea until now has only been to preserve access to a fertile land of considerable extent, which is well-suited to the production of Indian colonial products”. “Suggestions for the colonization of the country have at various times been presented”. In 1825, the king was reminded, Governor Richelieu and Major Wrisberg had proposed sending poor Danish-African children to Copenhagen to be trained as craftsmen; it had been suggested that Danish orphans could be sent out, who, when grown and acclimatized, could form the core of a colony on the Volta; transported convicts could be set to growing sugar, cutting lumber for the navy, making soap, burning potash, and tanning leather. The Chamber of Customs had advised the king that the costs, risks and difficulty of the first of these schemes “verged on the insurmountable”, which finding the king had accepted. The Collegium had also expressed its reservations regarding Wrisberg’s plan for a penal colony in reports in May and June, 1826. This plan had nevertheless been passed on to the Commission of Investigation, whose assessment had been embodied in a representation by the Chamber in June 1829, when the king had allowed himself to be persuaded that a Volta colony was out of the question, at least for the time being. Interim Governor Findt had proposed sending four sons of rich African families to St. Croix to be trained as sugar plantation overseers, but the Chamber, in an opinion submitted in September, 1828, had advised the king that very considerable racial and social difficulties would be involved in sending free African negroes over to the Danish West Indies and treating them differently from the African population there; the king had determined not to pursue this proposition. At the same time, however, the king had ordered the Chamber to try to recruit a handful of free coloreds (or Eurafricans) in the West Indies, “who, after having acquired the necessary knowledge of setting up plantations, could be sent over to Guinea as plantation managers”. Governor von Scholten had reported that no such individuals were to be found in the

31 Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, No. 99, November 3, 1832, “Angaaende Capitain Lieutenants Linds Forslag til Colonie-Anlæg i Guinea”; see drafts of the resolution at GJS 536/1848. the commission frames its debate 443 islands, as the Chamber had reported to the king early in 1832; his majesty had yet to take any further action. “The present unproductive situation has now persisted for thirty years; it therefore seems that the significance of the matter in commercial, political, and financial regard make it advisable to take it under thorough consideration” to put the monarch in a position to decide “if it is desirable that the establishments should henceforth be maintained on that footing, or whether the current circumstances might make it advisable to put Captain Lind’s or a similar plan of greater or lesser compass into effect, whereby the present standing budget of 27,000 [rigsdaler] annually could also be put to productive use. The Chamber therefore hoped that it would please the king “to have experts assemble to take this matter under consideration”.32 If Thonning had any experts particularly in mind, besides himself, he did not name them here. A thorough investigation of the matter would doubtless consume considerable time, and the Chamber suggested that if a commission was unable to present an opinion immediately on the basis of information and reports already at hand, it should report on its progress quarterly “and be obliged, without awaiting the completion of the task entrusted to it, to submit most humble representations regarding such interim measures as might be regarded as necessary, either as preparations for prospective colonial agriculture in Guinea or to obtain practical information to better guide the proposal it intended most humbly to submit”. Thonning presumed that any such recommendations would be addressed to the crown through the Chamber of Customs. The Collegium felt that if it were to be determined that efforts should be made to realize the potential of the establishments, then “Interim Governor Lind’s proposals, in so far as they deal with what should be undertaken by way of preparation, should not be set in abeyance, nor should the establishments remain in their present passive state until the commission’s deliberations are completed”. To better allow the king to assess Lind’s recommendations, “to the degree that they aim to prepare for the colonization of Guinea, the undersigned Councilor of State and

32 In a draft of the representation, in his eagerness to bring out the importance of the African colonial question, Thonning had followed this with a clause, “just as the matter of the abolition of the slave trade in its day was discussed”. Denmark’s ban on the slave trade had redounded gloriously to the nation’s credit, and this comparison was perhaps thought to have gone a bit too far: the phrase had been struck out by the time the king saw the representation: GJS 536/1848, draft, marked 1, of the Chamber’s representation regarding Governor Lind’s proposals. 444 chapter twelve

Delegate Thonning permits himself most humbly to set forth the following remarks regarding the country and its characteristics, derived from a residence of several years in Guinea”. Referring to the large-scale map “most humbly attached” to the Chamber’s representation, Thonning rehearsed for the king the latitude, longitude, and extent of the stretch of coast from Fort Christiansborg to Fort Prindsenssteen. The image presents itself of the Scandinavian monarch scrutinizing a tantalizingly realistic map of his unthinkably exotic and remote territory on the coast of Africa, with its huge river flowing down through it from an utterly unknown interior off the edge of the paper, its great stone fortresses named in his family’s honor, its towns and villages and as yet uninhabited lands, its anchorages and fishing banks, tides, and winds, with all its marvelous potential, all its scope for speculation, while senior administrative officials at his elbow, perhaps including Thonning himself, gesticulated over it as they outlined their representation.33 “The negro tribes on this coast and deep into the country in a northwest direction are under the influence of the establishments”, as Thonning carefully put the case, “call themselves Danish negroes, fly Your Majesty’s flag, and are obliged not to permit other European nations to establish themselves among them”, and there was thus little chance that other Europeans would found agricultural colonies on the Danish stretch of the coast, “except the little English district at Prampram, whose hinterland was too limited to allow of such enterprises. (Every place name implicitly directed the king’s eye back to the map now on his desk, and this, as Thonning had doubtless assured himself long since, was no small matter of colonial psychology.) To the east, across the Volta, there was no chance of a territorial dispute with any other European power; landward from Accra, however, where the British Fort St. James was well maintained and the Dutch flag still waved over the ruins of Fort Crevecoeur, the claims of those nations could be thought to coincide with the town’s territory, which extended about twelve miles from the sea. The established nations have hitherto not concerned themselves about any territorial right, because all perceptions have revolved around the slave trade; two European nations can thus be seen here established in each its own quarter of the same town…. [It] would therefore be desirable, if colonial agriculture is to be advanced in Guinea, if the relinquishment of the English

33 Thonning’s map is no longer attached to the representation. the commission frames its debate 445

St. James and the Dutch Crevecoeur could be obtained, whereby Your Majesty’s territory would be bounded to the west by the River Sacumofyo. None of this, however, presented any hindrance to Danish agricultural projects, which would be centered in Akuapem, just to the north of the Gã or Accra territory. Thonning then provided a concise description of the physical geography of the enclave; its tone of quiet scientific authority was perfectly pitched for his highly sophisticated audience. He explained that little could be hoped for in the land immediately on the coast because of the dryness of the climate and the sharpness of the sea air. Closer to the hills of Akuapem, the vegetation become steadily lusher: “Thus this landscape along the mountains, from the River Sacumofyo to the east, is as favored by nature as is perhaps possible”, and the mountains themselves were no less fruitful. The level plain to the east received little rain but was very fertile, being watered by small tributaries of the Volta; “it also gets, like Egypt, an annual watering and fertilizing by the Volta and Tojeng rivers’ floods in September”. Danish cultivation should commence as far to the west as possible, in the healthiest part of the enclave, close to the protection of the main fort and not too far from the sea, in part so as to forestall any similar effort by the other European nations represented at Accra, and so that, as cultivation expanded, the dangerous “exhalations” from newly opened land would blow down the wind over as yet unoccupied territory. The king’s African territory was not subject to South America’s fearful earthquakes, to the hurricanes of the West Indies, east Asia, and southern Africa, nor to the plagues of grasshoppers to which Asia and Egypt were subject. There were other significant advantages for plantation agriculture here: land could be obtained extremely cheaply; the workers could be purchased and maintained for a quarter of what they would cost in the West Indies; and the slaves could grow their own food or obtain it very cheaply locally. “The European way of life merely lacks but does not necessarily require butter, cheese, wheat flour, tea, wine, refined sugar, and spices”. Building materials were available at low cost, with the exception of ‘long timbers and planks, iron, glass, and painters’ materials.” The roadstead at Fort Christiansborg was secure and healthy, and a mole enclosing a boat harbor could easily be erected on the stone reef at the canoe landing by the fort. Thonning found it advisable to explain why, if the land was so eminently suited to plantation agriculture, it had not already been taken up and worked by European settlers and entrepreneurs. First, he said, “no man of means would seek his fortune in Guinea”; the climate was too 446 chapter twelve dangerous and the risks to property and life itself on unprotected plantations among the Africans too great at present. “The use of private capital can therefore not be hoped for in the beginning, and the local circumstances are also too little known” for anyone to have been able to calculate the potential of investment there. It was thought that plantations a few miles inland would be healthier than the forts on the sea, although Thonning admitted that this could not be confirmed, for no European yet lived in the interior. Without doubt, however, until cultivation on a large scale had improved the climate, “cultivation here, as everywhere in the Indies, will claim many victims”. This was rather cautious language, to be sure, but Thonning was obviously concerned lest he appear a fantast and projector, and he appears to have assumed that the long, national, royal perspective would allow the king to contemplate the prospect of such sacrifice without undue dismay. The only Europeans on the ground were either merchants or government officials, and both were not only bound to the forts by their circumstances but also regarded their residence here as temporary. The officers’ incomes were modest, and they were from time to time obliged to move from fort to fort. “But a proper plantation undertaking, in which there is so much to attend to, as in a new planting, demands a man’s constant residence in the place and the application of all his time in this pursuit”. Plantations in Africa and their communications with the coast would require protection by a mobile militia and by inexpensive gun towers, mud perimeter walls, and thick hedges of cactus, which would secure the planters against the quick attacks the Africans favored. Other measures essential to the success of a new colony, and which could only be undertaken by the government for the lack of any other source of capital, included the introduction of a core population of young Danes to whom the first plantations could be entrusted, but who would require support at the start in the form of houses, slave labor, land cleared in advance, draft animals, and equipment. A return on this investment could be expected only after the passage of “several years”. Various circumstances favored an African colony: all the European colonies in the West Indies “are in a distressed state”, and indeed their very existence was threatened. “Neither should it be left unremarked from the humanitarian side: that such plantations, if wisely adapted to the negroes’ condition, [would be] the surest means of gradually civilizing the natives’ ways”; the introduction of law based on Christian morality would reduce the frightful murders of captives of war that had become so common since the end of the slave trade. the commission frames its debate 447

The Chamber’s representation then turned to the immediate steps governor Lind had recommended. Lind’s concerns about the officers’ ranks, pay, and uniforms the Chamber found unexceptionable. Sending horses out from Denmark seemed a difficult and “precarious” proposition and should be postponed. The Chamber felt that a suitable wheeled conveyance for the governor should be his own affair. Tents for the use of the officers in the field would be a wise provision, but three hundred rifles for a militia that did not yet exist would be a premature investment. Military musicians and their instruments would not be needed at present. The Chamber raised no objection to the purchase of a hundred African families as the core of a permanent military force if Lind could find the resources in the establishments’ current budget. It seemed very advisable to make a start on the difficult matter of importing horses from the interior of Africa and acclimatizing them. Lind’s plan to move the seat of the Government to a new town at Legon seemed premature, however; furthermore, the Chamber reminded the king, he had already granted a substantial sum for the construction of a Government residence at the feet of the Akuapem hills, although it was not known what progress had been made on it. The Government on the coast had purchased a plantation from Lind; the Chamber had requested more information about this plantation in September, 1831, but had heard nothing back. Nor did the Chamber feel the time was right to discuss Lind’s proposal to send down twenty or thirty families of “Danish military settlers”. The Chamber endorsed Lind’s suggestion that West Indian plantation overseers should be engaged: as it stood with the plantations on the coast, “time, work, and expenditures are not well employed”. No one qualified and willing to remove to the coast of Africa was to be found in the Danish West Indies, however, and the Chamber suggested that perhaps a few men acquainted with the cultivation of coffee could be recruited from Martinique or Puerto Rico. On November 9, 1832, King Frederik ordered the Chamber of Customs to present suggestions for the composition of a special commission to study the Guinea question.34 In the meantime, a number of steps were to be taken immediately to encourage existing plantations and to prepare the way for the establishment of an agricultural colony. The king authorized the expenditure of up to four thousand rigsdaler towards the

34 Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, royal resolution, Copenhagen, November, 9, 1832 (No. 99); GJ 474/1832. Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 204, was aware of the appointment of this commission but appears to have known nothing of its archives. 448 chapter twelve purchase of slave families from the interior of Africa for these plantations. (In his draft of the representation to the king, Thonning had put the cost of the various new arrangements the Chamber recommended at four or six thousand rigsdaler a year. This figure was crossed out in favor of “up to 4,000”, “once and for all”, which was then also crossed out. A note to Thonning among the Guinea Commission’s papers from one of the Chamber’s administrative secretaries warned him that the representation had been held up on Director Lowzow’s desk because of this reference to increased annual expenditures. Lowzow wanted this matter to be formally discussed by the collegium, and Thonning was requested to bring appropriate documentation with him to the meeting that day.35) If circumstances permitted, a militia was to be organized.36 Stallions and mares were to be obtained from the interior, and tack for six or eight small horses was to be sent out from Denmark. The Chamber of Customs was ordered to once again correspond with the Danish West Indian Government regarding a few young men experienced with plantations, and in particular with coffee, who might be willing to take service in Africa, “although these planters must be sought in our own West Indian islands, for we do not find it advisable to place in Guinea anyone from one of the other powers’ possessions in the West Indies”.37 The king also over- ruled his Chamber of Customs and allowed Lind a small consideration towards the purchase of a carriage suitable to his station on the coast. With this legislative step, Thonning had perhaps attained his immediate goals, which, to be sure, were carefully measured. It is hard to say whether Governor Lind thought that he himself had accomplished much. The king had signed language fairly firmly endorsing an ambitious African colonial future for his country but had not found himself obliged to

35 GJS 536/1848, draft, marked 1, of the Chamber’s representation regarding Governor Lind’s proposals.; GK II, Wedel, November 3, 1832, to Thonning, in association with Designation 7 documents. 36 ad GJ 474/1832, draft of Chamber’s letter to Lind, November 15, 1832, filed at GJS 536/1848. 37 GJ 499/1832, royal resolution, November 9, 1832, ordering the Chamber of Customs to communicate with the Danish West Indian government regarding plantation overseers; an abstract of this resolution and a copy of the Chamber’s letter to the West Indian government, November 27, 1832, were classified by the Guinea Commission as Designation 6, Nos. 5 and 6, and are now filed at GJS 671/1833. Royal resolutions, which is to say the operative legislation affixed to the government’s representations to the king, rarely deviated even as much as this from the language proposed by the bureaucracy, and this is an indication of the degree to which the monarch depended on a competent and disciplined administrative apparatus, as well as of the extent of the foregoing oral communication, now unrecov- erable, that underlay the final texts of legislation. the commission frames its debate 449 advance the matter so very far: fiscal conservatism remained the hallmark of the administration, or at any rate the other main pillar of its African colonial policy. Toward the end of November, the Chamber of Customs, having corresponded with the financial branch of the administration,38 submitted a fresh representation regarding the make-up of the new commission the king had ordered seated to study Denmark’s African colonial future. The Chamber recommended that since the commission’s work will not touch solely on the colonial administration, but also on trade and shipping, as well as the state’s finances (in so far as a colonization plan cannot be expected to be carried out without extraordinary expenditures from the treasury), the new commission should consist of representatives from both the Chamber of Customs and from the Finance Deputation, and that “it would also be useful if in the commission were also enlisted an expert in the word’s large-scale trade, as well as one who is familiar with Guinea’s localities”.39 On January 9, 1833, King Frederik created the Guinea Commission, which was to study whether Our establishments on the Guinea Coast should be maintained in the manner which is now followed, or whether circumstances might make it advisable that a colonization plan should be put into execution, and that in such case a well-grounded proposal regarding the way in which this can most appropriately occur is to be made.40 Peter Thonning had written a great deal of scope for the commission’s investigation into the legislation: “In so far as the goal of the Commission’s deliberations cannot be properly attained with the information that can be obtained here”, considerable time was likely to pass before the commission arrived at its conclusions; in the meantime, it was to send in quarterly reports. This was almost to guarantee that the commission’s study would be quite a protracted affair, but there seems no reason to suppose that the administration was trying to shunt the African colonial question out onto a side track.

38 FJ 3976/1832, the Chamber of Customs, December 6, 1832; FJ 4285/1832, annotation of December 28, 1832. 39 Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, representation November 27, resolution December 4, 1832; GJ 474/1832. 40 GK I, Frederik VI, Copenhagen, January 9, 1833, copy at GJS 536/1848; GTK, Guineiske resolutioner 1832–39, No. 256, January 9, 1833. 450 chapter twelve

The documentary evidence indicates that it was Thonning’s idea to form the Guinea Commission, although he may have been forced in this direction. He saw in the history of the Danish venture on the coast a series of troublesome setbacks for a colonial project that appeared to him almost inevitable, rather than a string of foolish and futile imperial gestures by the monarch of a fatally weakened state. He may have seen this as an opportunity, for which he had been waiting for thirty years, to forcefully present his arguments in favor of an agricultural colony through an influential new policy-making body that he believed he could dominate; others in the Chamber of Customs perhaps regarded the appointment of this commission as a safe enough way to delay consideration of so ambitious an undertaking. Frederik VI, for his part, had been watching the Guinea situation for forty-five years, and may have felt that little enough urgency attached to the matter. Governor Lind, having forced the issue this far, was on his way back to Africa, supplied with encouraging words and a few thousand rigsdaler, and administrative debate about Denmark’s future in Africa was now centralized in the Guinea Commission. The royal charge was sent to Johan F.G. Schønheyder, the director of the Exchequer and a high-ranking deputy of the Finance Deputation; to Nicolai Abraham Holten, a member of the Directorate for the National Debt; to Severin H.A. Wedel, an official in the Chamber of Customs; to former interim governor Jens Findt; to the merchant financier Joseph Hambro, and to Peter Thonning. (Thonning’s minute in the Guinea Journal regarding the composition of the commission recommended that Balthazar Christensen should serve as the commission’s secretary, but Christensen’s name apparently had not yet been laid before the king in this connection.41) Johan Schønheyder was the Guinea Commission’s most senior official. His career had carried him from the practice of law at the highest levels into state financial administration in the difficult period after the Napoleonic Wars. In 1831, after a time in regional administration, he was appointed director of the Exchequer, which had charge of public forests, roads, and buildings; the national cadastral administration; and the collection of taxes,42 although control of the disbursement of the national

41 GJ 474/1832 [royal resolution of November 9, 1832]. See GTK, Indiske konceptforestill- inger, 1832, for a draft regarding the composition of the commission, in which passages regarding Balthazar Christensen are firmly and repeatedly struck out. 42 Marcus Rubin, Frederik VIs tid: økonomiske og historiske studier (Copenhagen: P.G. Philipsens Forlag, 1895), p. 23. the commission frames its debate 451 revenues had by this time passed to the Finance Deputation, in which Schønheyder was also a deputy from 1831 until the reorganization and streamlining of the government undertaken by Christian VIII in 1840 not long after he ascended the throne.43 Schønheyder does not cast much of a shadow in the broader histories of the period. According to a manuscript biography “told by his son to his grandchildren”, Frederik VI “had always been well disposed toward Schønheyder, even if he did not fully appreciate his worth”.44 He was a man of broad experience, but he is not known to have had any particular connection to any of the Danish colonies. Nicolai Holten had been apprenticed in the offices of Niels Ryberg, the great Danish East India Company merchant,45 and made his fortune as a commercial broker in Copenhagen.46 Holten’s uncle was the great Danish man of science P.C. Abildgaard, and his brother Hans Holten tutored one of the Danish princes in the natural sciences.47 His expertise in international exchange markets drew him into administrative financial circles; King Frederik often sought his advice regarding his private investments. This was a financier of considerable substance who was appointed to the Guinea Commission, and not a man, presumably, whom the king or his government would wish to burden with inconsequential administrative chores. The merchant Joseph Hambro, a Jew in a rather rigidly Lutheran society, was a man of similar financial expertise.48 He made a good deal of his fortune in the West Indian trade and on several occasions made large loans to the Danish state.49 In the 1830s, he erected Denmark’s first steam- powered grain mill. His son Carl, whom he had placed in the home of Johannes Reinhardt, of the Natural History Museum,50 to be raised in the

43 “Schønheyder, Johan Franciscus Gottlieb”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 2nd. ed.; see Frank Jørgensen and Morten Westrup, Dansk centraladministration i tiden indtil 1848 (Dansk Historisk Fællesforening, 1982), pp. 164, 171, 177. 44 Privatarkiv No. 5227, Bruun, Peter Daniel, Box 3, an envelope of material on J.F.G. Schønheyder, “hans Liv og Levnet fortalt af hans Søn til hans Børneborn osv. osv”, reproduced in Jørgen Swane, “Rentekammerdirektør, Geheimekonferensraad Johan Franciscus Gottlieb Schønheyders Levned”, Personalhistorisk Tidsskrift, series 9, Vol. 2, 1929, pp. 122–139. 45 “Ryberg, Niels”, Dansk biografisk lexikon, C.F. Bricka, ed. [at runeberg.org/dbl]. 46 “Holten, Nicolai”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 2nd. ed. 47 Hopkins, “Peter Thonning and the natural historical collections of Denmark’s Prince Christian” pp. 149–150. 48 “Hambro, Joseph”, Dansk biografisk lexikon, C.F. Bricka, ed. [at runeberg.org/dbl]. 49 Rubin, Frederik VIs tid, pp. 122, 229, 232. 50 [Mathilde Reinhardt,] Familie erindringer. Breve og Meddelselser samlede af Mathilde Reinhardt 1800–1831 (Copenhagen: Bianco Lunos Kgl. Hof-Bogtrykkeri (F. Dreyer), 1887), pp. 74–75. 452 chapter twelve

Christian faith, settled, after a sojourn in the United States, in London, where the father joined him in 1840. The Hambros Bank bears their name. Jens Findt, the former governor, was one of the few people of suitable rank in the capital who had sufficient experience of conditions in the establishments on the coast to be able to contribute to the Guinea Commission’s investigation. He was the commission’s only military man.51 Severin Wedel52 was the youngest member of the Guinea Commission, twenty years younger than Schønheyder, Holten, and Thonning, who were all in their late fifties when they were appointed to the commission. Wedel had been appointed to a collegial seat in the Chamber of Customs in 1829 and stood several ranks junior to Peter Thonning: it may be that Thonning calculated that he could count on Wedel as a subordinate ally on the commission. Peter Thonning, the sixth member of the Commission, was perhaps the only senior officer of the central administration who had ever so much as visited any of Denmark’s tropical outposts. Although it was now almost thirty years since he had left the Guinea Coast, he clearly retained the utmost confidence in his African expertise, and the arguments he assuredly intended to make in the commission’s report to the king were well rehearsed. His long administrative experience had also taught him, however, that he would have to marshal his evidence with care and thoroughness to attract a consensus to his views.53 This he forthwith set about to do. Thonning launched his investigation even before the composition of the Guinea Commission had been fixed: in a letter notifying the Government on the coast of the royal decision to form the Guinea Commission, he asked the Council for information on a broad range of matters relevant to the commission’s investigation.54 Further reports were to be sent in without further reminder with every subsequent ship. Rømer’s, Isert’s and Monrad’s published descriptions, although richly informative, had no official standing. Nor could Thonning simply lay copies of the reports and proposals he had written almost thirty years earlier

51 Findt ended his days as commander of the cadet-ship Flora: “Findt, Jens Peter”, Topsøe-Jensen and Marquard. 52 “Vedel, Severin Henrik August”, Dansk biografisk lexikon, C.F. Bricka, ed. [at runeberg. org/dbl]; the name was properly spelled with a ‘W’. 53 See Hans Jensen, Vol. 1, p. 10. 54 Guin. Kopibog, November 15, 1832 (No. 377), to the government on the coast, a week after the king had resolved to form a commission but still three weeks before the commission had been formally seated); GK II, Designation IX, No. 1; two copies filed at GJS 226/1836. There is a draft of Thonning’s questions in GK III, in file marked “Gouv, Capt. Linds Forslag angaaende”. the commission frames its debate 453 before the Guinea Commission: after twenty years’ service in the central administration, he was well aware of the need to hedge his points of view about with documentation of an official character. The signed and sealed opinions of his government’s duly appointed colonial officers, even if he knew them to be the likes of his young nephew Niels Brock and others who had been elevated by circumstances to positions of responsibility perhaps well above the level of their ability, could simply not be dispensed with: formal executive power was absolutely centralized in the person of the king in Copenhagen, but the administration of the country depended just as absolutely on the particular expertise and delegated authority of officials duly exercising their functions at all levels of government and in every locality.55 The colonial office’s files were full of useful information of suitably official provenance—decades of reports, queries, proposals, disputes and their dispositions—but all this would take some time to extract from the working archives. There was no organized and authoritative body of information, besides Thonning’s own reports and essays in manuscript from the turn of the century, to refer to in the meantime; there existed no standard history of the Guinea establishments, no well-established body of precedent, none of the official or even common knowledge of localities and populations and livings that a contemporary European government could take for granted. None of the usual Danish amenities, services, and professions were to be found on the coast. None of the statistics that were becoming such vital appurtenances of domestic administration had ever been gathered in the African enclave. J.F.W. Schlegel’s “Statistical description of the principal European states” (employing ‘statistics’, in the earlier, less strictly numerical sense) had contained a thirty-page section on Guinea; Schlegel identified Rømer, Isert, Kirstein’s abstract of the Slave- trade Commission’s report in Minerva, Holberg (who had had little enough to say about the matter), and Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des etablissements et du commerce des deux Indes as his sources.56 In his marvelous, practically encyclopedic “Detailed guide to the Danish Monar chy’s statistics as they were at the end of the year 1813”, Frederik Thaarup recounted the history of Denmark’s ban on the slave trade with authority, but his description of the establishments was drawn mainly from Rømer

55 See Hans Jensen, Vol. 1, p. 17. 56 Joh. Fredrik Wilhelm Schlegel, Statistisk Beskrivelse af de fornemste europæiske Stater, Part I (Copenhagen: Trykt paa Boghandler Mallings Forlag, 1793), pp. 498–527; see Thonning’s notes on Schlegel in GK III, Uddrag af adskillige Autorer. 454 chapter twelve and Isert.57 Besides that, there were the policies, regulations, and pre- sumptions embodied in the standing annual budget and the admin istrative instructions Thonning himself had drawn up in 1816 and 1820. Thonning may have thought he already knew the answers to most of the questions he now in some haste sent down to the coast, but one of the functions of this letter, besides laying an official documentary foundation, was to attempt to define the scope and thrust of the Guinea Commission’s investigation. Thonning may also have presumed that Governor Lind, upon taking up his appointment on the coast, would be able to see to it that all Thonning’s questions would be answered in terms favorable to the establishment of an agricultural colony. Thonning naturally wanted fresh, detailed information, but he may also have hoped, as far as possible, to be able to control the format in which that information was submitted. It was the Guinea Commission’s unspoken charge to assess the potential of a colonial venture of as yet unknowable ultimate scope, basing its conclusions on what it could ascertain—at a tremendous remove—not only of the physical, economic, and cultural geography of the enclave on the Guinea Coast, but also, if less directly, of economic developments elsewhere in the tropics, for an African colony would have to compete with other producers of agricultural commodities. The commission, as Thonning no doubt appreciated, was in effect being asked to articulate a national view of the colonial world and Denmark’s place in it. Before he proceeded to his list of questions, Thonning ordered the Government on the coast (for, besides his new role on the Guinea Commission, he remained in charge of the Chamber of Customs’s colonial office) to make a large-scale “situation” map of the stretch of land between the Sacumo River and the coastal town of Labadi, and from the sea back to the mountains of Akuapem, which map, he instructed the Government, “can serve to illuminate the matters regarding which there will be questions below”. This was a central matter. In modern times we tend to take

57 Frederik Thaarup, Udførlig Vejledning, Vol. 6, pp. 617–627, 659–698. In his later but more succinct “Statistical survey of the Danish state”, in 1825, Thaarup pointed out that there were only three Danish officials in the forts and lodges on the coast. “What could again give these establishments some worth might be to get colonial plantations on the coast implemented in connection with an energetic and lively trade with the richer negro nations outside the coastal stretch, and efforts to open an outlet for the fabrications of the fatherland here. The good friendly understanding the Danes have lived in with the negro nation, the Ascheantes, who on these Coasts are among the mightiest, will doubtless not make such prospects difficult”: Thaarup, Statistisk Udsigt over den danske Stat i Begyndelsen af Aaret 1825 (Copenhagen: Fr. Brummer, 1825), p. 666. See also Axel Holck, Dansk Statistiks Historie 1800–1850 (Copenhagen: Statens Statistiske Bureau, 1901), p 139. the commission frames its debate 455 maps so much for granted as to in effect see right through them like windows, but the whole history of European exploration and expansion was inextricably bound up with the development and institutionalization of sophisticated cartography. The men and women who betook themselves to lives and deaths across the sea all through the colonial period often traveled beyond the bounds of all available maps, but the scope of European cartography expanded right on their heels, because metropolitan colonial administrators’ ability not only to direct their colonies but to even conceive of the geographical circumstances in which their colonial agents operated depended on maps.58 This is not to say that colonial maps were easy to read and manipulate, but they were nevertheless crucial tools in the construction and realization of colonial dreams and empires: they seem always to have been among the first measures taken towards the establishment of dominion, of jurisdiction, of administrative control— they were a graphic step, increasingly indispensable, towards the incorporation of new territories within the political structures of the mother country.59 Peter Thonning’s view of the Guinea Coast was always framed by the map he had constructed of the Danish territory on the coast at the beginning of his career: this was the lens through which he focused his colonial thinking. He had an unusually immediate appreciation, which probably few men in his position shared with him, of the geographical, intellectual, and political substance and communicative power of maps. However imprecise and selective the abstraction from the reality on the ground, maps allow at least some sense to be made of a distant and utterly foreign place. It was not, however, merely that “[s]ituation, size, and the places in most of these landscapes can more quickly and clearly be seen on [a] map than a detailed description is able to express”, as Thonning had written in his 1803 report to the Chamber of Customs;60 he assuredly knew by now that in this or any other colonial situation, of which the central circumstance was that it was impossible for a monarch or most of his ministers to have any direct experience of the place in question, maps, with all their subtle symbolism, were extremely compelling territorial icons. Thonning’s map was one of his most important rhetorical devices.61

58 See, for example, Harley, Maps and the Columbian encounter, pp. 2–3, 5, and Hopkins, “Peter Lotharius Oxholm and late eighteenth-century Danish West Indian cartography”, pp. 29–30. 59 See J.B. Harley, The new nature of maps, Paul Laxton, ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 190–195. 60 DfuA, GG, Thonning’s “Indberetning”, at end of § 3. 61 Hopkins, “Peter Thonning’s map”, esp. pp. 120–122. 456 chapter twelve

Time and again he had revised it and attached it to important statements of policy. For years he saw every communication to the Chamber of Customs from the coast, and geographical notes drawn from these letters can to be found on many a slip and scrap of paper in the Guinea Commission’s archives. He refers, for example, in very rough notes, to the “description of the islands in the River Volta and adjacent lands as well as of their suitability for agriculture” that Jens Flindt had sent in from the coast in 1816, noting that “there is much besides in this report to put in the map”;62 indeed, on one of his own maps, Thonning inked in a number of Flindt’s new islands and channels along the Volta, identifying them in a numbered key to one side.63 (Figure 16) Sometime after 1827 he had a draftsman incorporate most of the information on Lind’s map of the Volta River, at much reduced scale, into his own map of the enclave. (Figures 17 and 18) In the 1840s, he converted the travel times in a colonial officer’s account of his visit to Akyem into linear distances as best he could, apparently making allowance for winding paths and the steepness of the way through the hills.64 This was how African towns found their places on European maps.65 It is not known how many drafts of his map Thonning himself made. Some of the drawings are signed by copyists, and there survives a record of Thonning’s communication with one of these draftsmen. In an undated draft among the Guinea Commission’s papers of a set of instructions for the revision of his map, he pointed out to his draftsman that “the coast has gentle bays in the two places I have indicated”. “[The colors] around the towns indicate the different negro tribes; they must be larger and if possible better distinguished from one another.—Grey and blue, representing salt and fresh water, could also be somewhat clearer”. “The slopes of the mountains… are not so well-known that they could be drawn [in any detail.] I would therefore best like if the mountains were laid down with ink shading”. “The names are written too small,” he wrote. “I have corrected some letters”.66

62 GK III, Geografiske Noticer, de guin. Etablissementers Geographie vedkommende, Geographiske Notitser ang. Guinea, notes on GJ 1569/1817, Flindt, October 30, 1816. 63 RAKTS, Rentekammeret 337,26. 64 GK III, Geographiske Notitser, Kasserede Udkast til Kort over Danske Guinea, notes on Carstensen’s tour in 1845; Carstensens indberetninger, p. 158. 65 See [James] Rennell’s “Construction of the Map of Africa” in Proceedings of the Association for promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa (London: Printed for T. Cadell, 1791), chapter 12 (pp. [311]–351), on pp. 319 ff. 66 GK III, Diverse, “Observationer ved Karten over Guinea, der skal tjene til derefter at tegne en Original”; Hopkins, “Peter Thonning’s map”, pp. 110–112. the commission frames its debate 457 A rather heavily annotated version of Peter Thonning’s map, detail, with, in ink at upper right, in Thonning’s hand, a key to newly to hand, a key Thonning’s detail, with, in ink at upper right, map, Thonning’s of version Peter annotated heavily 16. A rather Fig. of courtesy Flindt in 1816. RAKTS, Rtk. 337,26. (By the Danish Jens information sent in by from drawn Volta, along the features inserted Archives.) National 458 chapter twelve A later draft of Thonning’s map, detail, with the lower course of the Volta missing, to allow for the incorporation of for the incorporation allow missing, to course ofVolta detail, with the lower map, ofThonning’s draft A later 17. Fig. of Archives.) courtesy National RAKTS, Rtk. 337,30. (By the Danish River. map ofVolta 1828 the Lind’s the commission frames its debate 459 Another later version of Thonning’s map, detail, with Lind’s rendering of the Volta drawn in. RAKTS, Rtk. 337.29. in. RAKTS, drawn ofVolta rendering the detail, with Lind’s map, ofThonning’s version 18. Another later Fig. of Archives.) courtesy National (By the Danish 460 chapter twelve

Thonning’s map, on which he had labored so long in 1802 and to which he had devoted so much attention over the years since, would clearly be indispensable to him in his effort to convey a properly proportioned sense of the lay of the land around the African establishments to his colleagues on the Guinea Commission, but he now felt himself in a position, from this new platform, to command the construction of an even more detailed and, he doubtless hoped, even more convincing graphic representation of the locus of his colonial dream. Thonning’s own map was of larger scope (and thus of smaller scale) than the one whose borders he now defined, which would cover an area of about two hundred square miles, or perhaps a thirtieth of the area encompassed in his own map. This smaller area could therefore be mapped in far greater detail. By placing this cartographic assignment at the head of his list of questions, Thonning was trying to induce the local administration not only to compile their map with reference to his questions but to compose their answers to his questions with specific reference to the map. He hoped to obtain a coherent, cartographically organized geographical description, just such as he had himself produced, at a more general scale, thirty years earlier, and to see the landscape he remembered writ even larger in this new map. “As time will not allow us to wait for an exact survey”, he went on, “which is in any case not necessary for our purposes, this map is to be laid off with trigonometric bearings” to a number of prominent points. This is the same simple method that Thonning had employed to construct his own map. He cared nothing for technique and exactitude; this map was to be an instrument in the formulation of national policy, not a blueprint for the construction of a colonial community. What he wanted was a convincing image he could put his finger on while he described for his fellow commissioners the character of that portion of the Danish territory he judged most suitable for the establishment of an agricultural colony. He then asked the Government for a “concentrated description of this terrain, its levelness or elevation, provision with rain, dew, and running water”. The Government was asked to describe the effect of local—and Thonning probably had in mind highly localized—variations in climate and soils and other conditions on the natural vegetation. Above all, the Government was to assess the suitability of the various locales for the important colonial export crops, as well as for subsistence crops and domestic animals. Thonning wanted a report on what edible fruits, herbs, or roots occurred naturally, and on the availability of wild game, building materials, and plants useful for fencing and hedging. The Government was to report on the fisheries, on the availability of common necessaries of all the commission frames its debate 461 kinds, on the condition of the roads, where such existed, on the price of land, and on all the risks to which people, crops, cattle, and buildings might possibly be subject—leopards, venomous snakes, swarms of grasshoppers, termites, and migrating herds. The plantations already on the ground were in particular to be marked on the Government’s new map. Thonning wanted detailed reports on the extent of these plantations, their buildings, production of colonial crops, methods of cultivation, and stocks of beasts of burden. He inquired about the cost, ages, and capabilities of these planters’ “serfs”. He wanted assessments of the planters’ individual enterprise and diligence and of their ability to maintain and expand their plantings. He asked “what conclusions can be drawn from these existing plantations: such as the fecundity of the colonial plants [and the] influence of the climate thereupon”. He wondered why the plantations had not on the whole done very well in the past, and what could be done to improve this state of affairs. He wanted to know why no tobacco was cultivated, and why no one was distilling spirits, for which he thought there should be a large market. He inquired about relations between the European planters and their African neighbors, about the possibility of hiring free agricultural laborers, and about the likelihood that the Africans’ interest in “the Europeans’ way of life and articles of luxury” might induce them to take up export agriculture. Could the Africans’ interest be linked to the colony’s in any other way, and could they be expected to turn to Christianity, abandon their barbaric ways, and enjoy the benefits of the colony’s “civilized state”? (Large questions like these, it can be thought, were directed as much to the Guinea Commission in Copenhagen as to the Government on the coast.) What was their potential as allies? What would their stance toward runaway slaves be? What measures would be necessary to defend the colonists and their property and to secure communications to Fort Christiansborg? He raised the possibility of pre-emptive attacks on the Africans. Would small gun towers, a small regular force, and a militia suffice to protect the colony, and what might such measures cost? Indeed, would the value of the colony justify the costs of its defense? He asked the Government’s assessment of the colony’s situation if it were to be cut off in the event of Atlantic war. He inquired about the difficulty of loading and unloading ships in the open roadstead, about whether moorings could be laid out, and about whether it might be feasible to construct a mole on the reef at Christiansborg. Thonning appears to have been particularly interested in the navigability of the Sacumo-fjo, just to the west of Accra, and in the anchorage at its mouth. Which of the European nations established on the coast, he wished 462 chapter twelve to know, could claim this river? There is no doubt of the drift of Thonning’s inquiry, but for form’s sake, constrained as he was by the language of the royal resolution establishing the Guinea Commission, he closed by asking “Whether His Majesty’s territorial rights cannot be maintained in a less expensive way than at present”. In a separate communication,67 Governor Lind was asked for information about the Dutch and English establishments on the coast from Apollonia to Prampram, and about their relations with neighboring African nations. Thonning even raised the question of whether Danish-led forces might be able, if necessary, to cross the Sacumo-fjo in the face of Dutch or English resistance. He asked if the other Europeans had attempted the cultivation of colonial products, either privately or with public subsidy. In still another letter,68 the Chamber asked whether the Government could “quietly obtain any reliable information about the English establishment on the island of Fernando del Po”. Had the object of the colony been the cultivation of colonial crops, the exploitation of the island’s timber, or the suppression of the slave trade? Had the colony been financed entirely by the government, or had private investors been involved? How had the colonization been carried out? What were the advantages and dis- advantages of the place? What progress had been made, and what was the present situation of the colony? Did the island have a good harbor? In particular, the Government was to assess “what lessons can be drawn for the Danish territory around the establishments”. In October, the Chamber of Customs had asked Lind (who was still in Copenhagen) to comment unreservedly on the contretemps between Balthazar Christensen and the late governor Hein. Lind replied that he had received Hein with all due propriety upon his arrival at Christiansborg in 1831, “but soon I detected that he showed an obvious animosity to everything I had esteemed highly,—in particular to Assistant Christensen and the merchant Richter”, both of whom, for their “personal qualities and general usefulness”, Lind had recommended highly and repeatedly.69 Hein had asked Lind to take up lodgings outside the fort to avoid any appearance that Lind might be influencing him, but Lind had visited the fort

67 ad GJ 474/1832, to Lind, November 15, 1832 (Designation IX, No. 4), two copies, filed at GJS 226/1836; another copy in GK II. 68 To the Government, November 27, 1832, Thonning’s draft and a copy, filed at GJS 226/1836; another copy filed in GK II (Designation IX, No. 5). 69 GJ 560a/1832, Lind, Copenhagen, October 10, 1832, filed at GJS 595/1838. the commission frames its debate 463 daily for three months and watched the whole unfortunate affair develop. Hein had “with coldness dismissed” all of Lind’s efforts to restore peace. Christensen’s behavior had been impeccable until he had permitted himself “to be provoked into making use of inappropriate language” in a written statement. Lind now recommended Christensen’s reappointment as Government assistant on the coast, to clear his name. Word was accordingly sent to Christensen that he should prepare himself to take ship early in November to resume his duties on the coast.70 This Christensen was by no means willing to do, and he applied to be relieved of his office, “for I do not have the courage or the desire, after the indignities it has brought me, to remain in it”.71 His petition was granted, and Sergeant Chenon, already on the coast, was appointed supernumerary assistant in his place.72 The Chamber of Customs had thought best not to mention Christensen’s name in its representation to the king regarding the formation of the Guinea Commission, for the crown naturally harbored a deep abhorrence of insubordination, but Thonning now pressed him into the Commission’s service, apparently through a back door: at the end of 1833, it was apparently thought timely for Christensen to ask for some compensation for his work for the Commission;73 he had been acting as its secretary for a year, “namely, under the guidance of Hr. Councilor of State Thonning”, he wrote, “going through the not a little voluminous Guinea archives and the not less extensive colonial literature relevant thereto, of which a selection is presently circulating among the Commission”. The Commission wrote in support of this petition that Christensen “combines with local knowledge particular competence and zeal” and that they wished to be able to dispose freely of his time and work, “which will be significant when all the collected documents are to be edited into a collected overview”.74 The king graciously accommodated Christensen with 200 rigsdaler a year for as long as he worked for the Commission.75

70 A sheet of Thonning’s draft, undated, to Christensen, filed at GJS 595/1838. 71 GJ(S) 469/1832, Christensen, Copenhagen, November 6, 1832, filed at GJS 595/1838. 72 GJ(S) 476/1832, royal resolution, November 8, 1832. 73 ad GJ 750/1834, Christensen, Copenhagen, December 28, 1833, to the Guinea Commission, filed at GJS 595/1838. 74 GJ 750/1834, Guinea Commission, February 1, 1834, filed at GJS 595/1838; GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance, draft. 75 GJ 776/1834, royal resolution, April 5, 1834. See related documents at GJS 595/1838. 464 chapter twelve

The Guinea Commission was summoned to its first meeting in March, 1833.76 Thonning prepared a short agenda for this first meeting.77 One of the items on his list reads: “[The maps are] to be laid forth, first Guinea, thereupon the large-scale”. The large-scale map will of course have been one of Thonning’s own maps of the Danish possessions. The other is likely to have been a map of the whole of the Upper Guinea Coast, at much smaller scale, published in Weimar in 1830,78 on which, at some point in the Commission’s proceedings, Thonning shaded in the area of the Danish territory in blue.79 This map appears to have lain back to back with three “cashiered” drafts of Thonning’s map in the Guinea Commission’s archives until 1980, when they were all removed to the Rigsarkiv’s Maps and Drawings Collection for safe-keeping.80 The order in which Thonning reminded himself to present these maps to the rest of the Commission is not insignificant: if Thonning’s lively and highly detailed map is turned to after the regional context is established, it seems a natural progression up through the cartographical scales, just as world maps and then regional maps are followed in an atlas by more closely focused maps of countries. Approached in the other order, the juxtaposition is a little disconcerting: the exotic little tropical world in Thonning’s map, with all the promise and meaning it held for him, is rendered down into a dab of color on the larger map, like a blue thumbprint on the African coast. His own picture is abruptly trivialized: all the verisimilitude and detail and humanity in his image are submerged in the overwhelming cartographic emptiness of Africa as the eye and the mind refocus on the more encompassing view. The Danish colonial dream fades into insignificance and improbability against the dismaying vastness of the continent. What the rest of the Guinea Commission may have made of Thonning’s map, however, which few of them will have ever seen before, is not known.

76 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance, Christensen, Copenhagen, March 1833, originally dated February 26, 1832, sending Schønheyder’s invitation to the Commissioners. 77 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance, Thonning’s note. 78 RAKTS, GTK U-samling, No. 24, C.F. Weiland, Senegambien Sudan und Ober-Guinea (Weimar: Im Verlage des Geograph: Instituts, 1830), originally in GK III; see also Thonning’s annotation referring to a Weimar map on the government’s report on Fernando Po and the other European establishments on the coast, April 26, 1833 (ad GJ 635/1833), copy, filed as Designation IX, No. 6, in GK II (what appears to be the original is filed at GJS 226/1836). 79 See GK, “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 5–6. 80 The drafts of Thonning’s map were removed from GK III and filed in the RAKTS as GTK U-Samling Nos. 21, 22, and 23. The archival marker laid in the box does not so indicate, but the maps presumably lay originally in the file marked “Kasserede Udkast til Kort over Danske Guinea” (Cashiered drafts of maps of Danish Guinea). the commission frames its debate 465

There is no formal record of how the Commission decided to approach its charge. A protocol-book is mentioned in Thonning’s scribbled agenda for the first meeting, as were “documents according to designation”, apparently in a portfolio with a lock and key, but, if any formal minutes of the Commission’s meetings were ever kept, they have not survived. Early in April, the Guinea Commission submitted the first of its quarterly reports to the king.81 The edges of some of the papers bound together in the Chamber of Customs’s Indian Representations and Resolutions, in which these reports are preserved, have been trimmed, and the secretary’s name is missing, but the bloated legalistic style appears to be Balthazar Christensen’s. The Commission reported having extracted from the Chamber of Customs’s archives all the official documents that might provide general information regarding colonial agriculture in Africa and more specific reports on “the experiments in colonial agriculture that since 1788 have been tried: Isert, Rohr’s agent Flindt, Wrisberg”, all at public expense, as well as the private undertakings of Schiønning, Steffens, Meyer, and others. “These documents, which call for the most careful consideration, are circulating now among the commission’s members”. In general, in could be reported, the Commission had “found the common opinion of Guinea’s superiority for colonial agriculture confirmed”. The Commission reported that it had sent to England for a selection of “colonial literature” and works on Guinea, as well as relevant parliamentary proceedings and official commission reports.82 “The necessity of considering these in themselves voluminous documents and writings with the greatest attention”, and the need to await reports from the coast, “will for some time limit the commission to merely preparatory activity”, but the Commission hoped to be able to submit its findings soon. At the beginning of July, the Commission again reported to the crown83 that there had been no word yet from the Government on the coast. The Commission was continuing its perusal of “archival documents and the Danish and foreign writings in local archives and libraries it that it was thought might come into consideration”. In response to the Chamber of Customs’s new query regarding the recruiting of experienced plantation

81 Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, 1833, the Guinea Commission’s first report, April 9, 1833. 82 GK II, copy of a letter from the Chamber of Customs, April 2, 1833, to the Danish General Consul, Wilson, in London (Designation IX, No. 7). 83 Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, 1833, Guinea Commission report of July 4, 1833, this time signed Christensen. 466 chapter twelve managers to send to Africa,84 the Danish West Indian Government had reported that, despite every effort, it “had not been able to find such subjects, for the free colored and the freed negroes have a particular aversion to going to the Guinea Coast and besides know only little of the culture of coffee, tobacco, and cotton, which are no longer grown in the islands”. The king’s idea had been found a trifle risible, it appears: Governor von Scholten’s subordinate on St. Croix, Peter de Nully, had reported that experienced coffee and tobacco planters could never be found on that island, “for coffee has never been cultivated among us as an article of trade, nor tobacco—cotton not since 1798 or 99”.85 No one suitable was to be found on St. Thomas or St. John, either.86 At the end of May, 1833, General Consul Wilson, in London, responded to a query from the Guinea Commission. He had been asked to gather expressions of opinion about the British colonies on the Gold Coast, whether in published writings or in parliamentary proceedings, and he now forwarded some remarks made in response to his inquiry “of the most distinguished of the houses trading to these colonies here in this place”. An unsigned and undated letter in English addressed to the Bureau Royal des Douanes et de Commerce à Copenhague related that the British government had taken over control of the Gold Coast colony from a “Company of Merchants” about twelve years prior, appointing Sir Charles MacCarthy governor.87 The English government had imposed strict limits on expenditures, and these were not likely to be raised until the African trade had developed further. The improved condition of the natives on the whole line of coast … since the abolition of the Slave Trade, the habits of industry which many have acquired and their eager desire for European comforts and luxuries, warrant

84 A draft of the Chamber of Customs’s letter to the Danish West Indian government, November 27, 1832, classified by the Guinea Commission as Designation VI, No. 6, is filed at GJS 671/1833, with an abstract of the royal order of November 9, 1832, (GJ 499/1832) that this inquiry be pursued (Designation VI, No. 5). 85 ad GJS 589/1833, Peter de Nully, St. Croix, March 22, 1833, to Scholten. 86 ad GJS 589/1833, Rosenørn, of the St. Thomas and St. John administration, March 22, 1833, to Scholten. Oldendorp, in the massive relation published more than a half century before, mentions that coffee was grown in gardens in the Danish West Indies; on St. John, “entire roads are lined” with the trees, and a certain amount of “business in coffee-beans is also carried on there”: C. G. A. Oldendorp’s history, pp. 102–103. 87 GJ(S) 596/1833, Handels og Consulat-Contoiret, June 15, 1833, with attachments, a copy of one of which, an excerpt of Wilson’s communication of May 31, 1833, marked with the commission’s Designation IX, No. 8, is filed at GJS 609/1833, where there is also an unsigned and undated document in English addressed to the Chamber of Customs, marked both ad GJ 596/1833 and Designation IX, No. 8. On Macarthy, see Wilks, Asante in the nineteenth century, pp. 169–175. the commission frames its debate 467

a sanguine expectation on behalf of these people, whose … improvement is desired by the British Government, who would promote any plan to further an object, which the nation generally have much at heart. Consul Wilson himself stated that regarding these possessions’ value, advantage, and use, I do not believe that any further view is entertained here than that they are regarded as a means to make use of a good quantity of English manufactured goods that are exported there annually and for which colonial products are brought back here. An extract of General Consul Wilson’s letter is the last item listed in the Guinea Commission’s two “Green Books” of abstracts of archival documents, but a penciled annotation at this place in one of the Green Books refers to another item, which was a letter early in August from the Chamber of Commerce88 placing Richard and John Lander’s newly published three-volume account of an exploration down the Niger;89 Denham’s, Clapperton’s, and Oudney’s Narrative of travels and discoveries in Northern and Central Africa;90 and three sets of published parliamentary papers regarding Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and Fernando Po, which had come in from Wilson in London, at the disposition of the Guinea Commission. The Commission’s Designation IX lists (as Nos. 10 to 23) a dozen publications that were to be submitted as attachments with the Commission’s report. These were the original edition of Isert’s Reise nach guinee;91 part of Frederik Thaarup’s Archiv for Statistik, Politik og huusholdnings Videnskaber; Monrad’s book; Meredith’s book; a German edition of C.B. Wadström’s work on the colonization of West Africa in general and Sierra Leone and Boulama in particular;92 the Abbé Raynal’s “Histoire des deux Indes”;93

88 Green Book of abstracts in box no. 1045; GJ 609/1833; Guin. Kopibog, August 10, 1833, to the Guinea Commission; GK II, Designation IX, No. 9. (Such exchanges between the Chamber of Customs and the Guinea Commission were a matter of bureaucratic formality: they amount almost to Peter Thonning’s writing letters to himself.) 89 Richard Lander and John Lander, Journal of an expedition to explore the course and termination of the Niger; with a narrative of a voyage down that river to its termination (London: J. Murray, 1832). 90 Dixon Denham, Hugh Clapperton, and Walter Oudney, Narrative of travels and discoveries in Northern and Central Africa: in the years 1822, 1823, and 1824 (London: John Murray, 1826). 91 Paul Erdmann Isert, Reise nach Guinea und den Caribäischen Inseln in Columbien (Copenhagen: J.F. Morthorst, 1788). 92 C.B. Wadström, Versuch über Kolonien: vorzüglich in Rücksicht auf die westliche Küste von Afrika; nebst einer Beschreibung der bis jetzt dort errichteten Kolonien, besonders der neuen von Sierra Leona und Bulama (Leipzig: Schaefer, 1796). 93 Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des établisse- mens & du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (Amsterdam, 1770). 468 chapter twelve

M. de Pradt’s Des colonies, et de la révolution actuelle de l’Amérique;94 a German edition of Pierre Labarthe’s Voyage a la côte de Guinée;95 Ricketts’s Narrative of the Ashantee war; with a view of the present state of the colony of Sierra Leone;96 and William Innes’s book on the founding of Liberia.97 Besides these there were a Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of the Colony of Sierra Leone, published on the order of the House of Commons in 1827; Papers relating to the colony of Sierra Leone; and the Report and minutes of evidence of a Select Committee on the settlement of Sierra Leone and Fernando Po, both published in 1830. In September, 1833, the Guinea Commission received the first of a series of responses to the questions Thonning had sent down to the Government on the coast the previous November.98 Having waited so long, Thon ning is likely to have been rather exasperated by the letter, in which the Government expressed its regret that it was not yet able to provide answers to Thonning’s “lengthy series of questions” on the area between Fort Christiansborg and the hills. The Government had seen fit to form a commission of its own, consisting of a number of independent Accra merchants who had resided on the coast for many years; it awaited this commission’s report. In the meantime, the Government provided the Guinea Commission with a long statement regarding the other European establishments on the coast.99 Of about two dozen forts and lodges, half were by now dilapidated or in ruins. St. George del Mina, the seat of the Dutch government on the coast, was in very defensible condition; the main English fort, Cape Coast Castle, was in similarly good preservation. A number of English merchants had factories at Fort Anomabu, which was manned by a score of soldiers and was in good condition; at Accra, St. James was well maintained, but Crevecoeur was in ruins, although it was still manned by a non- commissioned officer and a few men. There was an English palm oil factory at the ruins of Varnon’s Fort at Prampram.

94 M. (Dominique Georges Frédéric) de Pradt, Des colonies, et de la révolution actuelle de l’Amérique (Paris: F. Bechet, 1817). 95 P. Labarthe, Reise nach der Küste von Guinea, oder Beschreibung der westlichen Küsten von Afrika (Leipzig: Joachim, [n. d.]). 96 H.I. Ricketts, Narrative of the Ashantee war; with a view of the present state of the colony of Sierra Leone (London: Simpkin and Marshall [etc.], 1833). 97 William Innes, Liberia, or, the early history & signal preservation of the American colony of free Negroes on the coast of Africa (Edinburgh: Waugh & Innes, 1833). 98 GJ(S) 635/1833, the government on the coast, April 26, 1833, filed at GJS 226/1836; Guin. Kopibog, September 7, 1833, to the Guinea Commission. 99 ad GJ 635/1833, the government on the coast, April 26, 1833, filed at GJS 226/1836, copy (Designation IX, No. 6) in GK II. the commission frames its debate 469

The Government named a dozen African nations in the lands between the European forts on the coast and the territory of the Asante. All of the establishments enjoyed essentially similar relations with their African neighbors, except that the English, with “greater pecuniary means”, wielded greater influence. The English administration assigned £4,000 sterling a year to its establishments on the Guinea Coast, which was sent out in the form of trade goods of high quality through a committee of merchants in London, which took £100 a year for its services. Annual expenditures for the Dutch establishments were thought to be 41,000 guilders (perhaps £3,500). Thonning had wished to know if the Danes could marshal a sufficient force to drive west of the Sacumo-fjo, if necessary: the Government replied that the Danes could assemble as large an African force as the Dutch or the English, if they were provided with sufficient funds, although the cooperation of the Akyem and Anlo could not at present be relied upon. A military movement across the Sacumo-fjo would depend on the Danes’ relations at the time with the Africans of Dutch and English Accra, however, who would be in a position to hamper communications. Neither the Dutch nor the English had made any effort to cultivate colonial crops, the Government reported. The cause of this can scarcely be attributed to the character of the land, for this will be suitable for cultivation everywhere; the reason for it probably lies in the relationship to the natives that makes the security in property very precarious and can furthermore be sought in the vagueness of territorial rights, as a result of the interrupted situation, which has the effect that the Governments’ efforts are sometimes opposed either by the nearest foreign government or by the natives, … and even by the private residents, who with their widespread commercial relations have occasion to act in political connections, too. The Government related that Governor Maclean had told Lind that he thought it probable that Denmark could obtain control of Fort St. James for a suitable consideration. The British colony at Fernando Po, the Government wrote, had been established mainly as a place to take Africans rescued from slave ships and to which to move the admiralty court at Sierra Leone. The English had also hoped to exploit the timber on the island. It was thought that the English government could not have expended less than fifty thousand pounds sterling on the colony in the five years it had existed. The settlement had been founded with craftsmen from Europe and Africans and Eurafricans from Sierra Leone; everything necessary, including prefabricated buildings, had been shipped down at great expense. The initial settlement had 470 chapter twelve been placed on a sheltered bay, but the landing place was backed by a pestilential swamp. It rained almost every day there so near to the equator and the mountains of Cameroon (which could be seen from the island in clear weather), and the mortality had been so high that there was a shortage of labor. Relations with the native inhabitants had soured to such a degree that no one could safely go more than a mile from the establishment, and no more ground than that had been cleared and cultivated. Spain had begun to stand on its territorial rights, demanding a hundred thousand pounds for the island. Furthermore, the naval interdiction of the slave trade had evolved in such a way that instead of keeping so many large cruisers off the African coast, where they could be served by a station at Fernando Po, the British were concentrating smaller vessels around Cuba. In the spring of 1832 the English had abandoned their colony on Fernando Po. The Government on the coast concluded in the most decided terms (and this again was doubtless Lind’s opinion making itself felt in the Council) that the difference between this establishment and the Danish territory on the Gold Coast is so significant, especially since there have been colonies here for centuries and there, from the start, there had to be founded a new establishment, that between these 2 places altogether no parallel can be drawn, and the events that have taken place in the one territory can provide no guide or experience for the other. 1833 appears to have been a very unhealthy year on the coast: Governor Lind died in July, 1833, a little more than half a year after his return to the coast.100 In August, the Government (reduced now to Brock and Chenon) sent in further responses to the Guinea Commission’s questions.101 They had received a response from the local commission they had seated, and this report was enclosed, but Brock and Chenon regretted “that we find ourselves completely disappointed in our expectations, receiving, instead of, as their local knowledge promised, complete and expert replies, some highly incomplete [and] almost completely useless” answers. Brock and Chenon therefore attached their own responses to the first few of the questions, promising more as soon as possible. The map Thonning had demanded of them had not yet been made, because the officer charged with its construction, the newly arrived Lieutenant Edvard Gandil, had

100 GK III, Diverse, Materialier, Thonning’s notes on a private letter from Brock. 101 GJ(S) 692/1833, the government on the coast, August 26, 1833, filed at GJS 226/1836. the commission frames its debate 471 been ill.102 They promised to send this map in with the next shipping opportunity. The local commission’s report was signed by Richter, Svanekjær, Lutterodt, Balck, and Holm.103 It is possible that none of these men controlled Danish with the fluency of a native speaker, and the report is very roughly composed. It is impossible to say which of the men had been given the task of compiling it, or if they had all ever assembled to discuss its particulars or the possible significance of this extraordinary query from the metropolis. Thonning’s questions seem to have aroused little interest among them, and the commission’s response appears to have been based on no more actual study than a few brief conversational exchanges; their answers were laconic, mechanical, and superficial. No one appears to have made a reconnaissance of any kind. The Government’s own responses to the first of Thonning’s questions were signed by Chenon alone.104 Chenon took his task seriously, responding diligently and thoughtfully. Nevertheless, his responses contained little enough about the geography of the enclave that was not already well known to Peter Thonning, nor indeed to anyone in Copenhagen who had read the various published accounts. Chenon had risen considerably in station from a non-commissioned military appointment, and his prose was unpolished.105 He was quite a devoted amateur of natural history: he supplied the royal Natural History Museum with insects and birds106 and had recently obtained support for his scientific work from the Fonden ad Usus Publicos; some of Chenon’s, Trentepohl’s, and another official’s meteorological observations were later published by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.107

102 Gandil was in fact now the acting governor, although he did not sign this letter. See Kongehusarkivet, tillæg; Landgrev Vilhelm og landgrevinde Charlotte af Hessen, Bundle 7, Breve til landgrev Vilhelm fra forskellige, A-H, Edvard Gandil, Gandil, Christiansborg, March 13, 1833; Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 315, Larsen, p. 137. 103 What appears to be an original, ad GJ 692/1833, dated July 29, 1833, is filed in GK II, with the government’s cover letter, as Designation IX, No. 2, The ink is very faint. A more legible copy, ad Designation IX No. 2, is filed at GJS 226/1832. The copyist in Copenhagen appears to have had a great deal of difficulty with the place names, as well he might. 104 GJ 692/1833; two sets of Chenon’s responses, dated Christiansborg, August 26, 1833, are filed at GJS 226/1836. These were listed by the Guinea Commission as Designation IX, No. 3. The responses are divided into two sections, I and II. 105 GJ 476/1832, royal resolution, November 8, 1832;. 106 Henriksen, 202; Spärck, Zoologisk Museum i København, p. 57. 107 According to the Fonden ad Usus Publicos’s representation to the king, “C. has the most favorable testimonials from the Academy of Sciences and Letters, for whom he has conducted meteorological observations at Christianborg in Guinea. These are thought to be the most complete that have ever been undertaken in tropical Africa. They provide the 472 chapter twelve

Chenon described the lay of the land from the beach to the hills of Akuapem, the seasonal distribution of rains (which the local commission stressed were highly unreliable), and the increasing moisture, fertility of the soil, and lushness of the vegetation the greater the remove from the sea.108 The streams south of Legon Hill filled with water only after heavy rains, when they sometimes broke through the sand-bars thrown up by the sea at their mouths. The source of the Humo, “which falls into the Sacumofyo and which at all times of year has more or less water”, remained to be investigated. According to the local commission, the Humo ran up into the country “altogether out of the way” of the existing plantations, and in places dried up at times of drought. (On some of the extant manuscript versions of his map, Thonning depicted the Humo and the Sacumo-fjo running handily along the western edge of the image; only the Volta and the Tojeng are more prominently rendered. On other maps, including the last finished version, dating to 1845, the confluence of the Humo and the Sacumo-fjo falls outside the scope of the map.) Chenon named and in quite specific terms located a number of streams and springs in the vicinity of the Danish plantations, and the local commission characterized the flow in some of these. One stream, the Bambam, scarcely deserved the appellation, but there was water there year-round; the Sanfacubi spring yielded scarcely eight hundred pots of water a day in the dry season. The spring Pompo, at den Nye Prøve, was in fact a waterhole dug by governor Schiønning, but it supplied enough water for several nearby plantations. Another waterhole, Odioso Apapoh, had been dug long ago by brigands in this area. Water was more often than not in short supply, and colonial crops could only be grown in the richer soils north of Legon. Chenon declared himself insufficiently informed to answer Thonning’s question about the area’s suitability for colonial export crops with any authority, but ventured to say that the failure of the Government’s experiments with cotton from time to time could “sooner be attributed to incidental circumstances, such as the lack of watering and the quantity of most interesting and scientifically important information about the climate in these regions. The Botanic Garden also expects to profit by his collections”: Glarbo, Fonden ad Usus Publicos, Vol. 3, p. 295. Chenon’s (and also Trentepohl’s and F. Sannom’s) daily observations of barometric pressure, temperature, and wind at Christiansborg for years were published by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters with an introduction by two such distinguished men of science as H.C. Ørsted and J.F. Schouw: J.J. Trentepohl, R. Chenon, and F. Sannom, “Observationes meteorologicæ per annos 1829–34 & 1838–42 in Guinea Factæ”, Collectanea Meteorologica sub auspiciis Societatis Scientiarum Danicæ edita, Fasc. 3, 1845. 108 GJ 692/1833 (Chenon) and ad GJ 692/1833 (the local commission). the commission frames its debate 473 insects that devour the young sprouting plants, than to the quality of the soil”. (The passage is emphasized in pencil, doubtless by Thonning.) Cotton was probably the only export crop that could be cultivated with any success south of Legon. All the other colonial crops Thonning had named— coffee, cocoa, tobacco, and rice—would do well north of Legon except rice, for which the area was too dry. In the local commission’s view, the soil in a number of places was suitable for the cultivation of coffee, but this was “subject to various difficulties”, especially the rapid growth of weeds; and in using strict measures on the plantation’s negroes [to increase] the speed of the work, one is subject to the hard fate of losing them all when they deliver themselves into the protection of the fetish, which was the case with the older deceased plantation owners. Some provision crops were raised south of Legon, but they were harvested in greater quantity and variety north of the hill, Chenon wrote. According to the local commission, not even maize could be grown south of Legon for the lack of water, and the seeds of the cotton grown here were difficult to extract from the fibers. Chenon’s observation was that domestic animals, except horses, seemed to thrive best near the beach, but the commission reported that people kept cattle closer to the coast, and goats, sheep, turkeys, and chickens in the hills. These creatures were subject to the depredations of leopards and hyaenas. Thonning had asked what wild fruits and vegetables and other natural products were to be had in the country north of Christiansborg. The local commission referred simply to “various bush-fruits the European name of which is not known”; Chenon mentioned numerous game animals, the wine-palm, pineapples, peppers, spices, beans, greens, medicinal plants, and a “great quantity of fruits and edible berries”. (Here, as in so much of this geographical exercise Thonning had set in motion with his questions, the officer on the Guinea Coast actually knew less than his interlocutor in the colonial office in Copenhagen.)109 Oyster and mussel shells were burned for lime near Labadi and by the Sacumo-fjo. The Europeans built with flat cement roofs near the beach, but inland, because of the cost of transport, houses were thatched with grass. Prickly-pear did not grow inland, but many other thorny bushes and vines would serve for fencing and hedging. (The local commission pointed out that the prickly-pear and lime-tree were “not domestic but introduced here from the West Indies”.) Chenon described the same colored clays applied to the walls of houses

109 Thonning appears not to have thought to send a copy of Schumacher’s edition of his Guinea flora to the coast until 1838: GJ(S) 585/1838. 474 chapter twelve that Thonning had remarked upon three decades before, the calabashes used as vessels, and the fibers stripped from palm fronds. According to the local commission, palm wood was used for both beams and boards near the coast. Granite of some kind was available. The coast women made their vessels of a clay dug locally, but this was not as fine as that available by the Volta and in Krobo. The clay to be dug near the plantations was suitable only for building purposes. (The commission remarked that it was a good idea to build with a mixture of the earth in ant heaps and other soil). A white clay between Danish and Dutch Accra was not at present being exploited. Masons, carpenters, and smiths in the “district” in question possessed all the skills needed to build houses. A good number of the Africans made straw hats. “Almost all of the mulattoes are tailors, and some of them also quite good”. Shoes could also be made, if necessary, but the art of preparing the leather was unknown here. A harsh but serviceable soap was manufactured from palm oil. Men did the washing, ironing, and cooking for the Europeans, but both sexes spun cotton, from which variously pat- terned cloths were woven. “Commerce is carried on by both sexes”. According to the local commission, only palm oil was being exported in any quantity.110 The men cleared and planted twice a year in the northern district, while it was the women who tended the domestic animals. No one lived entirely by hunting. Fishing was men’s work. They made their own nets and lines of pineapple fiber, and obtained hooks from local smiths or from the Europeans. There was a great quantity and variety of both freshwater and saltwater fish, shellfish, and crustaceans, and large turtles were often taken, although their shells were of no commercial value. Chenon provided approximate prices for maize, yams, and various other vegetables, which were cheaper in Akuapem than on the coast, whereas meat and fish were more expensive. Game seldom came on the market but was inexpensive when it did. Fish was very cheap. All of these things were readily available, but water was sometimes difficult to obtain and had to be brought great distances. The prices of European provisions and drink fluctuated with the local market and prices in Europe. The way to Legon and the road from Accra to Labadi were regularly kept clear, but the road from Legon on to the hills was most often overgrown

110 See Martin Lynn, Commerce and economic change in West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), which concentrates on the British palm oil trade (p. xiv). the commission frames its debate 475 with grass. It would be desirable to cut a road along the southern flank of the Akuapem hills to allow communication among the plantations. Although, according to a convention between Dr. Isert and the Aqvapim prince, all uncultivated land in Aqvapim should belong to the king of Denmark, the contents of this contract are now to such a degree forgotten that all of the Europeans who now possess land bought it from the Aqvapims, who claim to be the owners of it. The price of land depended on its distance from the coast and on the presence of water, wood, and, in particular, of wine palms. The Africans were not as subject to the influence of the climate as people from northern climes, and those who suffered the climate sicknesses developed some immunity to them. The heat itself was not harmful. One had to protect oneself from the sun and from the cool night air; it was best to wear woolen underwear at all times of year, but one was especially liable to catch cold during the rainy season on account of sudden changes in temperature; “it can also be assumed that exhalations from the soil after rain infect the air with infectious matter”. Dangerous natural catastrophes were unknown here. One never heard of people being attacked and killed by animals, although there were numbers of more or less poisonous snakes, which were dangerous if stepped on. Mosquitoes were “unusually numerous and troublesome” in wet years, and had to be kept out with mosquito nets. There was “a large spider covered with hair”, scorpions, and centipedes, all poisonous. The Guinea worm seldom attacked anyone who did not go bare-legged. Ants were not dangerous. Horses that were brought here “seem to be subject to the same bodily revolutions as people”. Other locally bred domestic animals were not troubled by the climate, except that sheep and goats could not be shut in too near the sea. Leopards were more common in Akuapem, while hyaenas were most often to be found near the towns on the coast. Domestic animals were also pestered by various insects, and would occasionally be killed by ants if they were not rescued by their owners. The flat roofs of buildings occasionally collapsed during heavy rains, and huts of earth and clay were of course susceptible to damage. Iron rusted quickly in the salt air near the coast. Termites were no trouble in occupied houses, although houses made of posts set into the ground usually had to be rebuilt every six or seven years. The season of the harmattan was the most taxing for plantings of colonial products and provisions, especially those that were not well rooted, and the lateness or failure of the rainy season often led to shortages of 476 chapter twelve grain. Nothing at all could in any case be cultivated within a half-mile of the beach. A beetle about the size of a bee bored into trees and killed them or weakened their limbs to such a degree that they broke off in gusts of wind. Various larvae destroyed plants either by eating the leaves or spinning their nets around the foliage. Grasshoppers occurred in insufficient numbers to cause much damage. Termites would not attack living wood. Antelopes and buffaloes seldom damaged crops, but wild pigs could be destructive. “Traps are laid for them by the negroes to little effect; the goal is better achieved with fires and by keeping watches”. Most provision crops were harvested immediately before they were to be consumed, but maize was stored after the harvest and was subject to the predations of a small weevil that bored into the grains. The Africans therefore stored their corn in bins raised on posts over slow, smoky fires. Because of the humidity, stored corn, and coffee as well, had to be aired out from time to time. When Chenon’s and the local commission’s answers arrived in Copenhagen, Thonning scrawled across the top of the cover letter, “these remarks I wish to be journaled and brought back to me as soon as possible. Th.” They were then formally sent on to the Guinea Commission. A penciled note points out that the Government on the coast had appointed the local commission on its own initiative, not on orders from Copenhagen.111 A letter to Governor Hein regarding the royal plantation Frederiksgave, dated September, 1831, had arrived on the coast after his death and had been sent back, apparently unopened, to Copenhagen. Now, two years later, the Chamber of Customs simply reproduced its original letter to Hein in a new query regarding this plantation and the house the king had ordered built there to serve as the seat of the Danish government on the coast.112 Such was the unruffled tempo of colonial administration in the days of the sailing ship. The Guinea Commission’s third quarterly report was submitted to the king in October, 1833.113 The Commission had so far received from the Government on the coast only a report on the foreign establishments on the coast, the king was informed, and thus once again unable to proceed very far with its investigation. The voluminous parliamentary reports and

111 GJ(S) 692/1833, the government on the coast, August 26, 1833, and ad GJ 692/1833, draft of cover letter from the Chamber of Customs to the Guinea Commission, both filed at GJS 226/1836. 112 GJ(S) 629/1833, Government on Coast, February 20, 1833; ad 629 GJ 1833, draft of letter to the government, September 19, 1833, filed at GJS 539/1844. 113 Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, Guinea Commission report of October 8, 1833. the commission frames its debate 477 other material the commission had received from England would also be circulated among the members, since “exact knowledge of the history and state of these foreign colonies” would be central to their deliberations. In September, 1833, Governor von Scholten, in the Danish West Indies, sent in a letter he had received from one Peter Moth, who expressed himself willing to betake himself to the Guinea Coast to plant coffee, cotton, and tobacco on the government’s account.114 Moth was a descendant of Governor Frederik Moth, who had founded the Danish colony on St. Croix a century before.115 Moth thanked von Scholten for informing him that the Chamber of Customs was hoping to recruit two experienced planters.116 He made so free as to offer his services, “for my long residence in these hot climates gives me the impression that the climate on the coast of Africa will not be intolerable for me”. The wage offered was “much too low”, however, and Moth asked von Scholten “to recommend that it be doubled, which then, when the reasonable prices of foodstuffs there are taken into consideration, will be a more or less proportionate remuneration for the work performed, which truly will not be little”. Instead of hiring two people, Moth suggested, his experience would allow him to do the work of two, and the two salaries could be combined, which might even allow him to get a little ahead for the sake of his family. Moth wrote that in seventeen months on Puerto Rico he had obtained “quite good knowledge of the culture of the products that will be the objects of the work”, and he was sure that he could take charge of all of the government’s agricultural experiments on the coast, “which, in and of themselves, as far as the method of planting goes, are very simple when one has the necessary experience of the required qualities of the soil” and of “coffee’s, tobacco’s, and cotton’s appropriate care, the harvesting of the crops, and the supervision required”. “When engaged and I arrive on the coast, it will not be difficult to find among the free colored there young and suitable subjects who can be trained as competent planters, and one or 2 such apprentices will provide me with sufficient assistance”. Von Scholten undercut Moth’s application with a swift backhanded remark, saying that although Moth was “an aging man” (he was in his late

114 GJ(S) 671/1833, von Scholten, [Danish West Indies,] September 9, 1833. 115 See Daniel Hopkins, “An early map and the cadastral survey of St. Croix, Danish West Indies, 1734–1741/ A cartographic cul-de-sac”, Cartographica, Vol. 29, Nos. 3 & 4, 1992, pp. 1–19. 116 ad GJS 671/1833, Moth, St. Thomas, Aug 13, 1833, to von Scholten. 478 chapter twelve fifties), he was still “active and energetic”.117 This was sufficient word for the Chamber of Customs, and, despite the king’s long-standing and repeatedly expressed interest in this notion of transferring colonial expertise from the Antilles to West Africa, Moth’s terms were dismissed out of hand.118 The restless colonialist apparently embarked on other ventures instead: he died in New Orleans in 1840.119 In November, 1833, Balthazar Christensen once again put the Guinea establishments before the public eye in a long obituary of Gerhard Lind120 in Dagen, one of the largest Danish daily papers.121 Christensen regarded Lind as the most effective of the governors since the lamented Peter Steffens in the early 1820s. Like Monrad, Christensen wrote, Lind understood that no serious progress on an agricultural colony could be made until the last generation of slave-traders had died out, but that the time was now ripe to undertake a colonization in the hills of Akuapem, which were healthier than the forts on the coast. Such a colony could base itself on “just about all East and West Indian productions”. The driven but romantic adventurer Lind had been heavily committed to the execution of such a project; Christensen recalled him roaming the countryside in Moorish garb, armed with a dagger and a small pistol, and working at the head of crews clearing and planting. The Africans referred to him as the Iron One. No sooner had he been appointed governor in 1831 than “he laid forth a most humble representation and proposal about the coast, whose closer examination was delegated to a commission specially created for the purpose”. His loss now was “irreparable”. Christensen called his readers’ attention to a posthumously published article drawn from Lind’s report of his exploration up the Volta in 1827 and 1828 in a periodical devoted to maritime affairs, whose readership, in a seafaring land such as Denmark, was perhaps not so small; Lind’s map of the lower course of the river, lithographed at reduced scale at the royal lithographic shop, was tipped in at the back of the volume.122 (The article

117 GJ(S) 671/1833, Scholten, September 9, 1833. 118 GJ 671/1833, annotation regarding letter to von Scholten, November 14, 1833. 119 “Peter Moth”, A. Falk-Jensen and H. Hjorth-Nielsen, Candidati og Examinati Juris 1736–1936, Candidati Politices 1852–1936, Candidati Actuarii 1922–1936, Vol. 3 (Copenhagen: I Kommission hos G.E.C. Gad, 1957). 120 Obituary of Henrik Gerhard Lind, unsigned but attributed by Erslew, Almindeligt Forfatter-Lexicon, to Balthazar Christensen, in Dagen, Nr. 278, November 21, 1833. 121 Søllinge and Thomsen, Vol. 1, pp. 137–138. The paper was edited at this time by Frederik Thaarup. 122 H.G. Lind, Situations-Kort over Floden Volta i Africa optaget i 1828 ([Copenhagen]: Kgl. Sttr. A. Dir., n. d.), at back of Archiv for Søvæsenet, Vol. 6, 1834. the commission frames its debate 479 did not in fact appear until 1834, and it seems as likely as not that Christensen and Thonning had a hand in its publication. Danish readers at this time could also have found snatches of the life and history of the establishments on the coast around the turn of the century in a memoir published in 1833 by the sea captain C.H. Bonne, if it had come to their attention: Bonne was his own publisher, and the book was printed in a small town in west Denmark; the bibliographer Erslew mentions no reviews of the book.123) Towards the end of February, 1834, Dagen picked up an article on slave- trading in the vicinity of Fort Prindsenssteen that had originally been published by Søren Hempel in his provincial newspaper Fyens Stiftstidende124 under the headline “ ‘Are Danes Really Protecting the Slave Trade?’ ” Hempel’s article quoted from a report by an English officer newly returned home from his station on the coast; Hempel had seen it “ ‘in a very widely circulated German paper (Das Ausland)’ ”. Fort Prindsenssteen, at Keta, had formerly been of considerable importance, the English officer had written, but now was staffed only by a sergeant and a small watch crew, which seems to have been placed here rather to protect than to hinder the slave trade. Portuguese ships come here often, under the pretense of purchasing cowries—a species of Cypeda [Cypraea] that is used as money, 40 to a penny—but the slave trade is their real aim. Slaves were moved by water from factories at Keta to other points along the coast, “ ‘where whole fleets of Portuguese and Spanish ships come to fetch them’ ”. This account, Hempel wrote, casts an evil—we hope undeserved shadow on the Danes’ conduct in Africa. The Dane who with a certain pride is used to praising himself because his mild regime was the first that abolished the slave trade should not permit such an accusation go untested, and he invited a rebuttal.125 The following day, “the Dane” most specifically in question, namely Frederik VI himself, unwilling to overlook this challenge, asked the

123 Bonne, Søreiser paa Europas Kyster og Kysten af Guinea; “Bonne (Christian Hersnack)”, in Thomas Hansen Erslew, Supplement til amindeligt forfatter-lexicon for Kongeriget Danmark med tilhørende bilande, 1841 til efter 1858 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1963 [1858–1868]). 124 “Hempel (Søren)”, in Erslew, Almindeligt forfatter-lexicon. 125 A copy of Dagen, No. 49, 1834, February 26, containing this article, is filed at Guineiske resolutioner 1832–39, in association with documents marked GJ 24/1835. 480 chapter twelve

Chamber of Customs for comment on this report.126 A week later, Dagen ran a long response, prepared in haste by Balthazar Christensen.127 Christensen sprinkled parenthetical exclamation points rather liberally about his text to express his astonishment at various misstatements in the British officer’s piece. He pointed out that a number of important circumstances relevant to the accusation had been omitted. First, “the native negroes in their country have taken great pains to preserve their complete domestic independence and complete domestic sovereignty in their own smaller or greater states”. Only in the towns by the European forts that were actually garrisoned, Axim, Elmina, Cap Coast, Anomabu, St. James, Crevecoeur, and Christiansborg— towns that are immediately controlled by the fort cannons—can the Europeans perhaps be said to have little by little appropriated to themselves such authority that they … allow themselves to wish to prescribe laws for the inhabitants of these towns and require them to be obeyed. It had never been possible to prevent these people’s engaging in the slave trade among themselves, and this was why the European governments confined their efforts to harassing the Atlantic slave-ships. Under the walls of Fort St. James at Accra, he wrote, there lived a “slave-trade factor or commissary, a rich and powerful negro chief well known to every Coaster”, in what passed on the coast for a brilliant palace … large enough for him, his harem, his numerous house slaves, the slaves he has purchased for export, and finally for his constant guests, ship-captains, English naval officers, indeed, who—and rightly so— are interested in having seen this, in his sphere, extremely noteworthy man. The Europeans “neither have the right nor the power to forbid this man or any other of the negroes this trade”. This trader received Brazilian tobacco off ships in the roads right under the British, Dutch, and Danish guns and ran his slaves “at night under the well armed escort of his most reliable folk along the coast across the Danish district to Popo or other places below our territory”. “Since trade in slaves in the country itself and between man and man is, however, and at least for a long time yet must continue to be legal and permitted, since it is slaves that are every negro’s greatest and most

126 Guineiske resolutioner 1832–39 (GJ 760/1834), Frederik, February 27, 1834. 127 Dagen, No 53, March 3, 1834; Christensen dated his letter to the editor February 28. Thaarup headed the article with a somewhat self-serving introduction suggesting that Hempel’s piece had been published expressly with the intent of eliciting just such a reaction from an expert. the commission frames its debate 481 indispensable property”, the transports could not be stopped, even in the territories of the nations allied with the Danes, although Governor Lind had imposed a heavy tax on them and Governor Hein had actually tried to forbid the movement of slaves if it could be proved that they were destined for export. Christensen scoffed at the notion: the only effect of these measures had been that, to avoid trouble, the transports went past the forts at night or down the coast in canoes to their appointments. Christensen could himself attest that none of the king’s own subjects on the coast had had any part in the slave trade in the past dozen years, and that, indeed, they “regard it as one of the many conditions that prevent the negroes, so talented and so favored by a rich nature, from creating, through industry and production, items to barter for [manufactured] goods”, which, as things stood, they could more easily obtain through the slave trade. Christensen referred Dagen’s readers to his own article about the slave trade in Valkyrien in 1832 (which, he noted, had been republished in the “litterärische Blätter der Börsenhalle”). “I at least believe that worthy old Hempel, least of all, if he only had read it and the other trifles on Guinea that I have communicated in this periodical, would scarcely have chris- tened his article with the lurid question that introduces it”. The Chamber of Customs sent copies of both Hempel’s and Christensen’s articles to the Government on the coast asking for information that would permit the Chamber to report on the matter to the King.128 The Government provided sufficient assurances that in February, 1835, the king resolved “On the information here most humbly set forth, which We have found entirely satisfactory, the matter herein referred to may lapse”.129 In April, 1834, more responses to Thonning’s questions came in from the coast.130 Lieutenant Gandil had delivered a map to the Government two days before this packet of mail was sent off the coast, and the drawing was enclosed with the Government’s apologies that a fair copy had not been made, for lack of time and drafting instruments. As the Chamber of Customs (which, again, is to say Peter Thonning) pointed out in its letter conveying it to the Guinea Commission, “regarding this map the Government has noted that on it, contrary to its expectation, the approximate area of the various plantations, as well as the latter’s location, are not

128 Guineiske resolutioner 1832–39, ad GJ 760/1834, draft of letter to Coast, March 20, 1834, with an annotation by Thonning that Christensen’s “replique” should also be enclosed. 129 Guineiske resolutioner 1832–39, royal resolution, February 24, 1835(GJ 24/1835). 130 GJ(S) 781/1834, government on the coast, December 23, 1833, and ad GJ 781/1834, the Chamber of Customs to the Guinea Commission, April 19, 1834, both filed at GJS 226/1836. 482 chapter twelve

Fig. 19. Lt. Gandil’s map of the area north of Fort Christiansborg, 1833, detail. RAKTS, Rtk. 337,703. (By courstesy of the Danish National Archives.) marked”; in other words, the plantations were not represented at all on Gandil’s very rough sketch. In fact, the Danish plantations lay altogether outside the scope of Gandil’s map, which extended no farther north than to the northern slopes of Legon Hill.131 (Figure 19) Gandil had mapped precisely that area—the coastal plain around Christiansborg—in which Thonning was least interested. Nor had Gandil made up for this central

131 Rtk. 337,703, untitled, signed “Opmaalt af Lieutenant Gandil, 1833. the commission frames its debate 483 failure with any sort of richness of detail: there was nothing on this map, besides a small ‘x’ marking the location of the windmill erected in Findt’s and Hein’s time and some hachured indications of relief, that Thonning had not himself mapped more than thirty years before. Thonning’s careful effort to guide the making of this map and thus to constrain the compilation and communication of the essential geographic information the Guinea Commission needed had in this respect been wasted. The Government’s answers to Thonning’s questions were this time signed by both Chenon and Brock.132 They had not yet worked their way to the end of Thonning’s list. They now addressed Thonning’s queries about existing plantations.133 Since the area had not yet been mapped, neither the location nor the area of the royal plantation Frederiksgave had yet been precisely ascertained, but it lay about eight miles north-northwest of Legon. The soil there was good, if rather rocky on the slopes. There was a solid house on a stone foundation, the largest of any of those at the Akuapem plantations, with a covered veranda thirty-two feet by twelve, a storage area under the stairs, and a spacious attic.134 In addition, ever negro family has its own house, which thus compose a little town, consisting of two rows, each of 10 houses. The street [is] planted with two lines of fruit trees, which form an allée, situated below the main building, from which there is a view over the town and the greatest part of the plantation. There were four or five thousand coffee trees on the plantation. When a new piece of land was taken under cultivation, the underbrush was cut and piled up and burned, and then the ground was tilled; if there were no large trees, pisang or the like would be planted to shade the young coffee plants, which were set out, six or eight feet apart, at the beginning of either of the rainy seasons. The Government did not yet know how much the trees could be expected to produce each year. The slaves also planted a bit of maize, yams, and other fruits and vegetables. No animals were kept. Two mares from the Cape Verdes and a couple of foals were kept at Christiansborg, as there was at present no use for them at the plantation. “Of pawns and serfs” there were forty-two men, women, and children. The Government was quite capable of maintaining and expanding the

132 There are two sets of Brock’s and Chenon’s answers of December 23, 1833, at GJS 226/1836, both marked III, and one of them marked ad Designation 9, No. 3. 133 See Kea, “Plantations and labour”, pp. 132–135, regarding these plantations. 134 See Bech, pp. 104–107, and Jeppesen, pp. 62–67. 484 chapter twelve plantation, but it would be “most necessary, to bring it to any perfection, that a European, who was knowledgeable in the method of cultivation of colonial products, be present at all times”. Without the Government’s support the plantation would be unable to maintain itself on its own production, especially in the first years. Richter’s plantation Forsynet (Providence) lay eight miles north of Legon, on similar soil. There were about thirty slaves on the plantation, but no buildings beyond a few huts of clay. Richter kept quite a number of cattle, but at Osu. The plantation suffered from the lack of supervision, for Richter’s commercial concerns otherwise engaged him. His coffee trees produced better than on any of the other plantations, and it could be said that his plantation was progressing. The former Government assistant Lutterodt’s plantation, De forenede Brødre (the United Brothers) yielded quite a bit of palm wine. There was a three-room plantation house of both stone and clay, and a slave village of about twenty houses. Of about two thousand coffee trees, only a hundred had yet borne fruit. There were no beasts of burden on the plantation. “Enterprise cannot be denied the owner, but since the first efforts did not meet his expectations, he has devoted himself to commerce, which pays better”. Lutterodt himself calculated that he could maintain his plantation but not expand it in the current commercial conjunctures. The merchant Balck’s plantation, Abokebi, lay somewhat farther south than the others, down out of the hills. There were a dozen clay huts there, and only a couple of hundred coffee trees, about half of them bearing, from which Balck harvested forty pounds of coffee a year. “The owner was once quite enterprising but is now getting on in years”, and the plantation was not likely to be expanded. A little to the east of Richter’s place, and on similar ground, lay Hans Svanekjær’s plantation den Nye Prøve. Here there was an old house and eight or ten huts constructed of clay. Svanekjær had about two thousand coffee trees, and kept a dozen workers and their families on the plantation. He was very young and had only owned the plantation for a short time, so the Government reserved judgment about the energy he devoted to the matter. The plantation was in fact already in decline, although this could be attributed to flooding on the Dacubi; there had been standing water on a substantial portion of the coffee planting for several months. Besides these, Brock and the merchants Holm and Aarestrup owned land back towards the hills but had not yet begun to cultivate coffee, for the actual intention of it is to be able to send there those of their negroes they have no use for at Christiansborg, and where they thus by cultivating the soil support themselves, and besides that, annually deliver to their the commission frames its debate 485

masters a portion of what they harvest, against which they receive in turn clothing once a year and in addition agricultural tools. “What conclusions, based on experience, can be drawn from the present plantations?”, Thonning had asked. “Experience seems to show, from the present plantations”, Brock and Chenon wrote, “that the coffee plant is not particularly fruitful”. This could be attributed, to be sure, to the local climate’s extremes of dryness and wetness, but also to the owners’ ignorance of the method of cultivating colonial products, for the plants are often placed in such places that an expert in the method of cultivation would not have planted them out, as well as the negroes’ neglect of cleaning and clearing around them when the owner is not himself present, whereby they are then choked by the tall grass. The slaves worked three days out of the seven for their masters. Brock and Chenon thought that the slaves could be held quite steadily to the work with proper supervision and that each slave could be expected to maintain a thousand coffee plants. Slaves seldom came on the market, and certainly not whole families of them, as Thonning had speculated in his query. Disappointing early results had restricted further investments of time and energy in plantations. It would be absolutely necessary to bring experienced West Indians to Africa to pursue the experiment, the Government believed. “Experience will then show whether the land is suited to the cultivation of said products”. The prospect of better returns would then doubtless lead the local merchants to invest more heavily in their plantations. No one knew anything about the cultivation and preparation of tobacco here. As for the distilling of spirits from maize, the Africans much preferred rum. Jens Flindt’s experience indicated that no matter how inexpensive the raw materials, American traders could not be undersold, and the same was true of leaf tobacco. Brock and Chenon thought that a plantation colony need not fear its African neighbors, if it avoided disputes with them. The local commission took a dimmer view: it was the usual event that when there arises one dispute or another between the surrounding negro states, then all the plantations are subject to the greatest dangers…; in the year 1811, 1815, and 1816, the plantations existing at the time were ruined. Day laborers were commonly hired to clear ground, simply by putting word out in the towns announcing a date and place, and Brock and Chenon presumed that it would also be possible to hire regular plantation laborers; no such thing had ever been attempted. In the local commission’s 486 chapter twelve view, “if one wishes to have any benefit from their labor one is obliged to stand over them in the hot sun, for by leaving the supervision to negro or mulatto overseers one will get no benefit for the money”. The Africans at present had no interest whatsoever in plantation agriculture for export, but Brock and Chenon thought the example of a pretty fortune or two being made in this way might change their view. Certainly the Africans aspired to a European style of life, but trade, rather than agriculture, appeared to be the means of achieving this. The local commission pointed out that the Government had offered to buy cotton and coffee from the Africans in Governor Johan Richter’s time almost twenty years before, “and not a single one since that time showed the slightest desire to cultivate such products”. Thonning had inquired “whether it can promote mutual security and good understanding to make use of hired free folk as house servants and overseers”. Brock and Chenon thought that, indeed, it might be useful to have “some of the most respected family’s children as house servants and in other service”, for these could also be held hostage in times of crisis. On the whole, they thought slaves would be the more faithful servants. It would doubtless contribute to bring the natives’ interests into connection with the colony by … assisting them should the occasion arise; for it is not seldom the case in good years that the diligent native finds himself unable, for an acceptable price, to dispose of what he has harvested; it often happened, Chenon and Brock wrote, that crops rotted or were discarded for lack of a market. The colony could in such a situation undertake to support prices by purchasing crops at reasonable prices. Some of Thonning’s questions, although they identified important colonial concerns, were all but impossible to answer. He had asked “whether it can be expected that the natives in time will enter into a colony’s civilized conduct, accept the Christian religion”. Brock and Chenon replied cau- tiously, “it will be difficult to judge …; however, it dare be assumed that this would probably happen in time”. The local commission, for its part, saw no likelihood of a plantation colony’s integrating itself into the local community to such a degree as to transform it. Brock and Chenon doubted that very many runaways would seek the protection of fetishes, because the Government had recently obliged several Akuapem fetish priests to yield up a number of slaves belonging to the Danish planters; owners of large numbers of slaves usually made arrangements to buy the priests off. The local commission thought this might remain a problem, however: the commission frames its debate 487

We fully believe that if one by the exercise of might demanded serfs delivered, [they] will have a harmful influence on the colony and its settlers, for they will in one or another devious way with poison end the days of him who had used power, and put the blame on the fetish. On the whole, the Government thought that the web of Danish alliances with the Africans was such that a colony would have little reason to fear an attack, except perhaps from the Asante, who had not forgotten their defeat in 1826. The Government also complained with this mail about the condition of the three lower forts:135 repairs could not be undertaken with the resources allowed by the annual appropriation. The Chamber of Customs ignored this complaint, however, and in fact obtained a royal order cutting the staffs at all three forts to an “attendant” to raise and lower the flags on Sundays and holidays and when ships passed along the coast—solely, in other words, to preserve Denmark’s prior claim in this territory.136 In July, 1834, the Government’s responses to the last of Thonning’s questions arrived in Copenhagen. The colonial office was advised in a terse annotation that these were not to be forwarded to the Guinea Commission until Lowzow, the director of the Chamber of Customs, had seen them.137 It may be that Thonning, feeling himself secure in his position in the Guinea Commission, had been presuming a little too much on his authority over colonial affairs within the Chamber. Brock and Chenon recommended that if plantation operations were to be expanded, they should be protected by a substantial tower, with twelve cannons mounted in it, with another three towers about half that size along the way to Fort Christiansborg.138 They guessed that a twenty-foot tower, equipped with six-pound cannons, a water cistern, and a magazine, might cost four thousand rigsdaler, the smaller towers half that. They could be manned by the establishments’ regular military corps and a militia. Thirty-six men would be needed in the large tower to work the guns, and these would have to be protected by a like number of infantrymen. The planters could not expect to recover the costs of their own plantations in the first eight or ten years, Brock and Chenon supposed, and there would thus be nothing for defensive works. On the whole, the best way to

135 GJ 799/1834, government on the coast, December 23, 1833. 136 GJ 835/1834, royal resolution, August 3, 1834; Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 205. 137 GJ 812/1834, the government on the coast, February 28, 1834, slip filed at GJS 226/1836. 138 ad GJ 812/1834, Brock and Chenon, Christiansborg, February 26, 1834, filed at GJS 226/1836. 488 chapter twelve secure the colony would be to maintain cordial relations with the surrounding peoples, and especially with the Akuapem, “and indeed with their support even go forth on the offensive against individual tribes that might threaten them without particular cost”. The colony would not be much affected if communications to the mother country were cut off for a time by a sea war, as long as peace prevailed locally. The Government described some of the difficulties and risks of running cargoes in and out through the surf in canoes; anchors had to be raised daily in stormy weather, or they would dig themselves in under the rocks. They disclaimed any knowledge whatsoever of moles and breakwaters but supposed that such things could be constructed, although at considerable expense, as many of the materials and workers would have to be brought down from Europe. The local commission obviously regarded such a project as far-fetched. As far as Brock and Chenon knew, the Sacumo-fjo lay too far from the existing plantations to be of any use as a transport artery; they intended to investigate how far up it could be penetrated by canoe and promised further report on the matter. Ships never anchored off the mouth of the Sacumo-fjo, so they had no information about the anchor- ground. If the river proved to be navigable as far as the plantations, then it would certainly be more convenient to load ships with colonial produce there, except that the surf appeared to be worse than at Christiansborg. They presumed that the river fell under Dutch jurisdiction. Finally, the Government, when it discovered that the area of the plantations was not depicted on Gandil’s map, had ascertained that the royal plantation Frederiksgave occupied perhaps a hundred and thirty acres of land, Balck’s a similar area, Richter’s a hundred and eighty acres, Lutterodt’s two hundred, and so on. Svanekjær’s was the smallest: he had about fifty. The Government then turned to the Chamber’s inquiries regarding the royal plantation Frederiksgave.139 They enclosed with their short report the deed Lind had passed to Hein in 1831,140 as well as a series of deeds, establishing a short chain of title, that Lind had himself received. The plantation’s situation and extent were defined in terms of neighboring pieces of land, rather than of measurements on the ground. Some of these neighbors were Africans, and some men and women of mixed Danish and

139 GJ(S) 825/1834, the government on the coast, March 31, 1834, filed at GJS 539/1844. 140 ad GJ 825/1834, February 22, 1831, signed H.G. Lind, transferring the property to Hein, acting on behalf of His Majesty the King, filed at GJS 539/1844. To this are appended lists of the slaves sold with the property, as well as of pawns and the amounts of their obligations. the commission frames its debate 489

African blood.141 Lind’s plantation had been sold to him by a Danish- African, Jeremias Engmann, who declared in the title he proffered that he intended it to have all the force of a “legally valid deed”, which indicates that no one there that day, at the problematic boundary between African and European traditions for the possession and transfer of land, really had much idea of the validity of the document.142 Neither Brock nor Chenon had ever been to the royal plantation, and they could not venture to say whether the mortality among the Europeans would be lower there than on the coast, although they allowed that this was likely to be the case: “Europeans seem to feel strengthened after a residence of 8 to 14 days there”. They hoped to clear a driving road that avoided hills, for at present sick people on the way to the plantations were obliged to walk for an hour or so where the road passed over Legon. They expected that this road could be cut at little expense. In a private letter, according to Thonning’s notes among the Guinea Commission’s papers,143 Brock wrote that Lind himself had spent only two days at his plantation, in February, 1831, and that Hein had only visited the place once for a few days. He also suggested that if more coffee was planted at Frederiksgave there would be no room for the slaves’ maize. Obviously, very little ground had been cleared. Still, Brock wrote, “I have no doubt that plantations will be profitable, but a European must always be on the spot”. In August, 1834, the Chamber of Customs ordered a separate account kept for the royal plantation in the establishments’ official books; this was to be based on regular reports from the plantation’s overseer, whose reports were to contain “information on the cultivation, the numbers of plants, the harvest, and so on”.144 The Chamber approved the Government’s plan to cut a road around the base of Legon Hill, “although it would be desirable if this road could be laid west of Legon, if no significant circumstances were to the contrary”; in a draft of this letter, an additional clause was struck out: “for it would thereby come closer to the regions that probably will be used for plantations”.145 It appears that Thonning had it in

141 Some the European names were Jeremias Engmann, a Madame Schall, Charlotte Erasmus, Charlotte Balck, and Johanne Flindt: series of records of land transfers filed at GJS 539/1844. 142 ad GJ 825/1834, Christiansborg, March 11, 1828, signed J. Engmann, filed at GJS 539/1844. 143 GK III, Diverse, Materialier, Thonning’s notes on a private letter from Brock, March 31, 1834. 144 Guin. Kopibog, August 2, 1834, to the government on the coast. 145 ad GJ 825/1834, draft of letter of August 2, 1834, to the government on the coast, filed at GJS 539/1844. 490 chapter twelve mind to nudge the area in which he hoped to establish plantations to the west, toward the Sacumo-fjo and thus into territory to which the Dutch at Fort Crevecoeur and the English at Fort St. James could conceivably have a claim; at present, however, he may have thought better of expressing this motive in the Chamber’s letter. According to Gandil’s map, a road skirting Legon Hill to the west would fall almost due north—directly inland—of Dutch and English Accra. “After a plantation is thus established by the Aqvapim mountains”, the Chamber’s letter continued, the Government on the coast was to “submit a proposal regarding what is required to move to the plantation region”, to identify places “best suited for the seat of the government with regard to influencing plantation agriculture”, and to submit estimates of new annual costs that might be expected to be incurred in this connection. Frederik Mørck, a naval lieutenant, was now appointed interim gover- nor of the Danish establishments.146 Mørck was promoted from a position as second-in-command of the cadet ship the Najad, and it is likely that former governor Findt, one of the members of the Guinea Commission, who commanded the Najad, effected this appointment. Mørck’s travels had carried him to the West Indies, Callao, Brazil, and Cayenne between 1828 and 1831. A Lieutenant Bracht, who had also served on the Najad, accompanied him to the coast in a subordinate position.147 The Chamber of Customs directed Mørck to provide them with further and better responses to Thonning’s set of questions of November, 1832, and in particular to see to it that the map the Chamber had ordered made was soon drawn, for the one that had been sent in from the coast was “altogether unusable”.148 The Chamber also ordered Mørck to stop at Monrovia on his way down the coast to engage the services of one or two unmarried young men of good character with “particular knowledge of colonial agriculture, especially in cultivating coffee, cotton, tobacco, rice, and the like” and processing them into trade commodities. The Chamber was unwilling to pay more than 300 rigsdaler a year to hire these men, however.149 Mørck sailed for the coast at the end of September in Den danske Eeg (the Danish Oak),150 which was bound ultimately for the Danish possessions in India. An officer in the administrative council of the Danish

146 “Mørck, Frederik Sigfred”, in Topsøe-Jensen and Marquard. 147 “Bracht, Peter Enevold”, in Topsøe-Jensen and Marquard. 148 Draft of letter to Mørck (ad GJ 812/1834), September 2, 1834 (Guin. Kopibog, No. 721, 1834), filed at GJS 226/1836. 149 Guin. Kopibog, September 4, 1834, to Mørck. 150 Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 203. the commission frames its debate 491 establishment at Serampore, Johannes Rehling, was also on the ship. In a private letter to Thonning from India the following May, Rehling made a long report, undoubtedly at Thonning’s behest, of his impressions along the African coast. (Rehling was sufficiently close to Thonning to have spent some time under his roof; he thanked Thonning for his hospitality in Copenhagen.) The letter is preserved among the papers of the Guinea Commission.151 Den danske Eeg arrived at Monrovia on November 12, 1834. Rehling called Liberia “a most remarkable establishment, and, convinced that it will not be without interest to you, Mr. Councilor of State, to learn from an eyewitness something of a place about which so much has been said and written”, he permitted himself quite a long description. It was now twelve years since the colony had been founded. No European or American whites were permitted to settle there, but Africans who were prepared to renounce their own tribal allegiance were; slaves freed from slavers by British cruisers could also find homes in the colony. (Thonning underlined this last.) These freed slaves, indeed, were regarded as the “most competent” and “most diligent” of the settlers, and those most appreciative of their situation. All of the settlers from the United States, and their families, had been given free passage to Africa and given a property of ten English acres, of which two acres were cleared in advance and were ready for immediate cultivation. (This also Thonning marked.) There was a substantial, finished wooden house of three rooms and kitchen on each lot. The land and house were occupied free of charge for the first ten years, after which a very low land tax applied. The settlement stretched sixteen miles up either side of the Mesurado. The entrance to the river was broad and fair, bestrewn with small wooded islands. “On the left hand, up along the river, plantings extend as far as the eye can see”; in the background lay the “prospective” town of “Moravia” (Thonning in pencil corrected this to “Monrovia”). Rehling called it “prospective”, he wrote, because the settlers were only now turning their attention to the town, having secured the necessary agricultural base. “Rocks have been blown up, streets as straight as an arrow … have been surveyed and demarcated, buildings have been begun, … and soon the eye will meet here a flourishing town”.

151 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance, Rehling, Tranquebar, May 7, 1835, to Thonning; Kongelig Danske Hof- og Stats-Calender for Aar 1835 (Copenhagen: udgivet og forlagt af afdøde Kammerraad og Kammerfoureer Ibsens Enke, [printed by] Jens Hostrup Schultz, 1835), column 548. 492 chapter twelve

Although the river was not navigable for large vessels, communications between the upper portions of the settlement and Monrovia, which would be “the colony’s goods depot”, were easily effected in vessels of the local type. There were fifteen hundred settlers, Rehling said, and the number was growing steadily as more colonists arrived from the United States. The settlers have hitherto limited themselves [underlining Thonning’s] to cultivation of the actual necessaries of life: maize, manioc, yams, sweet potatoes, bananas, etc. But already now the cultivation of various important tropical crops is beginning. The cultivation of coffee has been tried with great success. Besides the usual blue coffee bean, another had been planted whose fruit was almost as large as a plum, with a correspondingly large bean. Samples of this product have already been sent to the United States, where this bean is found to be much preferable than the usual. Sugar has just recently been planted, but it thrives uncommonly well. The cotton bush is far more luxuriant and vigorous than I have seen it here in India. A coarse variety of cinnamon grew wild. In Rehling’s opinion, the soil along the rivers was “to the highest degree fertile. It consists of a red dish type of clay mixed with black garden mold, and seems to be able to produce whatever might be wished”. Good water was to be had not only from the rivers but in wells at a depth of only eight feet. Rehling thought that the settlers would sooner or later require educated leadership. “The raising of crops with the cultivation of which the free negroes are familiar has, to be sure, so far succeeded to perfection, but beyond this I fear that their activity will halt”. They knew little of the cultivation of coffee, sugar cane, cotton, indigo, or cacao and could scarcely be expected to succeed with extensive plantings of these crops “without appropriate instruction. It is the cultivation of these plants, how ever, which at some point, and soon, should become the basis of the real prosperity and importance of the colony”. The Liberian administration, through the Society, had “approached the governments of the southern American states, [with] requests to be supplied from there with competent colored folk who completely understand the cultivation of the plants named”. Thonning’s pencil marks elsewhere indicate that he was interested to see that the American colonists had African day laborers working among them, for very small wages. The climate was extremely dangerous for white men, Rehling said; by far the greatest number of the whites who had come to the colony in its twelve years had perished. “The few whites to be found in Liberia had a the commission frames its debate 493 pale, extremely sickly appearance; they mostly look like walking shadows”. The black and “mestizo” settlers from the United States, after a first bout of illness, were not much troubled by the recurrent fevers that were so fatal to whites. Den danske Eeg was ten days en route from Monrovia to the roadstead at Fort Christiansborg, where it lay for several weeks. Rehling wrote that “it would be bringing coal to Newcastle” to attempt to tell Thonning anything new about the place, “unforgivable arrogance”. Indeed, he had been confined to his bunk by illness for most of the time the ship was at Christiansborg. Nevertheless, he presumed that certain things had changed since Thonning’s time on the coast, and he offered his observations on what he had seen in the landscape near the fort and on an excur- sion inland “to the foot of the Aquapim mountains well known to you”. “According to the statistics”, Rehling said, referring perhaps to one of Frederik Thaarup’s compilations, “the Danish possessions on the coast of Guinea stretch from the fort Christiansborg all the way to the River Wolta, which is to say, if I am not mistaken, a stretch of seacoast that makes up about 20 Danish miles” [somewhat over 80 English miles]. There was now on this whole stretch only one other foreign establishment, a French fort (this Thonning marked with “!”) “of no significance whose name I have forgotten”. It seemed to Rehling nevertheless that the Danish dominion was more a matter of appellation than fact. He repeated the old line that “Mastery over the country and the country’s inhabitants extends no farther than the cannons of the respective forts can reach”. As none of the Danish forts below Fort Christiansborg were in fact equipped with cannons or manned, “it is easy to see how much the Danes have to say along this seacoast”. “Even in the negro town ‘Danish Acra’, immediately under the cannons of the fort Christiansborg, the Danish Government’s authority seemed to me of no significance”. The tone in which African leaders addressed the governor at a palaver at which he was present was not such as Rehling was accustomed to hear in such assemblies in Tranquebar. “What I could least reconcile myself to were the presents to the negroes, for they seemed to me to have the appearance of taxes”. There would be little in the way of “obedience” and “submissiveness” if the distribution of these gifts were to cease. As for the Danish plantations, Rehling wrote, having just visited a colony that, only ten or twelve years after its founding, promised so extremely much, it was therefore natural that my eye, upon my arrival at our own colony, eagerly looked for plantations of coffee trees, sugar 494 chapter twelve

cane, cotton bushes, and other tropical plants whose products yield such advantageous sales in the European markets. But I must confess that I saw little or nothing that permits hope that our possessions on the coast, at least soon, will from that side be useful to the motherland.

He was reluctant to try to analyze, after so short a visit, why more progress had not been made since the end of the slave trade, after which men’s energies and investments here could have been expected to be turned to plantations, but several things seemed apparent. The soil around Fort Christiansborg (this Thonning underlined) and north to the hills was “altogether disadvantageous for plantings of the abovementioned nature”. It was dry (the word was underlined, and the words “Nov. and Decemb.” were penciled in) and sandy. Water “seemed to have been distributed by nature with such a sparing hand in these regions that a plantation would doubtless only with difficulty be able to thrive in same”. Beyond that, the plantations were regarded with great indifference by their owners. These plantations, only seldom visited by them, are thus entrusted to the care of their negroes, who are commonly left altogether to themselves, and what progress a plantation can have whose supervision and direction is left to a negro who can do what he wishes, that no one will know better than you yourself, honored Mr. Councilor of State, who are so thoroughly familiar with this otherwise not contemptible race. (Thonning marked the passage in the margin.) The garden at Frederiksberg, near Fort Christiansborg, had “run altogether wild”. A few cotton bushes here and there and some coconut palms are all that remained. No progress had been made with planting at Bibease. He had not seen a single coffee tree of normal size, but “everywhere nothing but dwarf trees; I found none of them growing as lushly as those I saw in Liberia”. Land would be easy to obtain, but Rehling doubted that plantations would be left in peace once they were established. Rehling recalled that Isert had first attempted to found his colony on the Volta, which was held to be very unhealthy, but he doubted that it could be much worse than in the settlements on the Liberian rivers. The banks of the Volta might after all be the best place for a colony. I know too little of the condition of our free negroes in our West Indian islands to be able to express an opinion about whether it could be desirable for some among them to settle, in a similar manner as in Liberia, in a place that will [give] each diligent, industrious, hardworking free negro the necessary subsistence and the prospect of prosperity and comparative wealth. Late in January, 1835, governor Mørck reported to the Chamber of Customs that he had in vain sought the services of experienced planters in Liberia, the commission frames its debate 495 for there were none there to be found. “The government there informed me that it had itself applied to the Colonial Society in North America to obtain such expert planters, but had not yet received any answer thereto”. Mørck had obtained indigo plants in Monrovia, and these, “together with various other plants and seeds that I brought with me from Denmark”, he had brought safely to Christiansborg.152 For lack of anyone more qualified, the miller Grønberg had been assigned the supervision of the royal plantation. The Government also promised to report soon on the feasibility of moving the seat of the government back to the hills.153 All through 1834 the Guinea Commission had submitted quarterly reports to the king, artfully reiterating, in Christensen’s marvelously convoluted lawyer’s prose, that little real progress of any kind had been made on the Commission’s charge. The king was informed early in the year that incomplete and unsatisfactory reports had come in from Africa, including information submitted by a local commission established on the coast to study the colonial question. Sickness and mortality on the coast had slowed the investigation considerably, and the mapping “of that part of the country that seems most likely to come into consideration in the commission’s investigation” had not yet been performed.154 In April, the king learned that no further word from the coast had been received, and no map, and that, because of “the importance of these data”, the Commission would not yet proceed to its final report.155 In July, the Commission reported that fresh word from the coast would be essential to its assessment of “the both contradictory and extremely incomplete information we have been able to acquire elsewhere about this Coast country”. They had, however, “begun to have all these data abstracted and edited”.156 In October, the Commission, expressing its resolve not to produce a hasty or incomplete report, wrote that in the absence of new information from

152 GJ(S) 37/1835, Mørck, January 26 [28], 1835, filed among Guineiske resolutioner 1832–39. 153 This matter was referred to the king, who approved Grønberg’s appointment: GJ 38/1835, the government on the coast, January 29, 1835; GJ 33/1835, royal rescript, April 21, 1835; GJ 60/1835, royal resolution, May 23, 1835; ad GJ 113/1835, Udskrivt af Raadshandlingsprotocollen, September 16, 1834, to January 30, 1835, with the Government’s letter of January 27, 1835. 154 GTK, Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, 1834, #18a & b, Guinea Commission’s report of January 9, 1834, forwarded to the king by the Chamber of Customs January 14. 155 GTK, Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, 1834, 58a & b, report of April 10, 1834, conveyed to the king by the Chamber on April 15. 156 GTK, Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, 1834, 62a & b, report of July 10, 1834, to the king July 22. 496 chapter twelve the coast in response to its questions, “we must continue to postpone the actual preparation” of a final report on the colonial question.157 In January, 1835,158 the Commission reported that it had completed the work of abstracting pertinent information from the Chamber of Customs’s “older archives and the newest official reports that have so far come in from Guinea”. In April, the commission reported that it had met to discuss these abstracts from the archival record and hoped to begin work on its final opinion in the coming quarter.159 In July, Christensen put further stress on the Commission’s two indexed books of abstracts of official documents.160 (In a draft of this letter among the Commission’s papers, Christensen suggested that these extracts were to be laid before the king with this quarterly report. There is no other indication that this was done: Thonning and the rest of the Commission presumably restrained their young secretary’s eagerness to document his diligence.161) The content of the very extensive archived material had thus been put into a more accessible form, on the basis of which the commission could “prepare in a coherent order a presentation of all the local and comparative circumstances” relevant to the establishment of a commercial colony in the possessions on the coast. Christensen’s draft of this quarterly report indicates that he, and perhaps Thonning and the rest of the Commission, felt that a royal decision was called for before the Commission proceeded. The state’s commitments of resources and lives since 1817 had been quite sufficient for the maintenance of the enclave, but none of this investment had been applied to transforming the enclave into a productive colony. “We must doubt that such a transformation could have been achieved or can be achieved without much more significant sacrifices of both by the motherland”; on the other hand, the simple maintenance of the Danish claim to the establishments could be accomplished still more cheaply that at present. “It further seemed to us as beyond all doubt that the only terms under which these establishments should be able to be or remain of interest to the motherland is that they should be colonized. But an actual colonization, to succeed, would have to be undertaken with vigor”, at great cost of lives and treasure. The question was whether the Guinea Commission

157 GTK, Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, 1834, 103a & b, report of October 10, 1834. 158 GTK, Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, 1835, 9a & b, report of January 15, 1835. 159 GTK, Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, 1835, 30a & b, report of April 11, 1835. 160 GTK, Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, 1835, 53a & b, report of July 24, 1835. 161 GK IV, at front of Christensen’s “Betænkn. ang. Guinea—ved Christensen”, in file marked in a modern hand “Udkast til Betænkning om Guinea. Udarbeidet af Balthasar Christensen. the commission frames its debate 497 should proceed to draft a plan for such a colonization. All this language, however, was removed from the quarterly report that actually went to the king. The colonial undertaking would depend above all upon good men, the report went on, and the commission was particularly interested in the opinion of governor Mørck, who had behind him “several years’ residence in colonial countries and particularly in Cayenne, which has about the same climate and geographic latitude” as the Danish possessions on the Guinea Coast. From Mørck the Commission “dared expect such comparative observations as no one before has been able to provide and which indeed in general are lacking in the published writings on Guinea known to us”. However, it was pointed out to the king, since Mørck had only arrived on the coast in November, the first information he could be expected to submit would have been collected in the altogether dry and unfruitful season December, January, February, and March, and thus not useful for our purpose, and so much the more so since the desiccating wind (the Harmattan) prevailing at the beginning of the year has apparently been very prolonged this year. The Commission looked forward to hearing Mørck’s “views, based on what he has observed in America and when, after a year’s residence in Guinea, he has acquainted himself” with the effect of the seasons on the vegetation and agricultural production. Indeed, it appears that the Commission then suspended its quarterly reports for a year. More than half a year after Mørck had arrived on the coast, the Guinea Commission asked the Chamber of Customs to once again instruct Mørck to re-examine the Commission’s original questions.162 The Commission hoped Mørck “could be reminded to give this matter the utmost attention”. Mørck made his opinion of all this known in the most unreserved terms in a series of personal missives to Balthazar Christensen early in 1835, and it may be that Thonning had already received some intimation of the governor’s views. Extracts from these letters, in what appears to be Thonning’s hand, are preserved among the Guinea Commission’s papers.163 Mørck wrote that at the end of January (and thus in the depths of the dry season),

162 GJS 76/1835, Guinea Commissionen, July 24, 1835 filed at GJS 226/1836; Guin. Kopibog, to Mørck, August 18, 1835. 163 GK IV, Udkast til Betænkning om Guinea. Udarbeidet af Balthasar Christensen, Extract af Breve Xb fra Gouv. Mørch til Balth. Chr. for saavidt Landets Beqv. for Cultur kan være angaaende, dated at top XB [Christiansborg] 7/3 35 [March 3, 1835]. 498 chapter twelve he, Niels Brock, and Bracht traveled overland to the Sacumo-fjo and the Humo, having sent the fort’s canoe ahead to the mouth of the Sacumo. “The distance from here to the Sacumo is more than double so great as it is drawn on the map, and the rivers just as mistakenly drawn with regard to their courses”. (Mørck can only have been referring to a copy of Thonning’s map.) He reported that there appeared to be some connection between the Humo and the Sacumo-fjo eight miles inland, but that the main channel of the Humo did not join the Sacumo-fjo until very close to the latter’s mouth. The Humo “describes far larger and more bends and has quite another direction” than on the map. “Sakumo runs from its mouth almost parallel with the sea for about 2 miles and perhaps much farther, for we could not come any higher up in it for lack of water”. The stream had “many different arms, but it is so full of oyster banks that it can never be navigated except in the rainy season”. The land here was very swampy and looked as though it would be inundated in the rainy season. Humo, on the other hand, is a fine river, its banks are high, the river narrow and deep, and particularly rich in fish, and the land itself appears to be very fertile. Humo first becomes fresh about 6 miles up, but Sakumo was salt as far as we came up in it, and according to what the negroes say it is so all the way up into the country. He promised to visit the area again when he found time: “This is, as far as I can yet judge, the only place where an agricultural effort could be made here on the whole coast”. A couple of weeks later, Mørck traveled by canoe with Henrich Richter and Brock down the coast to the Ponny River, where Richter had a palm oil factory; they returned overland. My idea of the country, my dear Chris, has altogether not improved on this tour; on the contrary it has even worsened, if that was possible. It is nothing but a perfect sandy desert; as far as the eye can see one sees not a tree, a single bush here and there is the only thing one hits on. All of the so-called rivers are nothing but a bed for standing salt water that poisons the area. The mouth of them all is stopped up with a high dike of sand so that not even the sea, which is otherwise rather rough all along the coast, can make its way into them and refresh the water. The Ponny or Prampram River appeared to run pretty far up into the country, and he thought it must rise in Akuapem or Krobo, “instead of, as one assumes here, that it communicates with the Volta”. The river appeared to be navigable for quite some distance inland, but the country through which it ran was “surely useless”; the sandy soil at Ponny [Kpone] appeared to extend inland as far as the eye could see, which was ten or twelve miles, the commission frames its debate 499

Mørck said. “The hindrance that it is a fetish river, and that no canoe may be on it, would be the easiest to remove in my judgment”, but he simply could not imagine where people got these notions about plantations. Nobody he had spoken with seemed to grasp what would be called for. Thonning and Christensen, whom he otherwise took for very sensible men, “I can simply not understand. You must presumably have forgotten how the coast of Guinea looks, otherwise I cannot grasp your intention in putting it in this advantageous light. Both [Bracht] and I are au desespoir, for what are we to do here? It would surely have been better to cultivate the Alhede in Jutland164 than this sand desert, for even if one need not warm oneself in the winter, it is a complete impossibility to produce anything of any kind whatsoever here in this country, not to speak of how difficult it is to get these so-called people, or perhaps more correctly animals, to work. We spoke of the negroes here as quite another class of people than those one finds in the colonies, but phoo!, I don’t see the slightest difference, I find them to be the same as I have found them everywhere, the same kind of lazy, indifferent, and nix-worthy people, as I already many years ago found them in other places. It would have given me great pleasure if it had been otherwise, [but] I see myself obliged to tell the truth. Mørck went so far as to say that if it were not for the Europeans, who supplied them with what little they required, the people here would be in desperate straits. A negro is, in the understanding that I have been able to form of him, always a negro, whether one finds him in the Pacific Ocean, the West Indies, America, or on the coast of Africa. It will be an absolute impossibility for him to change his nature. I have seen them now in so many different places, but it is not possible for me with the very best will in the world to think otherwise of them than that they are people far beneath the whites, something in between the ape and what among us is called a human being. To be able to think ahead in time, lay a plan, or reflect on anything would I believe be altogether impossible for them. I would even admit that they perhaps for the instant, or in dealings that only depend on considering the present, will perhaps even be able sometimes to surpass the Europeans, but one finds the same characteristic in most animals. For all that, Mørck reported that a few weeks later Bracht had betaken himself up to the royal plantation

164 The great Jutland heath was in fact being attacked, although little progress had yet been made in Mørck’s time: Kenneth Olwig, Hedens natur, revised Danish edition, Jens Peter Hovelsø, transl. (Copenhagen: Teknisk Forlag, 1986), pp. 36–37, 78–79, 99–101. 500 chapter twelve

to prepare himself a [piece] of land to plant tobacco in. I got a letter from him today, in which he tells me that there is no profit in undertaking anything before we get rain, for the earth is altogether too dry. There is a lack even of what they need to drink. I had intended to go up there after him, but now I think it is best to postpone it a little yet. The harmattan blows almost daily up there and is doing significant damage to the plants. In the Government’s official report of July 3, 1835, Mørck was somewhat more optimistic.165 The rainy season, during which not much rain had fallen, was now almost past. The coffee trees at Frederiksgave, after the long harmattan, had been in rather poor condition but were looking better now, although “since the trees have had to use most of their sap to sprout new branches and leaves, the harvest of coffee will only be very poor”. On the other plantations, except Lutterodt’s, “there is not a bean to be seen”. They had done fresh experiments with sugar cane, indigo, and many garden crops, and promised a report as soon as they knew the results. The Government was sorry to inform the Chamber of Customs that Lieutenant Bracht, “a young man particularly competent to advance the plantation enterprise”, who had lately “resided at Frederiksgave and there in the vicinity rented a piece of land, on which he had put in a small tobacco plantation”, had died. Mørck had cast himself with some enthusiasm into regional politics, if only to counter the energy of Governor George Maclean, at Cape Coast Castle, who was interested in opening up the trade of Akuapem and Akyem to the British;166 the Danish Government also reported at this time that We have succeeded in putting Isert’s treaty regarding His Majesty’s rights over uncultivated extents of land here in this country into effect, [so] no Danish white need any longer pay for the terrain he wishes to cultivate, if it was not beforehand taken into possession by anyone else. This development was greeted in the Chamber of Customs with the bare annotation in the Guinea journal “to be observed in the future”, and these items of colonial news were conveyed to the Guinea Commission. Mørck apparently took to spending considerable time at the royal plantation, although there is no suggestion that the Government on the coast had made any effort to move its seat from Fort Christiansborg.167 In November, 1835, he traveled up into the Akuapem hills in the company of

165 GJ(S) 89/1835, the Government, July 3, 1835. 166 Nørregård, Danish settlements, pp. 205–206; Metcalfe, Maclean of the Gold Coast, p. 199. 167 Metcalfe, p. 199. the commission frames its debate 501 the Danish missionary Andreas Riis, the last survivor of a group of Basel missionaries who had been sent out in 1832. After several fruitless years on the coast, Riis had recently established himself at Akuropon, the main town of Akuapem.168 He undertook a number of journeys east and west in the next few years, traveling across the Volta to Akwamu, to Akyem, and, in 1839, to Kumasi, where he failed to obtain an audience with the Asante king. In 1840, he returned to Europe under something of a cloud, having converted not a soul in all the time he had spent on the coast. Nevertheless, he had nudged the Danish establishments’ center of gravity, so to speak, back toward the hills.169 Mørck found the Akuapem and the Krobo to be considerably at odds when he arrived in the hills at the end of 1835. His efforts to reconcile their differences were rejected by the Krobo, and he elected to use military means to impose his will. In rather an unusual inland projection of European military might, a troop of forty men from the fort, equipped with field guns and rockets, joined by forces from Osu, Labadi, and Akuapem, forced the Krobo to submit in January, 1836.170 Richter, Holm, Lutterodt, Svanekjær, and Riis all took part in this campaign, and King Frederik saw to it that appropriate expressions of his appreciation were made to them.171 At the conclusion of this test of strength, which can be taken to have rather significantly changed the terms of the Danish presence on the coast, Mørck levied a large fine on the Krobo, which had the effect for a time of funneling their exports of palm oil, in the production of which they had taken a leading role (on land rented from the Akuapem),172 through Henrich Richter’s hands, cutting off the flow to British merchants.173 This led to a long and rather heated exchange of complaints and

168 Lorenzen, pp. 307, 304; Hans W. Debrunner, A history of Christianity in Ghana (Accra: Waterville Publishing House, 1967), p. 99. 169 Lorenzen, pp. 317, 320–321, 322, 328; Noel Smith, The Presbyterian Church of Ghana, 1835–1960 (Accra: Ghana Universities Press, 1966), pp. 31–34; Kwamena-Poh, pp. 112–114; GJ 441/1837, the government on the coast, January 20, 1837; GK II, Bilage (udenfor Designationerne), text of a report from Mørck to the king, April 2, 1837, regarding improper and impermissible behavior on Riis’s part. 170 Congreve rockets and field artillery had also contributed to the Europeans’ victory over an Asante army in 1826: Kea, “Ashanti-Danish relations”, pp. 470–474, and Wilks, Asante in the nineteenth century, p. 183. 171 Nørregård, Danish settlements, pp. 206–207; GJ 225/1836, royal rescript, June 10, 1836. See Kwamena-Poh’s interpretation of the outcome of this conflict and the ensuing diplomatic exchanges between Denmark and Great Britain: pp. 62–63, 104–107. 172 Metcalfe, p. 197. 173 Nørregård, Danish settlements, pp. 206–207; p. Metcalfe, p. 200. 502 chapter twelve recriminations between Maclean and Mørck; the two governors finally agreed to refer the dispute to their superiors in Europe. In Copenhagen, Maclean’s side of the correspondence was ordered translated into Danish;174 in London, the bureaucracy was similarly stimulated to action, and early in 1837 the Danish Department for Foreign affairs forwarded a complaint from London about Mørck’s actions to the Chamber of Customs,175 which, in due time, at the end of 1837, submitted its analysis of the dispute to the Department for Foreign Affairs. Mørck had been accused, as the Chamber of Customs’s report expressed it,176 of seizing British flags from the Akuapem and the Krobo, imposing mulcts, and establishing military posts to hinder traffic to the British estab lishments, thus cutting off trade. The British government demanded that its Danish counterpart order Mørck to desist from “endeavouring to stop those Paths of Commerce, which it ought to be the desire both of England and Denmark in the general Interests of Civilisation to open as wide and as extensively as possible”.177 The Chamber of Customs scoffed at the suggestion that Mørck had closed the roads to the English forts: “it would an impossibility to garrison the roads [to enforce] such a monopoly, for the roads are only footpaths, and the whole country is open to passage”.178 Mørck had complained to Maclean that the British government had encroached on his authority in a town in Akyem, in what was thus Danish territory. Maclean in response called into question the Danes’ rights not only in Akyem but in Akuapem, as well. According to the Chamber’s translation of Maclean’s letter, he had argued that if the Danes had ever had jurisdiction there, they had lost it when Akyem and Akuapem were con- quered by the Asante in the 1820s; the British had subsequently freed them from the Asante “yoke” and secured oaths of allegiance to the British crown from their head men, as the Danes had been well aware. If any

174 GJ 324/1836, the government on the coast, April 9, 1836, enclosing copies of the correspondence between Mørck and Maclean; the papers, including translations of Maclean’s letters to Mørck, are now filed at GJS 126/1850, having been moved thence from the Guinea Commission’s archive (GK III, Forskellige Autorer), according to an archivist’s removal notice; Metcalfe, p. 202. 175 GJ 399/1837, Department for Foreign Affairs, February 27, 1837. 176 Guin. Kopibog, December 5, 1837, to the Department for Foreign Affairs, No. 476 (pp. 203–250). 177 DfuA, GG, Box 872, William Wynn, Copenhagen, February 21, 1837, to Krabbe Carisius. 178 Ivor Wilks has demonstrated that there was more to these roads than “footpaths”, if only because of travellers’ need for “accommodation and provisioning” and for resort to “centres of authority” in the event of robbery: see Asante in the nineteenth century, the first two chapters in particular, here quoting from p. 2. the commission frames its debate 503

European nation had a claim on them, it must be “the regime that had liberated them from the Asante tyranny”. Mørck had written in turn that “I can only answer that the Akims and Akvapims have from time immemorial been subordinate to the Danish government”, and that they had always accepted “wages and gifts”. Maclean had rejoined that “if you wish to be guided by ancient rights”, then these tribes must in fact be Dutch subjects. The Chamber of Customs, in its response to the Department for Foreign Affairs, pointed out that it could “not discover when the nations under discussion first have acknowledged the Danish supremacy, since this occurred in the time of the chartered trading companies, whose archives are lost”. The Akuapem and the Krobo had allied themselves with Governor Kiøge against the Anlo, to the east of the Volta, in 1783 and 1784 and had time and again “turned to the Danish government as their forum”. No complaint about the Danish relationship with these tribes had ever before been lodged by any British government. The Chamber insisted on the position that Denmark, by virtue of Isert’s treaty with Obuobi Atiemo in 1788, had obtained a claim to all the land in Akuapem not previously occupied and cultivated. Neither the British nor the Dutch, nor the Asante, had then protested what had been quite a well- known treaty, and Danish work on plantations there had commenced forthwith. When, in 1835, the Akuapem were demanding payment for lands being taken up by Danish colonists and planters, Mørck had called them together and extracted from them an acknowledgment that these demands contravened the terms of Isert’s and Obuobi Atiemo’s treaty.179 In 1792, when the slave trade had been abolished, the Chamber went on, the King had taken over the direct administration of the African enclave, and the Akyem, the Akuapem, and the Krobo had been among the Danish nations identified in the formal transfer of authority from the Guinea Entrepreneurs. The first royal budget for the establishments, promulgated in October, 1792, had established regular wages and gratuities for their head men. Mørck and Maclean may have thought they had a fairly clear of idea about the actual localities they were squabbling over, and so, perhaps, did Peter Thonning at the Chamber of Customs, but it would not be at all easy for diplomats in Copenhagen and London to get their geographic bearings in this territorial dispute. An annotation on a slip of paper in the Guinea Jour nal files in connection with this dispute indicates that Thonning took “the

179 See Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 206. 504 chapter twelve map” with him to the Chamber’s formal discussion of the affair,180 and the Chamber’s analysis of the two European nations’ conflicting territorial claims in its report to the Department for Foreign Affairs refers, although only in passing, to an attachment, which it carefully characterized as “a map of the Danish territory in Guinea, with the exception of Akim, of which there was room for only the southernmost portion on the map”. The Department for Foreign Affairs’s main concern in the matter appears at any rate to have been to placate the British government, and Mørck was in the end ordered to avoid further conflict with the British on the coast.181 When a report from the Government on the coast late in the summer of 1838 brought no further news of jurisdictional disputes in the territories in question, the Chamber of Customs took care to report it to the Department for Foreign affairs.182 In September, 1835, Mørck wrote to the Chamber of Customs that he had sent the Admiralty “samples of a kind of hemp, called emong, and of pineapple flax, that seem to be particularly serviceable for rope work, sailcloth, etc. These plants grow wild and could with ease be produced in quantity”.183 In March, 1836, the Admiralty forwarded a couple of these samples to the Chamber with a copy of a report on its tests of the fibers.184 “It is seen from this”, the Chamber noted in the Guinea Journal, “that emong is about 1/4 part stronger than Riga hemp but pineapple 1/3 part weaker”. The admiralty’s experts wished to obtain sufficient emong that they could actually make rope of it and subject it to further tests of its durability. A bit of the sample had been tarred and had taken the tar well. The pineapple fiber they thought might be useful for sailcloth, although the sample had been too small for them to draw firm conclusions; they did not think it would do for rope, although it might be worth experimenting with in other manufactures.185 The Admiralty offered to absorb part of the expense of obtaining samples of a few hundred pounds. “It is noted in the report”, the annotation in the Guinea journal goes on, that it would be too expensive to send the plants home in the raw form, and that they therefore must be cleaned on the spot, but since the latter will not be able to be done expediently without the help of a scutch, it is supposed that such a one should be sent, together with a description of its use.

180 GJS 411/1837. 181 Nørregård, Danish settlements, pp. 208–209; Nørregaard, “Englands køb”, p. 368. 182 GJ 681/1838, the government on the coast, May 24, 1838. 183 GJ(S) 143/1835, Mørck, Sept 27, 1835, filed at GJS 683/1838. 184 GJ(S) 191/1836, Admiralty, March 21, 1836. 185 ad GJ 191/1836, Tuxen, Tuxen, Schierbeck and Hummel at Gammelholm, March 7, 1836, to Rear- Admiral Stephansen, filed at GJS 683/1838, but a trifle out of place. the commission frames its debate 505

Fig. 20. A sample of fibers sent in from the coast preserved among the archived colonial correspondence, labeled No. 191 G.J.p. 1836 but tucked into GJS 143/1835, itself in GJS 683/1838. (By courtesy of the Danish National Archives, photograph by Marty Ross.)

The navy’s experts reckoned that “such a machine will doubtless be of importance for the negroes themselves, instead of the tedious method of picking and cleaning the hemp just with the fingers”.186 The samples sent over by the Admiralty, labeled, “in the condition in which it was sent in” from the coast, are still there in the Chamber of Customs’s archives, the fibers protruding from the bundle of papers. (Figure 20)187 The Chamber of Customs informed the Admiralty that it was willing to procure more of this African hemp if the Admiralty would cover the entire expense of it.188 This the Admiralty was unwilling to do: expressing some surprise that the Chamber would not share the cost of further investigation of what “possibly could become an important matter for the Danish African possessions”, the Admiralty wrote to Governor Mørck directly, asking him to send more small samples.189

186 ad GJ 191/1836. 187 ad GJ 191/1836, filed at GJS 683/1838, tucked into GJS 143/1835. 188 GJ 191/1836; draft of letter to Admiralty, April 14, 1836, filed at GJS 683/1838. 189 GJ(S) 201/1836, Admiralty, April 23, 1836, filed at GJS 683/1838. 506 chapter twelve

The Admiralty had perhaps touched a colonial nerve, and the Chamber sent a copy of the Admiralty’s report on the fibers to the Government on the coast.190 The economical use of these fibers would depend on the quantities available and on production and shipping costs, and the Government was asked to project such costs. The Chamber in particular wished to know whether “the hemp emong, which seems to deserve attention, occurs under such circumstances that it can be cultivated, planta- tionwise, on a large scale”. Would it not require trees and shrubs to “climb over, which would create significant obstacles to its culture? The Chamber asked for samples of the whole plant, with “flowers, leaves, and fruit for closer scientific investigation”. A routing slip in Thonning’s hand adds: “as a guide to plant knowledge ‘Beskrivelse af Guineiske Planter’ could be obtained, … and sent out for the establishment’s book collection”.191 Almost a year later, Mørck wrote again to the Admiralty, sending a copy of his letter to the Chamber of Customs.192 He was only now responding because of the difficulty and thus the expense of picking the emong fiber. Flattering myself with the hope that I might possibly succeed in inventing a machine, or with the help of other means, to extract and clean this hemp, I have made many experiments with it, which, however, have unfortunately not yet lead to any satisfactory result. Since the sap of the plant or vine emong is Gummi Elastiqum, or, as it is commonly called, India rubber, it simply cannot be treated in any of the ways normally used in Europe to prepare flax and hemp. The vine could not be braked when it was fresh, and when it was dry it was too brittle. He had tried “to have the vine put through rollers to squeeze out the juice”, hoping it might later be easier to brake when it was dry, but this had proved not to be the case, and he thought that the fiber had lost some of its strength on account of it. He was sending home samples of the plant in hopes that a machine to extract its fibers could be produced. Emong was common in Akuapem and Krobo, Mørck reported, where it was often to be found as thick as an arm and several hundred fathoms long. It grew up and down the trees in the woods, dropping roots from every descending loop. It spread from tree to tree, and a single plant could extend over quite a large area. Where there were no trees, it grew on the ground. It did not grow so large in this case, but the fiber was stronger. “When the fiber is larger than a finger’s thickness the negroes do not use

190 GJ 201/1836; draft of letter to the government, May 10, 1836, filed at GJS 683/1838. 191 The plant is not listed under the name ‘Emong’ in Hepper’s Appendix I, pp. 167–170. 192 ad GJ 428/1837, Mørck, Christiansborg, April 2, 1837, to Admiralty, copy, filed at GJS 683/1838. the commission frames its debate 507 it”. If the vine was allowed to become wet during the drying process, it quickly rotted, and the fiber was ruined. Extraction of the fiber with the fingers was extremely laborious, and the Africans demanded a rigsdaler a pound for it, five times the price of pineapple fiber. If a machine could not be found to perform this task, the plant would be of no use in large-scale production. Mørck sent in a drawing of the plant, so schematic as to amount almost to a caricature, labeling the leaf, the fruit, and the vine, which ran several times up and down his page. He also enclosed a few of the leaves in a fold of paper; they are to this day quite green and supple.193 The following summer, the Admiralty’s technicians, with an apology for the long delay, reported that they had again tested these African fibers. In the course of picking and hackling, fifteen per cent of the emong and nineteen per cent of the pineapple had been lost, and they had ended up with a few pounds of each to work with. This had all been “spun up into common 3 1/4 # cable yarn”, which had been subjected to the standard tests. The emong had on average supported a weight of 2,340 pounds before breaking, or 130 pounds per yarn, and the pineapple fiber somewhat over half that. Riga hemp, by comparison, supported 2,609 pounds. In their earlier test, the emong had proved stronger than Riga hemp, but the fiber this time had not smelled quite fresh and had in fact been a little moldy after its long journey from Africa.194 The emong was also rather brittle, which would make it unsuitable for use in any running rigging. At the Chamber of Customs, Thonning made a note: “To be communicated to the Government—its sanguine hopes are now scattered”.195 In the meantime, the Government on the coast had written to say that “the emong plant has failed completely. Of 700 planted out there are only half a score left”. None of the plants had got to be more than three or four fathoms long nor very thick. They had nevertheless taken up quite a bit of ground: on the same amount of land in Denmark, a far greater quantity of hemp could be grown. It was therefore the Government’s opinion that emong could not be cultivated to advantage.196 The Guinea possessions fell, if only peripherally, under the purview of a new branch of the Danish government beginning in the 1830s. In 1833, a

193 ad 428/1828 [sic], filed at GJS 683/1838. 194 GJ(S) 634/1838, Admiralty, July 2, 1838, and ad GJ 634/1838, Tuxen, Schierbeck, and Hummel, Gammelholm, June 20, 1838, copy, both filed at GJS 683/1838. 195 A slip abstracting the Admiralty’s letter, filed at GJS 683/1838; a copy of the technical report was sent to the coast for the edification of the government on July 17, 1838, according to the draft filed at GJS 634/1838. 196 GJ 683/1838, abstract of item 9 in GJ 681/1838, government on the coast, May 24, 1838. 508 chapter twelve commission to organize the gathering of national statistics was seated, and the first census since 1801 was taken the following year.197 In 1835, King Frederik ordered a census taken every fifth year thereafter;198 in 1834, Peter Thonning sent down to the coast with governor Mørck a standard set of schemata and rules for the collection of the census, which was also taken at Tranquebar and Frederiksnagore in India and in the Danish West Indies.199 Thonning understood that the statistics commission’s guidelines could not be strictly applied on the coast, but he ordered the Government to collect information on people “under Danish law and jurisdiction”, classified by age, sex, marital status, rank or office, nation and ancestry, “namely white, negro, or mixture, free, pawn, or slave”. He also asked for a table of real property, indicating its location, areal extent, agricultural use and annual production, labor force, buildings, and value. He wanted a list of converts to Christianity. Another tabulation was to be compiled of the provinces and towns within the royal jurisdiction, with their distances and compass bearings from Fort Christiansborg, estimates of their populations, the numbers of arms-bearing men, assessments of whether the populations were growing or shrinking, and information on the means of sustenance and industry. (This instruction applied only to towns in Gã, Adangme, the Volta region, and Anlo; he expected only general information regarding Krobo, Akuapem, and Akwamu.) All this he wanted as soon as possible, with supplemental information to follow. It represented, on paper, at least, quite an extraordinary projection of refined new standards and procedures of civil administration onto the Danish enclave on the African coast, where the relevance of the exercise, not to speak of the feasibility of gathering the information bureaucrats in Copenhagen thought might be of interest and use to the state, was doubtful. However, with a promising new governor on his way to the establishments, Thonning perhaps indulged himself, once again, in visions of an effective Danish colonial administration on the coast. He had himself recast the national statistics commission’s instructions to accord with circumstances on the coast, and he presumably thought the census would be a burdensome but not impossible task. Having been reminded of the matter in August, 1836, however, the Government on the coast reported in February, 1837, that the required

197 Hans Jensen, Vol. 1, p. 1. 198 Holck, p. 139. 199 ad 773 VJ 1834 [with the ‘V’ underlined, for this, here among the Guinea Journal files, is a reference to the West Indian Journal], Thonning’s draft, September 4, 1834, to the government on the coast, filed at GJS 188/1846; Holck, p. 139. the commission frames its debate 509 census would be impossible to take. The Government arrived at an overall estimate by multiplying the number of men capable of bearing arms by four, which came to forty thousand people.200 The Chamber of Customs forwarded this figure to the statistics commission but asked the Govern ment on the coast to break its estimate down according to the ethnic groups within the population. A year later, the Government reported that the figure of forty thousand had not included sixteen thousands in Akyem. They then divided their figure into the populations in seven towns along the coast—Osu, Labadi, Thessing, Tema, Kpone, Ningo, and Ada, with a total of twelve thousand; the territory of the Anlo, with six thousand; Krobo, with ten; Akuapem, with nine; Akwamu, with two; and Shai, with a thousand.201 Thonning’s notes indicate that he was not happy with the way this material had been presented, but he ordered it sent to the statistics commission as well as to the Guinea Commission. He wanted the number for Akyem included in the overall estimate, because “the omission of Akim in a public statistical work would be to regard its status as otherwise” and might lead to diplomatic disputes.202 In 1840, when the statistics commission was undertaking a new census, the Government on the coast reported that there were 53,000 people in the Danish possessions but cautioned the Chamber of Commerce that this estimate bore little real semblance to a census, for “local circumstances” made such a thing “almost impossible”: this was scarcely a “well ordered state”, the Government wrote, and it was difficult to persuade the Africans of the importance of the accuracy of the count. Furthermore, several thousand of them were likely to be away in neighboring territories on business at any given time. The new number was higher than in 1838 because none of the towns up the Volta had been included on that occasion; it was now estimated that there were ten thousand people in the river towns. The Government was now assuming that arms-bearing men represented only a fifth of the population.203 This business was repeated in 1845, when yet another team of colonial administrators pointed out to the Chamber of Customs that as long as the Danish Guinea possessions are not subject to an orderly organization, a constitution, the natural consequence will be: that many measures, easily carried out in an organized state, here will belong among the

200 GJ 425/1837, government on the coast, February 20, 1837. 201 GJ 624/1838, government on the coast, February 17, 1838, filed at GJS 188/1846 (duplicate at GJS 676/1838). 202 Clerical abstract of GJ 624/1838, with Thonning’s penciled notes on it. 203 GJ(S) 16/1841, government on the coast, December 27, 1840, filed at GJS 188/1846. 510 chapter twelve

impossibilities. Among these fall ‘a census in the country’. The extent of the country, the inhabitants’ dispersal in countless plantations, in commercial affairs, the negroes’ superstitious fear of ‘being counted and seeing themselves written up by the whites’; all of this created insurmountable problems at present. The Government simply referred the Chamber back to the estimate submitted in 1840.204 A couple of months after the king initialed the Guinea Commission’s quarterly report of July, 1835, Denmark crossed a historic political water- shed. In 1831, Frederik VI had committed himself to permitting elected advisory bodies to meet, and now, on the first of October, 1835, the first of these assemblies of the estates opened its proceedings.205 Absolute monarch or not, Frederik’s had by and large been a regime of law and consensus, and there can be little doubt that the government’s collective sense was that its responsibility was not just to the head of state but to the nation, to the fatherland.206 Publicly voiced criticism, however, was not something the king had been much accustomed to hear. As late as February, 1835, the king, in response to a public petition signed by great numbers of the most influential citizenry, including many officials of the administration, protesting new measures of censorship, had issued his famous statement asserting the selflessness and benevolence but also the indispensable, fatherly centrality of his rôle in the administration of the country. The king’s proud declaration, coming just at this juncture in the nation’s political history, came to be boiled down, perhaps a trifle unfairly, into the undying paraphrase “We alone know”.207 Now, however, the state, perhaps not yet fully aware of the political implications and ramifications of allowing even advisory public bodies to meet but, for all that, acting in admirable accord with the spirit of the times,208 found itself making available information that had always been regarded as falling strictly within the purview of the royal administration. In September, 1835, shortly before the first assembly opened, the government for the first time published the previous year’s national budget, which reflected a substantial deficit.209 Three weeks later, Fædrelandet (‘the Fatherland’) a new liberal paper,210 called for cuts in

204 GJ(S) 188/1846, government on the coast, September 20, 1845 (duplicate at GJS 227/1846). 205 Hans Jensen, Vol. 1, pp. 121, 128, 131–135, 352. 206 Hans Jensen, Vol. 1, pp. 119 and, for example, 122. 207 Hans Jensen, Vol. 1, pp. 322–324, note beginning on p. 323, 343. 208 Hans Jensen, Vol. 1, pp. 122, 132, note 1. 209 Hans Jensen, Vol. 1, p. 345, 352. 210 Søllinge and Thomsen, Vol. 1, pp. 156–157. the commission frames its debate 511 state expenditures for the military and for government wages and pen- sions.211 Furthermore, the sums expended on the Danish colonies in the East Indies and in Africa appear not to be of any real benefit to the state. The time is past when trade to foreign continents made colonies almost necessary; they are now almost everywhere burdens for the motherland…. Our African colonies could perhaps with suitable enterprise and capital become useful; but that can be said of so many other uncultivated regions of the world, and now, when the slave trade is not allowed and trade with the interior of Africa will follow the course of the Niger, there seems not to be any reason to retain these colonies. This also seems to be the case for the East Indies…. We therefore believe that it would be best, and the sooner the better, to sell the East Indian and African and possibly also the West Indian colonies. Greenland and Iceland, on the other hand, “are of too much historical interest to be given up, and promise, besides, if properly made use of, quite other advantages than the former”. Fædrelandet’s sentiments were echoed in the first assembly.212 On March 22, 1836, the king seated an administrative commission to advise him on how to reduce the government’s expenditures, and this commission’s investigation entailed quite a close study of the functioning of the various branches of the government; even the collegial structure of the administration began to be called into question. Consolidations and cuts in staffing were contemplated, and it was proposed to establish separate auditing offices independent of the day-to-day administration of affairs. This commission’s work and the ensuing transformations in administrative practice extended into the reign of Christian VIII.213 The political circumstances in which the Guinea Commission operated were now thus rather abruptly altered. The future of the Guinea possessions, hitherto mainly an internal question of administrative policy, debated in a narrow circle very much under the sway of a single individual, namely Peter Thonning, had now become a matter for public discussion, and prominent new voices had begun calling for the end of Denmark’s long colonial adventure in the tropics. The Guinea Commission’s work was by no means yet done, however.

211 Fædrelandet, October 16, 1835. 212 Hans Jensen, Vol. 1, pp. 370–371, 373, 376–377; see Frederik Thaarup, Den danske Stats Finantsstatistik (Copenhagen: published by the author, 1836), pp. 263–266, in which, under the heading “Statens Indtægter fra Bilandene“, Guinea is not even mentioned. 213 Hammerich, pp. 409, 414, 416, 421,423–424; Albert Olsen, Studier over den danske Finanslov 1850–1864 (Copenhagen: Henrik Koppels Forlag, 1930), pp. 11–12; Hans Jensen, Vol. 1, p. 553, Vol. 2, pp. 124. 512 chapter twelve

In August, 1835, the Chamber of Customs complained to the Government on the coast on the Guinea Commission’s behalf that the Govern ment’s answers to Thonning’s list of questions had been insufficient. The Government responded in February, 1836,214 a trifle huffily, that the Chamber had not specified which of the questions it should particularly address itself to, but that it in the meantime would hereby take the most humble liberty of simply communicating to the High Collegium various changes that the Government is of the opinion should be made in the reports sent in earlier, especially since Governor Mørck, in accordance with the Collegium’s communication of 18 August 1835, with this opportunity will send in a report of the fitness of the country for colonization. A start had been made on the required map, it was reported, which, with a separate map of the royal plantation, would soon be completed and sent home. With regard to what was earlier reported about the rain here in this country and the character of the soil, it is thought fitting to add that in the last year we have only four times had any rain of significance, as well as that the land from here to Legon and from Legon further to Aqvapim is bare, ferruginous, and sandy as well as altogether infertile…. Of running water it is only the Hummo that deserves this name. The Government promised further report, with the next opportune ship, on experiments in recent years with various colonial products, from which, it said, the Collegium would be able to draw its own conclusions. All the privately-owned plantations “are used at present exclusively for maize-cultivation, as experience has taught the owners that they have more loss than profit of their plantations”. On the Chamber’s abstract slip for this item of correspondence, Thonning made a note that the Government was to be notified “which questions have not been answered at all or incompletely”. He advised his staff that “if other information on this—than that which has been delivered to the Commission—is to be found in the office or can be pointed out, same is requested enclosed or noted”.215 It was now almost four years since he had written his questions. The Guinea Commission’s investigation, for all its quarterly protestations to the king, had not developed much momentum, and Thonning was a

214 GJ(S) 219/1836, the government on the coast, February 12, 1836, filed at GJS 226/1836. 215 Abstract slip for GJ 219/1836, filed at GJS 226/1836. the commission frames its debate 513 man of many affairs. Balthazar Christensen, for his part, was by now deeply interested in domestic politics.216 In February, 1836, Governor Mørck, who had now been on the coast for a year, wrote:217 The high Collegium’s communication of 18th August [1835] I had the honor to receive at Krobbo late in December, and although this opportunity only gives me a short time to discuss such an important question as that regarding Guinea’s colonizability, I will, however, as far as circumstances permit seek to comply with the high Collegium’s request. The Coast of Guinea, in comparison with the colonies in other hot climates, is, as far as I have been able to judge, particularly unfruitful and unsuitable to cultivation of the plants that are commonly export articles for other colonies and constitute their wealth. The country from Sacummo to Ningo and as far as I have been able to see from there, is from the beach all the way to the foot of the Aqvapim mountains overgrown with a kind of very tough grass. The soil is sandy, mixed with sometimes red, sometimes blue and white clay and some ironstone and gravel. The depth of the soil layer is from about 1/2 to at most 2 feet, under which lies a rock mass consisting for the greatest part of quartz, sand, and ironstone that by some natural revolution or another are more or less mixed with one another. Trees or woods are not found in this terrain. Only a few thickets and shrub plants are to found her and there. Water is lacking nearly everywhere for 9 months of the year and must not infrequently be sought, especially by the beach, at a distance of several miles. In this terrain there grows almost none of what serves to support life, and the so-called plantations of maize, yams, etc. that in general make up the main component of the negroes’ foodstuffs are almost all up in or at the foot of the Aqvapim mountains. They commonly cultivate such a plantation only for a couple of years, whereafter they again seek out another piece of land for a new planting, as the other is after the elapse of this time exhausted and yields almost no output. Tobacco, indigo, and cotton grow here and there, indeed in a wild state, but the lack of rain, in connection with the soil’s poor character has the result that these plants would never come to such perfection that it could pay to cultivate them. Of domestic products that could serve for export, there are none here besides maize, but as this only is raised up between the mountains where there are no roads and the possibility of laying any out does not exist, the transport can only be by the negroes, who must carry this, as well as every other burden, on their heads. This has the result that it will not (at least ordi- narily) pay for the merchants to buy it. Furthermore, there is usually raised

216 Christensen, letter to the editor, February 28, 1834, in Dagen, No. 53, March 3, 1834; Hans Jensen, Vol. 1, p. 324, note 1. 217 GJ(S) 226/1836, Mørck, Christiansborg, February 12, 1836. A substantial amount of archival material examined by the Guinea Commission is now filed at this place. 514 chapter twelve

no more, either, at least in the Danish territory, than what is consumed here in the country, and often, in bad harvests and disturbances this article must indeed be sought in Fanté where the earth is better and the land richer in woods. The area was very unhealthy, Mørck went on:

it is generally assumed that 2/3 of [the] newly arrived fall victim to either the climate sickness or to dysentery and other illnesses prevailing here. The Harmattan, which with only a few exceptions blows from about the beginning of December until the end of March, causes such significant damage to the vegetation that it is almost completely dried out and destroyed. I therefore fail to see the possibility of attempting any colonization in this terrain. In Aqvapim the soil is better, to be sure, the country mountainous and the air clean and (as far as I have been able to judge) healthy and comfortable, and the rain there is more common; but as the whole country consists of many quite high and steep mountains, everywhere overgrown with woods, it will, in the first place, cost significantly to get a piece large enough as is needed to lay out a plantation cleared. Further it could be feared that the soil layer, which is in general just as thin there as beneath the mountains, would, as the trees were cut, be carried off with the water down into the valleys in rainstorms, and after the elapse of some time one would then have only the rocky ground left. This, at least, experience has shown itself to be the case with the plantation Frederiksgave. That the soil in Aqvapim in general is a little better that beneath the mountains can only be ascribed to the woods, which by the fallen leaves from the trees constantly provide a manure, and since the woods in general are so thick that the sun cannot shine through them, the soil is prevented from drying out and maintains its growth. On the other hand, in cutting these, as far as I can judge, the same would happen as is now the case beneath the mountains, namely that the soil would then become just as dry and unfruitful up there, as it now is down here. The Aqvapims would also, especially in the beginning, occasion the colonists considerable harm, and it would be difficult for the Government, without large costs, to provide them, in a place situated at such a great distance from the fort, with the peace and security that to a newly established colony is of such great importance.

This, together with the lack of transport, gave Mørck little hope that a colony could be established in Akuapem, either. The inhabitants of northeastern Akuapem derived considerable income from the cultivation of palms for their oil, but these

would scarcely repay the Europeans’ cultivating them. The tree is, in the first place, in general 5 to 6 years from planting until it begins to bear fruit. The price of this article is besides also in general very low and the transport from a place so far removed from the beach will besides be associated with many costs for the owner. the commission frames its debate 515

(By Mørck’s own statement, the Africans had already found it possible to overcome these costs. To be sure, ‘income’ for Africans and for Europeans might be two very different matters in his eyes.) The land in the vicinity of the Humo River is the only place that I have yet seen where possibly colonial products could be cultivated, but as it is rather low and swampy, it is to be feared that the climate there would be very unhealthy. The river is otherwise navigable for canoes almost all the way to the Akim mountains, and the water about 4 miles from the mouth is fresh and good; on the other hand the surf there allows communication with ships just about only in the Harmattan season, and it is even then associated with difficulties. Of the plantations formerly made in Aqvapim, Frederiksnopel and Frederikssted, there is no trace left. A few bamboos and guava trees are the only thing that still indicates the place where these plantations were made. Mørck ended his letter with a promise to send a report on the agricultural experiments made at Frederiksgave with a ship departing for London in two weeks. In notes made some years later,218 Thonning pointed out that Mørck (in another report also written on February 12, 1836,219) had stated that there in the last 8 months had fallen almost no rain, so that the water- shortage everywhere was significant; as well as that the Harmattan had been uncommonly strong and almost destroyed all the vegetation; that the coffee trees, etc., for the lack of rain, were almost entirely parched”, [and, further, that] “it was in Dec. 1835 and January 1836 that Gov. Mørck made this trip and campaign in Akvapim, thus at the time when the vegetation is in its winter. Mørck had then scarcely been 14 months in Guinea, which year was plagued by uncommon drought and crop failure. In September, 1836, the Guinea Commission sent another report to the king.220 It had by now produced a draft of a description of the various circumstances that might affect the establishment of an agricultural colony, “but we could not complete the editing of it or subject same to the necessary further discussion and scrutiny”, because no detailed word on new agricultural experiments had yet come in from Governor Mørck, although this report was expected at any time. The governor’s remarks hitherto

218 GK V, Udkast til betænkningen afsluttet 26. februar 1847, Diverse notater ang. forskellige udkast til betænkning (ca. 1846–47?), 1/4 46, Endvidere Observanda i Betænk., Thonning’s notes, on grey paper. 219 GJ 224/1836, Mørck, February 12, 1836. 220 GTK, Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, 1836, #64 a & b, Report of September 2, 1836, laid before the king by the Chamber of Customs September 20, royal resolution September 24, 1836. 516 chapter twelve

“suggest some risks and difficulties in an agricultural colony that significantly seem to have to come under our closer consideration”. This, however carefully worded, appears to represent quite a concession on Thonning’s part, but he could not prudently ignore the governor’s officially submitted opinion. It appears that the “interim draft” to which the Commission’s report referred (but which was not in fact submitted to the king) was an untitled and unsigned 102-page manuscript among the Commission’s papers; it can be identified as Balthazar Christensen’s work.221 It recapitulates the history of Danish colonial efforts on the coast since Isert’s day and lays out the considerations weighing against or in favor of an expanded colonial undertaking. The draft is annotated in Thonning’s hand, but there is no other indication that, if any of the other members of the Commission saw it, they had anything to remark upon it. The document draws heavily on Thonning’s earlier representations for the Chamber of Customs, as well as on the other official correspondence that Thonning and Christensen had assembled from the Chamber’s Guinea archives. In the treatment of the physical geography of the enclave, in particular, Christensen relied heavily on personal materials dating almost to the turn of the century supplied him by Thonning. This is doubtless why those private papers came to be preserved among the Commission’s files. Christensen also drew on his own earlier formulations on the current state and potential of African commerce. Although the document went no farther through the bureaucratic chain of command, it can be considered to have laid the structural foundation for the Commission’s final opinion to the king. “It is only because the country includes the most fertile extents for the cultivation of intertropical products”, Christensen wrote, and because of the importance of the Volta as an avenue into the interior, that Denmark had maintained its African claim at all since the slave trade had been banned.222 The forts, built solely to serve the slave trade, had been constructed right on the beach, regardless of the utter infertility of the region, stifling any inclination the slave-traders might have had to cultivate the land.” When the idea more commonly arose to cultivate the products of the Indies also in Africa, the West Indian colonies and their maintenance and

221 GK IV, an undated, unsigned, and untitled document in a folder on which is scrawled in red, presumably by Thonning, “Betænkn. ang. Guinea—ved Christensen”, itself in a file labeled, in a modern hand, “Udkast til Betænkning om Guinea. Udarbeidet af Balthasar Christensen”. 222 GK IV, Betænkn. ang. Guinea—ved Christensen, pp. 27–28. the commission frames its debate 517

expansion had already become to such a degree the object of almost all nations’ interest that any undertaking that could lead to the creation of competitors for these colonies was regarded with disfavor or fear.223 Nevertheless, even before the slave trade was banned, the Danish regime had begun to take an interest in the possibility of colonizing and cultivating in Africa, and Christensen described Isert’s, von Rohr’s, Flindt’s, Meyer’s, and Schiønning’s efforts to establish plantation agriculture; he carried this narrative on down to his own day. The English and the Americans dominated trade along the coast, but “it can be taken as certain that Denmark could with profit take part in that trade, if only the voyages were organized and carried out with the necessary insight”.224 A strong colonial government would doubtless be able to effect an expansion of Danish commerce in Africa, which had been severely depressed for most of the 1820s, and colonization in the enclave would both increase the volume and range of exports and enhance the local administration’s stature. The Government’s efforts to introduce colonial agriculture had “hitherto not been crowned with success”, but the long series of plantation experiments that had been undertaken both on public and private account had yielded valuable experience and had undoubtedly prepared the ground for a colonization.225 Many “unfavorable circumstances” appeared at first glance at be overwhelming difficulties for an actual colonization of this part of Africa…. Any colonization thus seems to presuppose and demand the clearing of the land, the raising of buildings, the laying out of roads, acquisition and transplantation of work animals, and mutual defensive arrangements for the plantations themselves and for the communications between them and the beach, all accomplished in advance. But all this presupposes a unified operation according to a specific plan, until the intended colonization might have reached a certain degree of independent strength, as well as arrangements, time, and costs that cannot be repaid for several years, and which thus only by public means and public administration can be expected to be effected. It was the lack of such preparations that had prevented earlier private efforts from making “reliable or lasting progress”.226 No man of means finds himself tempted to try his luck in Guinea in the circumstances prevailing hitherto, which expose him to all the trouble and

223 GK IV, Betænkn. ang. Guinea—ved Christensen, p. 28. 224 GK IV, Betænkn. ang. Guinea—ved Christensen, pp. 74–75. 225 GK IV, Betænkn. ang. Guinea—ved Christensen, pp. 78–79. 226 GK IV, Betænkn. ang. Guinea—ved Christensen, pp. 85–87. 518 chapter twelve

danger to life and property connected with being established without means of defense among the natives. It has thus hitherto not been possible to hope that private capital would be invested in advancing a colonization or real cultivation of the land. The country is itself also in general altogether too little known for the notice of private people to have fallen on it.227 Experience seemed to indicate, although it was not certain, that the interior a few miles from the strand was healthier than the establishments on the beach, and there could be little doubt “that a continuous extent of cleared and cultivated land must yield a much healthier climate than the present, which also has the experience of other colonies, for ex. St. Croix, in its favor”. (The Danish colony on St. Croix was now just about a hundred years old.) In the meantime, mortality would assuredly be very high.228 “Other obstacles and risks for a colonization have furthermore been identified in the customs and character of the native residents”, Christensen went on. It had also proved difficult to find “competent guides in colonial agriculture”, to say nothing of “diligent workers”. In addition, since trade on most of the coast was open to all nations, it was not certain that the benefit of a colony could reliably be secured to the motherland. Finally, he wrote, “it has been thought” (although it is not certain that he was with this turn of phrase referring to actual discussions among the members of the Guinea Commission) that the fact that “such active and informed trading nations” as the English and the Dutch had made no effort to establish colonies in their own possessions on the Guinea Coast indicates that they had not found that Guinea was suitable therefor, and it has been believed that this their passivity might increase our concern about venturing human lives and capital on an undertaking in itself subject to so much difficulty.229 (Here Christensen sharpened his pen, or took up a new one, and his script became once again crisp and clear.) These obstacles and concerns, he wrote, “scarcely deserve, however, to be ascribed any decisive weight”. The peoples of the Danish enclave, unlike those in the British and Dutch claims, were of “mild and peaceful ways”. A colony “that did not totally neglect security arrangements” would have little trouble. The Government on the coast already wielded considerable power, and because of the Africans’ growing recognition of their need for

227 GK IV, Betænkn. ang. Guinea—ved Christensen, pp. 87–88. 228 GK IV, Betænkn. ang. Guinea—ved Christensen, pp. 88–89. 229 GK IV, Betænkn. ang. Guinea—ved Christensen, pp. 93–94. the commission frames its debate 519

the organization of an orderly body politic as well as the advantage to themselves of the Europeans’ residence among them and of the thereby resulting opportunity to them of service and trade, it dare thus be assumed that the Government will find it easy to secure a colonization against any danger from the native population’s side and gradually, in proportion to the colony’s progress, to win the former over to civilization in general and [to] the colony itself in particular.230 The main difficulty of colonizing on the coast of Guinea was the sacrifice of human lives and capital that such a thing with inevitability would entail, while the country’s natural wealth and its fitness for all tropical agricultures, at a time when the state of the West Indies becomes more and more precarious, seems to call for such a thing, whereby in addition the natives little by little will be won for civilization and Christendom and thereby receive some compensation for all the sorrowful consequences the Europeans’ slave trade has brought them and their ancestors, just as the carrying out of same is also already essentially being prepared for by the establishments up until now.231 The king, in duly noting his approval of this quarterly report of September, 1836, asked the Commission to pay special attention to the cultivation of coffee on the coast, but this expression of the royal interest in the matter was not thereafter repeated. Indeed, this appears to have been the last of the Commission’s periodic reports to the king, although no royal order permitting their cessation has been found.232 The ageing King Frederik fell seriously ill in 1837, and it may be that the ship of state was ever so slightly adrift.233 The Guinea Commission at any rate appears to have made little progress with its investigation for a few years, or indeed to have paid much attention to its charge at all. Balthazar Christensen, having taken up the practice of law, stepped down as the Commission’s secretary in March, 1838.234 His career soon carried him into politics and the estates assemblies, and he is not known to have had any further involvement in African colonial affairs.235

230 GK IV, Betænkn. ang. Guinea—ved Christensen, pp. 94–96. 231 GK IV, Betænkn. ang. Guinea—ved Christensen, p. 103. 232 The clerical annotation in the Guinea Journal recording the receipt of this royal communication refers directly forward to the submission of the Guinea Commission’s final report, twelve years later, in 1848: GJ 333/1836, royal resolution, September 24, 1836. 233 “Frederik VI”, in Dansk biografisk leksikon, 2nd. ed.; Olsen, “Finansforvaltningen”, p. 424. 234 GJ(S) 595/1838, Balthazar Christensen, April 7, 1838, annotation on his letter. 235 “Christensen, Balthazar Matthias”, in Dansk biografisk leksikon, 2nd. ed. 520 chapter twelve

In April, 1836, Governor Mørck sent in his report on agricultural experiments at Frederiksgave, the royal plantation.236 “In the year 1830”, he wrote, “a portion of coffee beans from the plantation Bibiase, which at the time belonged to Doctor Trentepol, was sown at the plantation Frederiksgave by Int. Governor Lind”. When Governor Hein had bought Lind’s plantation in 1831, there had been several hundred young coffee trees and three thousand small plants in a nursery bed, of which a couple of thousand were planted out that year. A thousand trees had died by the middle of 1832, and another thousand were gone a year later; they were all replaced with new seedlings. Lind had also planted coffee on the slope of the hill near the residence house; most of these had died by the summer of 1834. “The reason for that lay for the most part in the fact that the hill or slope consisted of stone and gravel that was only covered with a thin layer of mold”, which was easily washed away. Trees were now dying faster than seedlings could be raised: in August, 1835, forty new plants were set out, which, for lack of rain, Mørck said, was all that had came up of perhaps eight thousand beans sowed in boxes and beds. “The harmattan has again been and is still at this time exceedingly strong, and, since from 25 November until today’s date no rain has fallen on the plantation, the coffee trees that are still alive are only in a mediocre state”. A total of 84 pounds of coffee had been harvested at Frederiksgave between 1833 and 1835. A similarly exact accounting of the tobacco planting was rendered, and Mørck was careful to point out that both when the plants were set out and while they grew “the greatest care was taken, and when the rain was lacking these, as well as all other plants (as far as circumstances permitted it), were watered”. On the whole, however, the tobacco had not done well. When a new patch of ground had been planted with five hundred plants, they had to be watered twice a day for the lack of rain, but the spring from which this water was taken after a time yielded so little water “that it was scarcely sufficient for the negroes’ own use. The watering therefore had to cease, whereby the greatest part of the plants died”. A hundred pounds of tobacco had been harvested, a fifth of what Mørck thought could have been hoped for. “These 100 # tobacco it seemed appropriate to roll into cigars, and since a number are already done, I have taken the liberty of sending the High Collegium a sample thereof”. It is recorded in the Chamber of Customs’s letter copy-book that a box of these cigars was

236 GJ (S) 314/1836, Mørck, April 1, 1836, filed at GJS 539/1844. the commission frames its debate 521 forwarded to the Guinea Commission with Mørck’s report.237 Unlike Mørck’s samples of emong leaves and pineapple fiber, however, the cigars are not preserved in the archives. In May, 1835, indigo seed was sown in beds, and the following month several hundred plants were set out, and more seed was sown directly in prepared ground. In the autumn of the year, Mørck manufactured some indigo with several hundred plants but found the result unsatisfactory. Sugar cane was also planted in May and June of 1835; within a month, the plants had been destroyed by insects. Some thousands of cotton plants were also planted, and most of these had died, too. Mørck reported that “of the grapevines, of which I brought 8 different kinds with me here to the coast, there are only three vines left”, and they were only insignificantly larger than when they had been planted. Nothing was left of the fig trees but a few shoots. The kitchen-garden vegetables had almost all died. Bamboo had not done well, “for the soil is not deep enough, nor moist enough”. Indeed, he wrote, all of these failures could be accounted for by the lack of rain and the shallowness of the soil. Under the uppermost crust there is either stone or gravel, so that when a good rain falls it immediately penetrates deeper down than the plant roots, and when the sun in the course of a few hours evaporates what moisture the uppermost crust may have contained, the plants get only very little benefit from it. If it is only a little rain, there is scarcely any trace of it 1/4 or 1/2 hour after it has fallen. Mørck ended his report, My flattered hopes of being able to effect something with regard to colonizing His Majesty’s possessions here on the coast, I therefore see brought to nothing, and as delightful as it would have been to me to be able to submit to the High Collegium a favorable report regarding this matter, which I, with regard to the experiments that have been conducted here, have employed all possible care on and on which I have made use of the knowledge thereof that I had acquired in other colonies, duty commands me to set the matter forth to the High Collegium as it is in reality. It was rather a sweeping conclusion, considering the patent limitations of the place Mørck and his predecessors had selected for their agricultural exercise. A “scientific evaluation of the agricultural experiments at Frederiksgave” conducted late in the twentieth century, taking Mørck’s

237 Guin. Kopibog, October 6, 1836, to the Guinea Commission. 522 chapter twelve report as the point of departure for its investigation of soil and climate, concluded that the Government’s experiments in the 1830s had been conducted in a most unfavorable location: the plants in question would have done much better near Isert’s plantation Frederiksnopel, back in the hills and valleys of Akuapem.238 A junior administrative officer named Hans Giede arrived on the coast in November of 1836, and in a long letter to his sister a few weeks later he mentioned these reports of Mørck’s on the plantings at Frederiksgave. It was assumed and hoped at Christiansborg, he said, that the establishments would soon “go by the board”, perhaps within two years. “The Government’s report about the progress of the plantations can at any rate be no obstacle to their dissolution”.239 Giede had found Mørck, who had been up at the plantations but had come down to the fort when the ship had arrived, to be a “magnificent” man, although weak and sickly. This first impression did not survive closer acquaintance: he wrote to his father a year later that “the great thoughts entertained at home about certain people are so without basis that I cannot understand the basis for them, unless they are occasioned by his own relations”; it appears that Giede was referring to Governor Mørck. Every other word uttered or written by “certain persons” could be counted on to be a lie. “They possess a rare dexterity” in the use of the pen to utterly transform the most “insane undertakings, carried out and preconceived in drunkenness, into merits”.240 In another letter to his father, he related that a party with the other governors “ended with the representative of the king of Denmark being, as usual, driven home as tight as on owl at 2 o’cl. at night” and carried up to bed by his soldiers. “Magister Bibendi”, he called Mørck, an incredible, gold-medal drinker. His father could confirm his account by talking to Wrisberg, who was well informed of the matter. Giede was afraid that his colleagues would soon start dying like flies, because the fort was running low on gin, which was all some of them sub- sisted on.241 At the end of August, 1836, the Chamber of Customs reminded the Government on the coast that it had received no reply to its queries regarding moving the seat of the colonial government from Christiansborg up

238 Awadzi, et al. 239 Privatarkiv No. 5796, Giede, Christiansborg, November 29, 1836, to his sister Amalie. 240 Privatarkiv No. 5796, Giede, January 26, 1838, to his father. 241 Privatarkiv No. 5796, Giede, letter bearing dates from October 15, 1838, to April 2, 1839, to his father, in section dated October 31. the commission frames its debate 523 into the vicinity of the plantations.242 Peter Thonning appears to have been convinced that a permanent European presence inland at the foot of the Akuapem hills was essential to further colonial development. The Government on the coast apparently wanted nothing to do with this proposition, however, and in February, 1837,243 it declared, regarding its removal to the plantation region, that such an undertaking would involve large and unpredictable expenses; besides residential apartments, warehouse space and fortification would also be necessary, just as Christiansborg would have to be maintained in any case so as not to cut off the communications with the sea. Most of the building materials and the weaponry would have to come from Denmark. If it were to be assumed that this removal, including materials, labor wages, transport, the digging of cisterns, etc., could be effected for a sum of 150,000 [rigsdaler], one would still not be in a position to calculate how much the required daily transport, etc., would increase the annual expenditures in the future. The figure quoted is marked with a large question mark in red, and on the Chamber’s abstract slip of the letter Thonning wrote,244 Here a ‘0’ too many surely ran out of the pen. There can be built inordinately much for little money, when one wishes to and knows how to build with the materials of the country. If one were to go back in the books to see what Prindsenssteen and Kongenssteen cost, one would assuredly find it to be a bagatelle for such large buildings, and these were put up in a time when economies were scarcely used or checked. Thonning feared that this information could only be found in old company archives, which were not available to him, but he thought there might be something in the Chamber’s books regarding the construction of Prøvesten, Christiansborg’s little out-tower. Two fortresses like Prøvesteen and two smaller towers will be sufficient to flank a very large rectangular area fenced in with walls and cactus [or] other thorny plants, in which square there would be complete protection for all of a colony’s residential and work buildings. Luxury beyond a smooth plaster- ing was not yet called for in even the government’s rooms.

242 ad GJ 825/1834, draft of letter to the government on the coast, August 27, 1836, filed at GJS 539/1844. 243 GJ (S) 446/1837, the government on the coast, February 20, 1837, filed at GJS 539/1844. 244 GJ 446/1837, filed at GJS 702/1849, removed thence from GK II, Ang. Plantagevæsenet i Guinea fra Kontoiret. GJ 446/1837. 524 chapter twelve

Paneling would merely give shelter to insects. At the end of March, 1837, the map of the terrain between the Sacumo- fjo and Labadi that Thonning had ordered made more than four years before was finally completed and sent in by the Government on the coast, together with a large-scale plan of the royal plantation Frederiksgave. Both maps were “surveyed with a plane table and chain” by the former miller Grønberg, but the larger map had been redrawn by Assistant Herbst.245 Grønberg’s and Herbst’s map, although it is very faint and on the whole rather vacant, is strewn with place names, and paths straggle all over its expanse. The character of the terrain is brought out with hachuring. The map can be thought to have tugged rather poignantly at Thonning’s memory, drawn, as it was, in considerable detail and at such a large and lively scale. The map in fact bears Thonning’s penciled instructions, at top left, for its revision and presumably its incorporation into his own map of the whole territory: 1) This map is to be the guide as far as it extends. 2) The X places are to be omitted— 3) The underlined places are to be added as far as possible 4) the places not underlined are to be added if it can be done without inter- fering with the clarity 5) Of roads only the solid lines are to be laid down, but not the dashed. 6) it is to be noted that in some places the names are to be changed as indicated in pencil.246 It is an interesting illustration of the editorial process that lies behind every map. Thonning, the metropolitan bureaucrat, but himself a compiler of maps, eliminates for his own purposes places that Grønberg, on the ground, had seen fit to depict. Although Thonning had proved himself a scrupulous cartographer, his prime concern was not so much accuracy, and assuredly not completeness—the radical reduction and abstraction inherent in maps in any case ensuring that no map can be strictly speaking accurate, to say nothing of complete—but legibility, balance, focus, and, above all, verisimilitude.

245 GJ(S) 447/1837, the government on the coast, March 31, 1837; the map is at RAKTS, Rtk. 337,27. On a copy of Thonning’s map drawn in 1845 by a copyist named Mossin (reproduced in Carstensen’s indberetninger and in Larsen) Grønberg is not mentioned, and credit for this survey is mistakenly given to Herbst: that map is at RAKTS, Rtk. 337,28. An archival removal notice in GKII mentions a large-scale map, with a reference to GJ 447/1837; this may have been either the larger map now at RAKTS, Rtk. 337,27, or the more detailed map of Frederiksgave. 246 RAKTS, Rentekammeret 337,27. Three further instructions were for one reason or another erased. the commission frames its debate 525

Grønberg’s plan of the plantation Frederiksgave, ten or twelve inches on a side, is quite sketchy. It shows the main house, built up against a rather threatening-looking slope, with the laborer’s houses below it. Something like a third of the extent of the plantation is covered with rather dense hachuring, accentuated in places into steep declivities. In the level ground between two slopes Grønberg outlined “the coffee plantation”, an area about 150 feet on a side. On the back of the drawing, 150 is multiplied by 150 in pencil to obtain the figure 22,500; on the Chamber’s abstract slip of the cover letter from the coast Thonning wrote, “If indeed the whole piece of land marked as coffee plantation is planted with coffee, it still makes up no more than [about two acres] of land; it can thus be judged how and with what eagerness this matter is being handled”.247 In March, 1837, Hans Giede again wrote to his sister: he had not yet experienced the climate fever, but he was not optimistic that he was long for this world, “if the king should not in the meantime part with the coast”. A month since, he had met four Englishmen, all of whom were now dead. It was fearfully quiet: he did not expect to see a Danish ship here for another two years, unless the king were to send a vessel to fetch off the whole garrison.248 A month later, he wrote again, and by this time he had visited the plantations. He remarked on Frederiksgave’s fine situation” on a slope, with a view down to Fort Christiansborg. The vegetation was astonishingly different from that by the sea, he said, but every pound of coffee produced here cost more than one would pay for it in Copenhagen.249 He went on: “The latest dispatches we received from the Collegium contained not a word of the liquidation of the establishments in one way or the other”, to the Government’s disappointment; “now we are putting our hopes in the provincial estates [assemblies], which are to assemble in the autumn”. The interim governor had sent in his application for a regular appointment, with the sole motive, according to Giede, of avoiding being put back at his old number in the navy’s list of first lieutenants if the establishments were closed down; but Giede doubted Mørck would ever see Denmark

247 GJ 447/1837, map and slip filed at GJS 702/1849. 22,500 square feet is actually rather less than one acre. Also at this place in the files is a pencil version of Thonning’s own map, and apparently quite an early one, drawn before Lind’s map of the Volta had been incorporated. Thonning may conceivably have referred to this old map as he wrestled with the problem of combining various maps at their several scales. 248 Privatarkiv No. 5796, Giede, March 10, 1837. 249 Privatarkiv No. 5796, Giede, April 14, 1837, to his sister. 526 chapter twelve again. The company was neither pleasant—Assistant Herbst, he wrote to his father, had been given permission to travel home because of his health “(and bestiality)”250—nor, clearly, very uplifting: Giede informed his sister in one letter that “the negroes here in Guinea” could not be regarded as fully human; they occupied some intermediate stage between human beings and animals. In another letter, he enjoined his sister not to relate anything of a personal nature from one of his letters to Wrisberg, who corresponded regularly with his connections on the coast. For himself, he hated this “barbaric country”.251 At the end of 1837, the Government on the coast reported that there had been an unusual amount of rain in a long rainy season, “and the coffee harvest on the plantation had on this account been even better than last year”.252 Early in 1838, Richter and Balck between them managed to deliver almost half a ton of coffee to the Government, demanding payment therefor in accordance with the royal resolution of December, 1816, by which prices had been supported to stimulate plantation experiments. Payment had been made, in iron bars, gunpowder, and rum, but the Chamber of Customs (apparently without troubling the king about it) suspended the subsidy as soon as it heard of the matter, pleading that prices and circumstances had changed.253 In March, 1838, the Government wrote that there had been so many storms in the past four months, which should normally have been dry, that all the fort cisterns were completely charged at almost all times.254 Giede wrote to his father that the landscape had remained green all through the dry season, which none of the old coasters could remember ever having occurred before. He added, I have in vain looked forward to the provincial estates assemblies meeting last year, for it is surely only by them that the coast will be dealt its mortal wound. This whole arrangement here is the most scandalous use of the state’s money that can be imagined.255

250 Privatarkiv No. 5796, Giede, January 26, 1838. 251 Privatarkiv No. 5796, Giede, January 11, 1838. 252 GJS 659/1838, the government on the coast, November 20, 1837 (duplicate of GJ 579/1838). 253 GJ(S) 625/1838, the government on the coast, February 17, 1838; ad GJ 612/1838, a copy of the government’s Forhandlingsprotocol, dated February, 1828, both filed at GJS 702/1849. 254 GJS 666/1838, the government on the coast, March 6, 1838 (duplicate of GJ 611/1838, where the letter is abstracted in the Journal). 255 He was able to follow the Danish political news in Københavnsposten and Berlingske Tidende, which it appears from one of his letters were regularly sent down to the Government: Privatarkiv No. 5796, Giede, January 26, 1838, and October 15, 1838, both to his father. the commission frames its debate 527

In May, Giede wrote to his father, “the coffee harvest cannot again so soon be an obstacle to the closing of the establishments, for all the trees on the king’s plantation are—dead”.256 The Government on the coast for its part reported257 that the coffee trees on both the plantation Frederiksgave and on the private plantations have suffered significant damage. The reason for this is that a worm, or larva, which goes from the soil into the roots of the tree and from there to the stem and the top, consumes them completely. The Government knew of no measure to take to combat this insect. Nevertheless, they wrote, It has always been the Government’s goal, as far as possible, to expand the coffee plantation, but for a lack of plants this has not before been able to happen. With the last two years’ tolerable harvests, however, we have now been in a position to obtain a number of good plants, and of these over fifteen hundred had already been planted out in a newly cleared piece of ground, which would contain, when they were done, six or eight thousand trees.258 Governor Mørck complained at this time that none of his assistants had command of English or French, so he was obliged to personally draft and copy all of his foreign correspondence. In this highly international setting, this was no small matter, and the Chamber made an annotation to the Guinea Instruction that in future the assistants sent out should have some knowledge of English and French.259 Finally it was reported that “the slave trade is being carried on stronger than ever before, which can be ascribed to the high price for slaves in Havana and all of Cuba”.260 In June, the Handelstidende picked up a story about the palm oil trade from the Journal du Commerce.261 Regarded as “a druggist’s item” until 1817, it had been exported from Africa only in insignificant quantities. “Seafarers and other foreigners who until that time visited the west coast of Africa busied themselves far more about the slave trade than with studying the

256 Privatarkiv No. 5796, Giede, May 19, 1838, to his father. 257 GJ(S) 681/1838, the government on the coast, May 24, 1838, item 8 abstracted, at GJ 682/1838. GJS 682/1832, the abstract of 681, is filed at GJS 702/1849. 258 GK III, Kaffe Dyrkning. Palmeolie, Extract af en Indberetning fra Gouvernementet paa Kysten Guinea, Christiansborg, May 24, 1838. 259 GJ 680/1838, Mørck, May 25, 1838; Guineisk Instruction, 1820, annotation to § 22. See Da Guinea var dansk, Carl Behrens, ed. (Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag, 1917), p. 44. 260 GJ 681/1832, the government on the coast, May 24, 1838. 261 Handels-og Industrie-Tidende, No. 55, June 30, 1838, pp. 221–22. 528 chapter twelve productions of the soil”. It was only with the suppression of the slave trade “that these products began to be given some notice”. In 1817, a perfume maker in London had broken into the market with a good palm-oil soap and made a fortune, and the trade had taken hold. Exports had increased, prices had fallen, and palm-oil soap had become more and more common. Imports into England, according to reports laid before Parliament, rose from 72,000 kilograms in 1817 to over 32 million in 1836. It was suggested that the trade annually employed 200 ships. (The French still had only a matter of eight or nine ships in the palm-oil trade.) “Considering that Denmark owns possessions on the west coast of Africa, this paper’s eds. are of the opinion that our shippers, our industry, and herewith the country could find profit in participating in the palm-oil trade”. (It will be remembered that the Handelstidende was published by the government.) The Handelstidende published another article on the palm-oil trade the following spring; a clipping of it is to be found among the Guinea Commission’s papers.262 The editors had this time lifted the story from a report from London in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung. This important and expanding new trade, it was reported, was almost exclusively in English and American hands. The oil palm grew from Sierra Leone to the Cameroons; “the Danish possessions thus lie in the middle of that stretch”. There were very significant exports from along the whole of the Bight of Benin, especially from the stretch of coast from Cape St. Paul, at the eastern end of the Danish territory, to Ouidah, “where this trade is already old”, although it was subject at times to neglect in favor of the slave trade. Five or six cargoes a year came out of the Benin River. East of Cape Formosa the palm covers the banks of a number of rivers, whose mouths are too shallow and too unknown for many ships to venture therein; but some English ships have sent their boats a long way up in some of these rivers and have found agricultural peoples, whose mild ways stand much in contrast with the inhabitants along the seacoast, demoralized by the slave trade. The main centers of production were “the banks of the New Calabar and Bonny, and 30 to 35 English ships of 3 to 600 tons call there annually”; an English ship, the Albatross, drawing eighteen feet of water, had recently been up into the New Calabar and the Bonny. The crop was harvested from

262 GKIII, anden Dyrkning end Kaffe og Palmeolie, “Palmeolie-Handelen paa den vestlige Kyst af Afrika”, clipped from Handels-og Industrie-Tidende, April, 1839 (according to an annotation on the clipping), beginning p. 127. the commission frames its debate 529

January to April, and the trade was at its best from March to May. A ship of four or five hundred tons might take five or eight months to complete a cargo, a bit at a time, trading directly with the Africans. Most of the English ships in the trade were owned by companies with permanent agents on the coast, who also dealt in other local products, particularly ship timbers and dye-woods. Some ships placed large orders on the Bonny and then sailed on down the coast trading, returning to pick up large cargoes of oil at the last. The ships were be unloaded and the entire hold painted several times with lime. The barrels were taken ashore, washed carefully, brought back on board, caulked, limed, and filled on deck. The oil was paid for with necklaces of amber (a Baltic product, from Danzig, as the paper did not omit to point out), bottles, weapons, lead, tobacco, cotton wares, and iron bars. Early in 1839, J.R. Sehested, on his way back to his post in India, wrote privately to Thonning from Danish Accra, where he was staying with Thonning’s old friend Richter, whom he reported to be very glad to have received a letter from Thonning. All the officers appeared to be in good health, “and this seems to be an eloquent proof that one can live here as well as in any other tropical climate, and as far as home-sickness is concerned, you know we also suffer from it in India”.263 Two months later, Governor Mørck was dead, after five years on the coast, having finally succeeded in drinking himself to death. Giede related to his father that Mørck had traveled up to the royal plantation in a much weakened state, although he was not suffering from any particular illness, and had died there. An obduction was performed, and the liver was found to be much enlarged. Lucas Dall, the next-ranking officer, who had run as much gin through his system as Mørck ever had, and who spoke not a word of English, had no interest in the governor’s post, Giede said, and he himself had been given temporary command of the establishments. “An old friend of Councilor of State Thonning’s”, Henrik Richter, “has offered to bet me any stakes I wish that I will get the post; it is therefore that I think that Thonning will not be against it; for I have read letters from him to Richter, that display more familiarity than usual”. As acting gover- nor, Giede made an effort to suppress the slave trade in the eastern part of the territory, but he was himself dead within six months.264

263 J[ulius] Sehested, Dansk Accra, January 10, 1839, to Etatsraad Thonning, GK I, in a file marked “Breve fra alle om Guinea”. 264 Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 209. 530 chapter twelve

In November, 1838, A.W. Moltke, the finance minister, submitted a report on the administration’s finances to the crown; the report was one of the results of the work of the Commission of March 22, 1836.265 Among the Guinea Commission’s papers there is an unsigned document without a heading,266 marked in pencil November 8, 1838; this appears to be an extract from Moltke’s report. It opens abruptly: “Next will be discussed a significant item of expenditure, which for the most part belongs under [the Chamber of Custom’s] direction, namely the colonies”. The expense of maintaining the Danish West Indies was “significant: nevertheless, the West Indies usually yield a financial surplus”, although this was, to be sure, extremely variable. The document recommended that the Governor General of the islands be charged with preparing a plan to increase revenues and reduce expenditures. As for the East Indies, “should higher concerns of state permit”, if at least the smallest of the entrepôts, Frederiksnagore, on the Hooghly River, near Calcutta, could be disposed of, 20,000 rigsdaler of a total Danish East Indian budget of 47,000 rigsdaler could be saved annually; “no opinion is expressed here about whether such a disposal could be advisable”. The Guinea establishments, on the other hand, provide not the least state income or, as far as can be seen, any national advantage whatsoever. It is inquired, therefore, whether diplomatic negotiations ought not to be begun regarding the sale of these establishments, or, if this were not to be attainable, whether they might not be abandoned. At this same place in the Guinea Commission’s papers there are a few sheets of draft in Thonning’s hand, responding to any such suggestion.267 He recapitulated the situation: the only function of the Guinea establishments after the abolition of the slave trade and “before new articles of commerce in significant quantities take its place” was to maintain Denmark’s claim to a territory which “has a particular fertility and suitability for all intertropical colonial products, and is inhabited by negro tribes who fly His Majesty’s flag and acknowledge the Danish government’s supremacy”. (Thonning here had crossed out “ ‘influence’ ” in favor of “supremacy”.) Invoking the language creating the Guinea Commission

265 Hans Jensen, Vol. 1, p. 553, Vol. 2, p. 124 (and note 1, where the question of the continuity of this commission’s work is touched on). 266 GK II, Correspondence med Financerne ang. Colonial-Budget og Normal Regl., a fair-copied document, unsigned. 267 GK II, Correspondence med Financerne ang. Colonial-Budget og Normal Regl., unsigned and undated drafts in Thonning’s hand. the commission frames its debate 531 and thus the authority of the crown, he pointed out that “it is, in accordance with the royal command, under investigation whether circumstances might make it advisable that a colonization plan be put into effect”. Furthermore, he said, “another circumstance is that the Department for Foreign Affairs is engaged in the diplomatic treatment” of the English governor’s claims to prerogatives within what the Danish government regarded as its territory. Thonning appears to have been trying to establish that administrative scrutiny of the African colony was already well in hand and thus, at least for the time being, outside the purview of Moltke’s budget committee. “As an [example of an] important circumstance, that probably cannot at the moment be decisively judged, but that nevertheless soon may be able to provide particular empirical facts in the matter”, was the effect of emancipation and African emigration schemes “on the productivity of the West Indian colonies and the prices of the products, as well as the probability of English commerce succeeding in replacing the declining production in the West Indies with greater volume and low prices on similar products from the English possessions in the East Indies”.268 At such a juncture, it would be unwise to abandon Denmark’s tropical African colonial prospects. Thonning then ran through the establishments’ budget in some detail, arriving at the conclusion that it could scarcely be reduced. Tucked into this statement regarding the Guinea establishments there is a similar discussion of the East Indian colonies, dated December 10, 1839. It appears that the Chamber of Customs had ordered its officers at Frederiksnagore and Tranquebar to submit proposals about how the colonies might be administered at less expense to the state, and now awaited the colonial governments’ replies. However, Thonning, who as head of the Chamber’s colonial office also had charge of the administration of the Indian entrepôts, had already concluded that “regarding any other use of these establishments, it appears to have ended with the general peace at sea”. (Neutral Danish shipping had always flourished in times of war, carrying the colonial trade of the combatants home to Europe.269) “Fr[ederiks] nagor is not visited at all by Danish ships, and Tranquebar is called at only every other year by a Danish ship”. Neither outpost’s manufactures were of any significance on European markets,

268 See Curtin, The image of Africa, pp. 439–442. 269 See, for example, Gøbel, “Danske oversøiske handelskompagnier”, pp. 538–539. 532 chapter twelve

and their territorial extent is not sufficient for the population’s necessaries of life, far less for the production of trade goods through agriculture. The Nicobar Islands [in the Andaman Sea, and claimed by Denmark at this time] are quite small and, according to experiments made, scarcely so suited to colonial agriculture that coffee, sugar, indigo [and the like] could not be obtained at cheaper prices and without risk to the capital of colonization at the English, Dutch, Spanish, or independent trading stations and free harbors. The Chamber therefore concluded, Thonning’s draft ended, that there were good arguments for disposing of the Indian establishments, especially if they could be bartered for some “pecuniary or other advantage secured by treaty”, but that these arguments, as Moltke’s Commission had already suggested, “might possibly be outweighed by higher concerns of state”. The review of the fiscal affairs of the government extended even to the division of labor within each office of the Chamber of Customs. Frederik Lowzow, of the Chamber of Customs, an eager reformer, wrote particularly scathingly of the inordinately slow pace of the Chamber’s work, of the endless abstracting and copying; the simplest message within the office had to be committed to paper.270 There survives a long and plaintive statement, on the other hand, from Karl Fredrik Ohsten, the chief clerical officer in the colonial office, asking Thonning how he could possibly answer all the questions that had been put him about how long it took to deal with each case and how many employees were required. He was over- whelmed with work: “Each of these colonies constitutes a whole, each of which has its own peculiar local conditions, laws and regulations, coinage, organization, and administration”.271 In a note at this place, Thonning advised against adding to the colonial office’s portfolio: the last three men in Ohsten’s position, he said, had worked themselves to death or nervous collapse. He saw no way to economize in that office.272 Stimulated, perhaps, by these uncomfortable winds of reform, and perhaps fearing a major shift in colonial policy if the aged King Frederik

270 See Hammerich, pp. 416, 474–475. 271 GTK, Toldkammerkancelli- og Sekretariatsager, B., Kollegiets Organisation og indre forhold vedkommende Resolutioner og Sager, Akter vedkommende Overbestyrelsen, blandt andet om Revisionens Adskillelse fra Expeditionen, 1771–1844, Contoirchefernes Erklæringer, Ohsten, August 17, 1839, to Thonning. 272 GTK, Toldkammerkancelli- og Sekretariatsager, B., Kollegiets Organisation og indre forhold vedkommende Resolutioner og Sager, Akter vedkommende Overbestyrelsen, blandt andet om Revisionens Adskillelse fra Expeditionen, 1771–1844, Contoirchefernes Erklæringer, Thonning, November 6, 1839. the commission frames its debate 533 should die, Thonning delivered the first forty-four pages of a draft of the Guinea Commission’s opinion to Johan Schønheyder, the chairman, in October, 1839, “together with my latest map of the area of the establishments” and an abstract of the Chamber’s correspondence with the Department for Foreign Affairs regarding Denmark’s territorial claims on the coast.273 Once again, and now with greater authority than ever, Thonning began going over the ground so long familiar to him. He was doubtless concentrating to the utmost for the benefit of his politically complex and powerful audience, which consisted not only of the Guinea Commission—most of whose members knew no more of Denmark’s tropical enterprises in general, of Africa, or of the Danish enclave there than any other cultivated Copenhagener—but of his colleagues in the Chamber of Customs and, ultimately, the king himself. His careful craftsmanship is everywhere manifest. The document is heavily edited, and the additions are very substantial, but there is little indication that very much of this rewriting was done in response to comments by the other members of the commission: it seems more likely that new ideas and arguments welled up out of the depth of his knowledge with every rereading and that, untrammeled by considerations that might have hampered him if he had been writing merely another legislative preamble, he permitted himself the fullest explication of his ideas. Nevertheless, this report is in a number of respects less rich than his African writings of forty years earlier; his intellectual scope had narrowed somewhat as he focused on the colonial question. Much of the geographical and ethnographic description is here condensed or omitted, although the document is still, to be sure, full of color and tell- ing local detail. The image he wove of an African colonial future for his country drew most heavily on his own direct experience, but he did not fail to point out at the start that he was building also on the Chamber’s own official archives, on information elicited from the Government on the coast, and on the most recent literature, including British parliamentary proceedings. Under his first heading on the location and extent of the enclave and on the security of the Danish claim and of its boundaries, Thonning found it

273 GK IV, Commissions Betænkning ang. Guinea saaledes som den 28/2 41 er giennem- seet til endelig Referat i Commissionen Th., Første Deel, draft headed “Allerund. Betænkning” and annotated “NB Akskrivt af denne Betænkning fra pag. 1 til pag. 44 incl. [delivered to] Kammerdirecteur Schønheyder” Sunday the 13th October 1839; the reference is presumably to the Chamber of Customs’s report of December 5, 1837, to the Department for Foreign Affairs. 534 chapter twelve immediately advisable to set his story against rather a glowing backdrop, inserting in a margin that “the intertropical situation is approximately the same distance from the Equator as the French, English, and Dutch agricultural colonies in South America, and as the islands of Sumatra and Java in the East Indies, which are similarly colonized with plantations”.274 He identified the various African peoples in the territory, sketching out the history and the present state of their relations with the Danish government, putting particular stress on Isert’s treaty with the Akuapem, a copy of which was to be attached to the report.275 He proceeded to a description of “the country’s natural characteristics, in so far as they can have any influence on an agricultural colony’s plantations’ use of the land, supply, and means of transport”. He divided the territory into five ‘landskaber’, the term implying, as usual in his use of it, not only physical geographic characteristics, but cultural and political distinc- tions. He labeled these landscapes ‘A’ through ‘E’ and in a margin referred to the color signatures applied to the towns of the African nations shown on his map. (In a subsequent insertion, he explained that it was the towns that were so designated, rather than the territories, “for their territorial margins are not so fixed that their territory can be marked with a color in the usual way on maps”.276 Landscape A was the coastal stretch between forts Christiansborg and Fredensborg and as far inland as the hills of Akuapem. In discussing anchorages and the transport of goods and passengers in through the surf by canoe, he began to speak of erecting a mole at Fort Christiansborg but then pulled himself up, acknowledging that it was premature to dwell on such a matter “before an agricultural colony has made progress”.277 It is perhaps no accident of the organization and development of his treatise, however, that such evocations of a complexly developed economic future crept into his prose, with a thousand other more or less heavily freighted geographical images. These details were inherent in his highly developed view of the place, of course, but it can be thought that he placed these nuggets with care, hoping that they would have their impact on the colonial thinking of his readers, too. Again, he permitted himself to speculate briefly that the two largest streams in the landscape around Accra, the Sacumo-fjo and the Laloe, might serve as

274 GK IV, Commissions Betænkning, Første Deel, p. 2. 275 GK IV, Commissions Betænkning, Første Deel, pp. 2–10. 276 GK IV, Commissions Betænkning, Første Deel, pp. 10–11; GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, p. 18. 277 GK IV, Commissions Betænkning, Første Deel, p. 13. the commission frames its debate 535 arteries into the hill country, although they could not be used year-round for such a purpose at present: it would be beyond the means of a young colony to render them fit for regular navigation.278 He described the general topography of the enclave, with its long ridges and valleys running parallel to the coast; the great variation in the vegetation; and the character of the soils, which, in the great valley between Aburi and Larteh (as he characterized the terrain here, relying on memory and his own map) were very fertile indeed, and in a marginal insertion here he quoted from a letter from Governor Steffens and his Council in February, 1821, in which it had been reported that the land at the feet of the hills of Akuapem past Krobo to the Volta “is the most blessed country, … the most suitable country of all for the establishment of plantations in this continent”. There were no real roads, he noted, but only footpaths, and all goods were carried across country by the Africans (mainly by the women) on their heads.279 He discussed the climate through the succeeding seasons, the varying distribution of rainfall in different parts of the enclave, and the astonishing contrasts in the nature of the vegetation that resulted.280 In Thonning’s Landscape B, the hill territory of the Akuapem, it was cooler than on the coastal plain, and the hills were often wreathed in clouds. The woods were lush here—“almost impenetrable”—and the soil was full of mold. The heights were held to be salubrious, but Thonning feared that this belief was insufficiently supported by the evidence, although, he admitted in a marginal addition, the missionary Riis and his wife, who had resided in Akuapem for a long time, had looked very healthy upon their return to Denmark in 1840. The clearing of the woods would doubtless make it a healthier place, but he concluded that although this landscape is so richly endowed by nature, it will nevertheless scarcely be suitable for an initial colonization, as the transport to and from the shipping points entails the difficulties that a mountainous, roadless country, a considerable distance to the beach, and lack of appropriate means of transport will lay in the way. Time would tell, he allowed in an addition, if it would be found advisable to extend cultivation up into and beyond the hills, and he took the opportunity to mention, purely in passing, the city of Caracas, a few miles into

278 GK IV, Commissions Betænkning, Første Deel, p. 14. 279 GK IV, Commissions Betænkning, Første Deel, pp. 14–16. 280 GK IV, Commissions Betænkning, Første Deel, pp. 16–26. 536 chapter twelve the hills behind the port of La Guaira, and, not far to the west, Valencia, similarly situated with respect to Puerto Cabello.281 Landscape C was a low-lying plain with, in its southeastern corner, extensive marshes that were periodically refilled by the Volta’s floods.282 This was a very thinly populated area, its people having been driven inland and across the Volta into Agotime by their enemies a hundred years before. It was by no means a healthy place, but it was not infertile, and in the grasslands just like it on the far side of the Volta, beef cattle and provision crops were raised; slave ships had “in their day” called at Keta and Anlo expressly to supply themselves with victuals. (Thonning later noted in this place in the Commission’s report that enormous herds of cattle were raised on comparable plains in South America.)283 In Thonning’s Landscape D, the river country south of the inselberg Nåjo, the Africans cultivated their provisions along both banks of the Volta, but colonial agriculture here would demand greater expenditures than a young colony could very well afford on drains and dikes and sluices, “to moderate the river’s floods”. The river was navigable for quite some distance inland for vessels of moderate draft, but a pilot station would have to be placed at the mouth. The air here was exceedingly unhealthy and would claim the lives of many settlers, as had “Surinam[e], New Orleans, and similar paces before they became cultivated”.284 New Orleans—the name was assuredly intended to conjure up images of a vibrant new port city in the pestilential marshes at the mouth of a huge river, providing a colossal interior hinterland with access to the markets of the world. A clipping from one of the Danish newspapers among the Guinea Commission’s archives relates of New Orleans: In the last twenty years this city’s population has grown by 20,000 souls. Foreigners of all nations, not only from Europe and the north of the United States, but also from the western free states, stream here. The harbor is already full of ships of every size, from the small Baltimore schooners to the large Boston three-master, which carry 2,000 to 25,000 [sic] bales of cotton, each figured at ninety hundredweight. Our city exports annually 60,000 bales of this significant commodity, 70,000 barrels of tobacco, and just as much sugar.

281 GK IV, Commissions Betænkning, Første Deel, p. 26–28. 282 GK IV, Commissions Betænkning, Første Deel, pp. 28–30. 283 GK, Betænkningen, p. 121. 284 GK IV, Commissions Betænkning, Første Deel, pp. 31–32. the commission frames its debate 537

Thirty or forty steamships called regularly, not to speak of the hundreds of flatboats. The grandest steamship is “Mohawk”, which is used for the connection with Tennessee, and which has already made several trips back and forth to Nashville, loaded with 3,000 to 3,600 bales of cotton. Everything here is done on a giant scale, at least in European eyes. With the most astonishing speed whole quarters of the town are built up, all sorts of buildings; canals and railways are constructed. Plans were in hand for a railroad to Nashville, a distance of 360 English miles. At the same time two monstrous hotels are being built in the city: no hotel in England will be able to measure itself against the St. Charles Hotel, when it is finished; four million bricks have already been used to build it. The new St. Charles theatre must be regarded as a true wonder of the American spirit of enterprise; in its outer compass and in interior fittings it does not lag behind any theatre in London. Six months ago there was not yet a brick laid for this magnificent building. The owner had committed himself to opening it to the public on the 1st December, and bets of from 10,000 to 15,000 dollars were laid against him, which he not only won, but was even able to open the house on the 30th November with Sheridan’s “School for Scandal”.285 Any city at all on the Volta remained in the wilder realms of speculation, however, and, contenting himself for now with an oblique allusion to the colonial promise of the tropics, Thonning concluded that the Volta region could only be colonized by fully acclimatized settlers. Little was known of Landscape E, the cattle country east of the Volta, Thonning wrote, except the tongue of land between the Atlantic and the great Keta Lagoon. The lagoon was shallow and full of oyster banks, and if it were ever to serve as a transport artery from the easternmost corner of the enclave through the Amu River to the Volta, “a barge channel would have to be constructed”.286 In all, Thonning declared, the variation in climate within the enclave was such that there could “scarcely be any doubt that Danish Guinea can produce all products that are cultivated by European colonies in the hot- test climate”. The Africans’ primitive agricultural techniques brought forth crops that bore comparison with those of Puerto Rico, which was famous for the productivity of its soils. The essential yam crop, with which the local people took some care, had not in living memory failed to such

285 GK II, Statistiske Noticer som kunne observeres ved Guinea Spørgsmaalet, clipping from a paper put out by the brothers Berling, marked in pencil 1835, with the dateline “Ny-Orleans”, March 12. 286 GK IV, Commissions Betænkning, Første Deel, pp. 32–34. 538 chapter twelve a degree as to lead to widespread want. “Besides fertile soil and climate a beginning colony in Danish Guinea will find there a very large variety of the necessaries of life” and other useful and pleasant products; various West Indian fruits had recently been introduced, and quite a number of new indigenous fruits had been discovered that only “need the art of European gardeners to be improved”. (Thonning was here alluding, in part, to his own botanical work, and he appears to have debated with himself whether or not to employ these plants’ Latin names for his august audience: a slip of paper bearing Latin binomials of such plants is glued into his manuscript at this place.)287 The animal kingdom also would provide a great variety of foods—beef, poultry, pork, fish, game—and the local cattle and the wild buffalo could in time be brought to the yoke. Forest products of all descriptions would be available, including thorny plants useful for hedging (but, Thonning inserted in red ink, no long planks or timbers). Gold and ivory were brought down out of the interior. A new colony would find coffee already cultivated here, besides a couple of kinds of cotton; tobacco, said to be from Brazilian seed (and there need be little doubt about the rhetorical intent of this little allusion to one of the world’s booming centers of tropical production); sugar cane; rice; indigo; Cayenne pepper; Orlean (annatto, a yellow coloring added to cheese, chocolate, oils, and candles, from the New World tree Bixa orellana); ginger; turmeric; grains of paradise, and the oil palm, “the product of which in recent years has become so important and increasing a commodity that it in the future may become the object of regular cultivation in plantations”.288 Having devoted a couple of pages to “harmful animals”,289 Thonning turned to the “presumptive relationship between a Danish agricultural colony” and the “Danish negroes”, who, he said, carried the Danish flag into battle and displayed it on other ceremonious occasions. He reckoned the density of the population in the enclave at 250 people per square Danish mil (about fifteen per square statute mile), and perhaps twice that in the area between Accra and Fort Fredensborg and in Akuapem. The population was thus very thin on the ground, and good cultivable land was to be had almost for nothing. On the other hand, the population was large enough to be reckoned with in the event of hostilities, especially at the

287 GK IV, Commissions Betænkning, Første Deel, pp. 35–37. 288 GK IV, Commissions Betænkning, Første Deel, p. 38a. 289 GK IV, Commissions Betænkning, Første Deel, pp. 38b-38c. the commission frames its debate 539 start of a colonial venture, and would be a valuable source of sustenance and labor. To help his fellow commissioners judge what relations between the Africans and a European colony were likely to be, Thonning provided an “overview” of the Africans’ social system. The people lived in fairly large towns, some of several thousand inhabitants, and few of less than four or five hundred. Larger towns simply could not exist as yet, for lack of sufficient means and avenues of transport to supply themselves from a surrounding hinterland.290 Each individual was “bound to the town of his birth by three mighty bonds, viz. by his family connections, upon which his freedom and independence in the society rest; by a particular piety for the graves of his ancestors”; and by the all but insurmountable difficulty of making a new life among any of the neighboring peoples. Thonning described the ranks within the society, from people born in slavery, who, he said, had the status of “subordinate” family members, to the classes possessed of wealth and inherited political authority. “Every town thus makes up a separate patriarchal oligarchic republic”. These were to a certain extent incorporated in larger confederations of towns, with higher structures of influence governing relations among them. The power of Asante, at the apex of these political systems, had at one time been very great, but it had been broken at the crucial battle of Dodowa (Katamansu) in 1826, which, Thonning took care to point out, had been fought not far from Frederiksnopel (a name he could be sure the king would not have forgotten): by the treaty signed at Fort Christiansborg on August 9, 1831, the Asante had abrogated their authority over the Akyem, Akuapem, Akwamu, and coastal peoples.291 This war had especially strengthened the Danish Government’s influence on the natives, who acknowledge a supremacy in the ability the Government, rather than any of their own authorities, has to unify municipalities and tribes in an allied defense against external enemies…. Just as important is the natives’ recognition of the Government’s [here he inserted “intelligent”, and then, in red ink, “moral”] power to decide the mutual conflicts between tribe and municipality. Local groups sometimes even took the European government’s part against people with whom they shared bonds of blood. The Danish political position was very strong, Thonning said: when an Akuapem ruler had

290 GK IV, Commissions Betænkning, Første Deel, pp. 39–40. 291 See Metcalfe, Maclean of the Gold Coast, pp. 43–44. 540 chapter twelve attempted to ally himself with the English, Governor Mørck had removed him from power.292 It was approximately this much of the Commission’s report that Thonning dispatched to Schønheyder in October. (He sent a copy of what survives in the Commission’s archives, and it is impossible to know where exactly what he sent may have ended.) In May, 1839, the Government on the coast informed the Chamber of Customs that swarms of grasshoppers had blown in with the harmattan one day in February: these had “in the literal sense of the word darkened the sky from 8 o’cl. until 11 in the morning”.293 The destruction was at first limited, as the maize had not yet been planted, but the insects returned in April and attacked it too. The “spawn” was everywhere, the forts covered with it. The coffee trees they everywhere left completely untouched”, the Government related, and these words Thonning underlined. Four thousand coffee trees had been planted the year before at the royal plantation, the Government reported, but of these five hundred had died. The rest looked promising, but no harvest could be expected for three or four years. In July, the Government on the coast inquired whether what remained of the funds granted Lind in 1832 for the purchase of horses and slave families, a matter of 2,272 rigsdaler, which were kept on the establishments’ books under the heading “colonization undertaking”, could not be transferred to the account for the royal plantation. Thonning apparently did not regard this as a trifling bookkeeping change, and he refused to permit it.294 Thonning appears to have worked on his draft of the Guinea Commi ssion’s report through the winter of 1839 and 1840, in the course of which King Frederik died, after a reign of more than forty years. His cousin, Christian VIII, ascended the throne in December, 1839. On March 15, 1840, in a note to Thonning, Schønheyder wrote to say that he regretted that he would be unable to keep their appointment for that day but that he understood, as he courteously phrased his request, that Thonning would in any case not be able to complete the report until that day week.295 Three months passed, and in June, Director Lowzow of the Chamber of Customs wrote privately to Thonning:

292 GK IV, Commissions Betænkning, Første Deel, pp. 40–44. See Kwamena-Poh, pp. 63–64, 104–105. 293 GK II, Correspondence med Financerne ang. Colonial-Budget og Normal Regl., extract in Thonning’s hand from the Government’s letter of May 14, 1839. 294 GJ 885/1839, the government on the coast, July 19, 1839, and ad GJ 885/1839, draft of letter of November 21, 1839, to the Government, filed at 702/1849. 295 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, [Schønheyder], March 15, 1840, to Thonning. the commission frames its debate 541

One of the members of the Guinea Commission has again approached me and asked me to try to get Hr. Councilor of State to advance the case to a con clusion. Although I already, several times, but until now in vain, have brought your attention to the profitlessness of letting the matter simply stand, as has been the case so far …, I wished to yet again remind you of the matter, so as to avoid the necessity of referring the matter directly to the king. “I expect your reply within a very short time”.296 This was exceedingly curt language, and it can be supposed that the two men were on perennially bad terms. It was in any case not until November 1, 1840, according to Thonning’s notes among the Commission’s papers, that he had progressed so far with the Commission’s report that he put it into circulation among the other members of the Commission, sending it first to former governor Findt for his scrutiny.297 Thonning may indeed have left it too late. The very next day, on November 2, 1840, King Christian resolved, in response to a legislative representation regarding the government’s finances laid before him by the finance minister, acting in his capacity as the head of the Committee of March 22, 1836, “that the Department for Foreign Affairs be attentive to making use of such opportunities as may reveal themselves to dispose of the establishments on the coast of Guinea”. In the meantime, the establishments were to be maintained on an annual budget of 27,000 rigsdaler. This development was formally brought to the attention of the Guinea Commission early in the new year.298 Christian VIII, having settled himself on the throne, was wielding his broom with vigor, and sweeping up something of a bureaucratic storm.299 In a letter from one prominent member of the estates assemblies to another late in 1840, it was reported that there was much talk of “the reductions”. Lowzow had sent a plan for the reorganization of the Chamber of Customs to the Finance Minister, who had been willing to express himself on the plan’s fiscal impact but not regarding its specific proposals regarding the personnel of the Chamber of Customs. H.M. himself then worked out a suggestion for reduction and sent it to the Chamber of Customs. There has now, from what I can discern, been great alarm, for to improve a draft written by H.M. is of course a fearful thing, and it is being whispered in people’s ears that it needs it badly.

296 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Lowzow, June 18, 1840, to Thonning. 297 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Thonning’s notes. 298 GJ 1040/1840, royal resolution, November 2, 1840; a note in the Guineisk Resolutions Protokol, 1816–1850, November 2, 1840, (GJ 1040/1840) indicates that the representation was the finance minister’s. 299 See Hammerich, pp. 417–418. 542 chapter twelve

Non-commissioned employees were to be let go with a month’s pay and left to fend for themselves, the letter related. “The gentlemen in the higher posts are to retire with full pay”. Peter Thonning’s was among the names mentioned.300 In mid-December, Lowzow formally submitted legislation substantially reorganizing the Chamber of Customs.301 The Chamber’s third section, “Trade and Colonial Matters”, was now also to have charge of “Industry and Manufactures Matters”; canals, harbors, and lights; and regular customs cases in the Øresund customs offices. This new office was placed under the direction of Peter Johann Garlieb, whom Lowzow described as “a man with many and among them technical abilities”, but who, Lowzow admitted, knew nothing about colonial affairs. Severin Wedel, one of Thonning’s junior colleagues on the Guinea Commission, “a very orderly and reliable man and a capable worker”, was placed in charge of a new, independent auditing office, subordinate only to the director of the Chamber.302 Peter Thonning and a few other senior officers, “whose service will become superfluous”, were permitted to retire. Such a disposition was not entirely unheard of,303 but it was sufficiently unusual that Lowzow felt it necessary to petition the king, on these officers’ behalf, for the customary marks of distinction upon their separation from government service, since their retirement “is not a consequence of Yr. M.’s being dissatisfied with their service”. All this was approved by the king, who at the same time, however, saw fit to “reserve to Us their service; in particular, [Councilor] Thonning shall continue to participate in the commission charged with consideration of various matters concerning our West Indian islands”, which had been seated in 1839 to wrestle with the question of the

300 Danske politiske breve fra 1830erne og 1840erne, Povl Bagge and Povl Engelstoft, eds. (Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Selskab for Fædrelandets Historie, 1945–1958) Vol. 1, pp. 468–470 (J.C. Drewsen, November 19, 1840, to J.F. Schouw). 301 GTK, Toldkammerkancelli- og Sekretariatsager, A., Kgl. Expeditioner vedk. Protokoller og Sager, Christian VIII’s resolutioner og rescripter vedkommende Generaltoldkammerets sager 1840–1847, No. 10, Allerund. Forestilling, Lowzow, December 14, 1840, resolution of December 19, 1840. 302 Thonning wrote to Garlieb attacking these new dispositions, which he was convinced would slow the operation of the office and lead to the very duplication of effort that King Christian was trying to eliminate, but it appears that he found himself arguing against all the prevailing opinion of the day: GTK, Toldkammerkancelli- og Sekretariatsager, B., Kollegiets Organisation og indre forhold vedkommende Resolutioner og Sager, Akter vedkommende Overbestyrelsen, blandt andet om Revisionens Adskillelse fra Expeditionen, 1771–1844, Thonning, January 18, 1841, to Garlieb. 303 Erik Gøbel, De styrede rigerne (Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag, 2000), pp. 205–207. the commission frames its debate 543 amelioration of the condition of slaves in the Danish West Indies.304 The king’s resolution made no mention of the Guinea Commission, but the Commission retained its standing in the Danish administrative structure: its work was by no means yet done. (Figure 21)

Fig. 21. A lithographed portrait of Peter Thoning at about the time of his retirement from the Chamber of Customs, 1840, by E. Bærentzen. (By courtesy of the Royal Library, Copenhagen, Department of Maps, Prints, and Photographs.)

304 See GTK, Div. dokumenter, Orig. Forestillinger fra Commissionen ang. Negernes Stilling i Vestindien med Resolutioner, 1834–43, Frederik VI, March 1, 1839.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE GUINEA COMMISSION IN A CHANGED COLONIAL CLIMATE

Peter Thonning clearly had the colonial wind against him now, but, for all King Christian’s proclamations and the estates assemblies’ agitation, the Danish flag still flew over the forts on the Guinea Coast. Thonning, whose voice in African affairs had been decisive for so long, had now lost his seat at the Chamber of Customs’s collegial table and was cut off from the flow of information in the day-to-day African administrative correspondence. Severin Wedel was now the only sitting officer of the Chamber of Customs represented on the Guinea Commission, and he appears to have been riding the political wave of fiscal reform and retrenchment that had shown itself so ill disposed toward the tropical colonies. (It was perhaps Wedel who had complained to Lowzow that the Guinea Commission’s work was dragging on interminably.) Early in February, 1841, the Chamber of Customs officially notified the Guinea Commission of the royal order to dispose of the Guinea estab lishments at the first opportunity and asked the Commission to provide whatever information the Department for Foreign Affairs might need to execute this charge.1 There was really nowhere else for the Chamber to turn: Thonning’s unmatched African expertise could scarcely be worked around. Schønheyder circulated the Chamber’s letter to the Commission a couple of weeks later (Joseph Hambro had by this time moved to London and can be assumed to have taken no further part in the Commission’s work2). He enclosed a fair copy of Thonning’s draft of the Commission’s opinion, by this time heavily reworked, which in the copyist’s open hand filled two hundred pages,3 as well as a number of attachments.4 He expressed the

1 GJ 1040/1840; Guin. Kopibog, to the Guinea Commission, January 30 and February 6, 1841 (a draft of this letter is filed at GJS 314/1893). 2 “Hambro, Joseph”, Dansk biografisk lexikon, C.F. Bricka, ed. [at runeberg.org/dbl]. 3 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”. 4 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Schønheyder, February 20, 1841, addressed to Holten, Thonning, Wedel, and Findt, with the Chamber of Customs’s letter to the Commission of Febr. 6, 1841, tucked inside. The Commission’s members dated and initialed Schønheyder’s missive, and Thonning kept track of who had the report and the attached documents in notes immediately following Schønheyder’s letter. 546 chapter thirteen wish to meet and discuss both the draft and the new royal order as soon as all of the Commission’s members had perused them. There survive several drafts of the Commission’s opinion, besides Balthazar Christensen’s initial effort. All of these (except the last) were heavily annotated, in various inks (and apparently in various hands) and at various times in the course of the Commission’s editorial work. New sections of text, long and short, were inserted here and there, and bits of paper are pinned or pasted into the various drafts;5 loose fragments of draft and of Thonning’s notes for the final report are to be found throughout the Commission’s archives. The drafts were of course all of different lengths, and Thonning found it necessary to construct new tables of contents as he went along; one of these uses two sets of page numbers, referring to two different drafts.6 On the 44th and 45th pages of the draft Thonning circulated in February, 1841, and thus perhaps at the end of the first section he had sent to Schønheyder late in 1839, Thonning had arrived at an optimistic preliminary conclusion: All circumstances show: that on the one hand the natives’ petty divisions and the lack following thereupon of mutual agreement on a common goal; on the other hand the Government’s position and influence, whereby it can centralize the natives around it and with discretion master them with their own forces; if, therefore, the governor were familiar with the natives’ customs and peculiarities, and does not lack ammunition and provisioning as important means of giving his influence weight, then it is very probable that he will be able to prevent or in a just manner resolve disputes which could arise between the populations of the colony and the natives, so a colony will not have anything to fear from the natives in its initial weaker condition; it is much more likely that a peaceful agricultural colony will open sources of income to the natives, which can awaken and sustain their interest in the former, just as hitherto in the commercial establishments, of which they have the opinion that they are a divine provision to supply them with earnings.7 Nevertheless, Thonning’s draft of the Commission’s opinion went on, a small colony ten or twelve miles from the forts on the coast would have to take steps to secure itself, if only against the possibility of “chance events,

5 Drafts of the Commission’s opinion in GK IV and V. Not much text was ever removed altogether: lined-through text usually appears to have been moved elsewhere. 6 GK V. 7 GK IV, Commissions Betænkning, Første Deel, pp. 44–45; GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 100–101. the commission in a changed colonial climate 547 especially collisions between the natives and thoughtless colonists” erupt- ing in a hasty tumult or assault, in which case the colonists should be able to repair to secure places of refuge. A fortified position inland would also be an important element in the Danish Government’s overall relations with its African neighbors. A tower twenty or thirty feet high, of simple local construction, armed with a half dozen “field-caliber” cannons, surrounded by an outer wall and thorn hedges, and manned by a small but well-supplied garrison, “can be regarded as an impregnable fortress to the natives and a sure protection for everything that could be contained inside the ring wall”. A number of these, depending on the extent of the colony’s lands, could be erected, and two or three more would suffice to protect the road down to the coast. Towers or no, the colony could not be defended against a regular invasion by a European force equipped with heavy artillery, unless the colony had grown so large that it could throw back the first onslaught and then allow the climate, “which is the inhabitants’ natural ally”, to demoralize the attacking force.8 The colony would be able to obtain all the provisions it needed from the surrounding countryside, which was so productive that not even the poorest person ever lacked for food. The supply was so secure, indeed, that the colony could concentrate at the start on raising domestic animals and establishing nurseries for the great commercial crops, which would produce harvests only after the elapse of several years. The local population would also be an important source of day laborers when new agricultural land was to be cleared or at harvest times, but, Thonning made clear, “there cannot be the slightest hope of founding a colony on the labor that can be obtained in this manner”, because the people’s needs were so few that they could not be obliged to work regularly. Rich and poor here ate the same food, and even a wealthy man lived in a house of clay with a grass roof. All the Africans required from the Europeans was guns, powder, lead, tobacco, spirits, and cloth. (Here Thonning took the occasion to describe the local garb and household furnishings briefly.) It would therefore not be easy to “bring the natives to unaccustomed industry”, although, Thonning underlined, they were no different in this respect from any other population to whom the material basis of life came easily and who “do not need to be provident for a long future”. Certainly the Africans could be inspired to work hard for a few days, and they willingly undertook day’s marches of

8 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 102– 106, 107, 108–109. 548 chapter thirteen fifteen or twenty miles in the pursuit of trade, carried large head-loads from the mountains to the beach, scarcely stopping on the way, and pad- dled their canoes miles out to sea to fish.9 Since the Africans could not be expected, for want of means, knowledge, or the prospect of a quick return, to take to plantation agriculture (although, Thonning noted, the cultivation of the oil palm, which had formerly been a strictly domestic affair, had of late expanded to become their main export), the plantation cultivation of commercial plants must thus not merely be commenced in the European manner but must indeed have become an accustomed and well known source of income before it dare be hoped that that the natives will themselves take to it. However, he pointed out, Conditions have changed so much in the course of time that to colonize in the way in which the existing intertropical agricultural colonies were set up can no longer be done; for to force by the might of weapons the negro tribes, as in the past the Americans, to work as slaves in plantations or mines, will not be tolerated by Europe, even if this means of proceeding were otherwise possible in Guinea, or if any civilized nation would be inclined to attempt it.10 Nor was the establishment of a colony on the West Indian model desirable, even if the condition of the African slaves in the West Indies had been ameliorated somewhat in recent years. Indeed, slavery had by this time been abolished in the British colonies (although Thonning was of the opinion that the British government had dealt its West Indian colonies this blow largely in order to promote the fortunes of its East Indian possessions, “which, after their exports of manufactures have ceased, desperately need new sources of income, [such as] colonial goods, opium, [and the like], to be in a position to purchase England’s manufactures and factory goods”),11 and it could easily be predicted that West Indian production would decline in the same proportion as the emancipation becomes a reality and the emancipated learn to adapt themselves to an independent way of life, and that this state of things will force its way into the other nations’

9 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 112–119. 10 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 119–121b. 11 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 121b-121c, quotation from a marginal insertion. the commission in a changed colonial climate 549

colonies. The West Indian products will thereupon become more expensive and scarcer. This appeared already to be the case in the English colonies, where production was down by two thirds, as well as in Haiti: Thonning introduced statistics showing that sugar production in “the negro state on St. Domingo” had declined drastically between 1789, “when the French Revolution had not yet brought the island to a slave revolt”, and 1826. No further territorial expansion was possible in the West Indies, and when emancipation had spread throughout the Americas in an apparently not distant future, … then the simple consequence will be a lack of colonial goods and encouragement to produce what is lacking for Europe’s consumption in the other intertropical lands, chiefly in the East Indies and Africa. The East Indies were already being driven hard in this respect, but Africa is still an idle onlooker, although the west coast has fertile land, climate, laborers, all the necessaries of life, and the sea route to Guinea is less dangerous and scarcely more than 1/3 of the way to the East Indies.12 The price of sugar in Europe did not yet reflect the developing shortfall in the West Indies, because European beet sugar production had taken up the slack, except in England, which had been obtaining all of its sugar from the West Indies. No such substitutes were likely to emerge for coffee, cotton, or tobacco, all of which Thonning assumed could be produced in West Africa and delivered to European markets “at acceptable prices”.13 In subsequent additions at this place, Thonning wrote that the huge expansion of coffee production in Brazil, which had driven down world coffee prices, had been based on very large imports of slaves, which were threatened by international bans on the Atlantic trade. The very fact that the Brazilian production continued to expand, even as prices fell, was proof that the trade remained profitable, he argued.14 If, therefore, it should after comprehensive deliberation be found to be in the interest of Danish trade, shipping, and the navy to possess producing intertropical colonies in Danish Guinea, the foregoing considerations appear

12 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 121c-121e. 13 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 121f-121g. 14 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. ad 121f, a-c. 550 chapter thirteen

to make it a moral and political necessity to find a way of proceeding with colonization there, which is different from the West Indian, and that this should “unite the times’ [the last two words were later replaced with ‘religion’s] and humanity’s demands regarding the laborers and the natives” with the hope of progress and usefulness to the mother country.15 Thonning now found it needful, before proceeding to discuss the labor system on which an African colony would depend, to describe the history of Danish plantation experiments in the enclave over the last half century. At present, this long section of the opinion concluded, there was a handful of private plantations near Frederiksgave, on which there was “an insignificant and in every respect wanting coffee-planting”. These efforts were on the whole characterized by a lack of application: these plantations’ proprietors were traders, not farmers. The ambition of most Europeans on the coast was to make a fortune and return to their home- lands, and as colonial agents such men would not serve. “The plantation business demands: that the planter must regard the country as his true home and the plantation as the means of future subsistence for himself and his children”, Thonning declared.16 This state of affairs was unlikely to change “without a particular impulse” on the regime’s part, for significant preparations and expenditures of “time, money, and climate-victims” would assuredly be called for before sufficient momentum could be established that private capital would be attracted to the coast.17 Besides modest fortifications, these preparations would include shelter for the colonists, roads, and beasts of burden. Carpenters and masons and other craftsmen would have to be brought down from Europe. These men would also form the core of the new colonial population: once acclimatized, they would come to love the place and would be reluctant to leave it, as indeed experience had shown. The simpler crafts could be passed on to the Africans, and after a time no further skilled settlers would have be brought out from Europe.18 It would be necessary to engage experienced planters from the West Indies or South America, and preferably from Brazil,

15 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 121g-h. 16 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 121h-124. 17 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 124–125. 18 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 125–129. the commission in a changed colonial climate 551

where not only the land and the climate, but also the relationship to the work negroes seems to be more in correspondence with the Guinean; the Spanish colonies in the West Indies might next provide good individuals; whereas it would scarcely be good to bring Dutchmen or Frenchmen, who are used to seeing hard practices against the field workers, and even less so Englishmen, who seldom omit to intrigue for their nation’s interests. Such men would not come cheap, and it would not do to skimp here, for their “competence and morality” would be the key to the colony’s success. Until suitable individuals could be recruited, Thonning added in a margin, horticulturalists sent down from Denmark would have to be relied upon to make a start on the plantings, relying on “the information they can get from conversation and printed writings, and they will soon develop a certain system in the cultivation of the products”. These gardeners would then soon learn everything else they needed to know from the hired American experts, so these latter would only have to be hired for a few years. Seeds and plants of the best varieties of commercial and other useful plants should be obtained at every opportunity; domestic animals should be brought from the islands. (Schiønning, Thonning remarked, had provided himself with “excellent races of the smaller domestic animals”.) It would also be necessary to build dams to impound water on the many streams that sprang up during the rainy seasons.19 Model plantations and nurseries would have to be set up and maintained at royal expense; all sorts of local fruits and other plants should be supplied to the settlers from these nurseries. The land would have to be divided into plots of suitable dimensions for plantations, which should be equipped and cleared on the public account, so that they could be alienated to individual colonists “in an already producing state”; Thonning did not venture to say on what terms these properties should pass into private hands. It was “altogether not to be expected” that Europeans of means would venture their lives and fortunes here; as elsewhere in the tropical plantation world, capital, or at any rate credit, would have to be built up locally by hardworking agriculturalists. It would be necessary for them to convert their crop into cash quickly, Thonning inserted in a margin, but their production would be so limited at first that little shipping would be attracted to the coast, and here again the

19 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 129–133. 552 chapter thirteen state would have to step in and buy the crop and store it in royal warehouses.20 Northern Europeans could not work in the open in Africa, nor even supervise the work in the fields. Their work, at least until they were well acclimatized, would have to be done in workshops, offices, or school- rooms; they could only work without shelter from the sun in the first two hours after sunrise and the last hour before sunset. There could therefore be no question of basing the colony on the labor of convicts. Nor would hired slave labor suffice for the regular working of plantations. Thonning calculated in an insertion that Accra and Akuapem could supply no more that six or eight hundred slaves for hire, and to make use of this labor force would simply stimulate local enslavement to supply the colony with rented hands. Such hired slaves would have no prospect of freedom until they were too old to work, when their freedom would only be burdensome to them, and this arrangement would thus work directly contrary to the colony’s founding principle that its slaves would be emancipated after a strictly limited period of servitude. Thonning similarly dismissed the use of what the English called “voluntary immigrants” from Africa or Asia, such as those who contracted themselves to work in the West Indies or Mauritius. Thonning rejected the idea that any truly free man would submit himself to such an arrangement, and if the contract was entered into on behalf of an under-age child by a family father, it was “much the same as a masked slave trade”; he related that a transport of “emigrants” from Sierra Leone to Trinidad had included “36 young people of the age of 10–15 years, thus of an age in which even the free-born does not have the disposal of his person”. Bringing Chinese or Hindu laborers to West Africa would be expensive, and the Indians were known for “weakness and mortality in foreign climates” and the Chinese for “many kinds of peculiar habits and customs, which will not avoid waking dissatisfaction and will have an unfavorable effect on any initial colonization”. Thonning also doubted that a sufficient number of pawns could be obtained to work the colony’s plantations. Some local slaves could be obtained at prices depressed by declining exports, but these, being mainly from the coastal region, and thus accustomed to Europeans and their languages, would be most advantageously employed as house servants or field-gang supervisors.21

20 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 133–136. 21 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 137–142. the commission in a changed colonial climate 553

“The actual working population for an agricultural colony must therefore be created by the purchase of negroes who are brought to the coast from the interior of Africa”. While this might appear “objectionable” and inhumane, Thonning wrote in a section of later “changes and additions”, it was in our respectful opinion in fact the only way in which the principle of emancipation can be made effective in Guinea for the benefit of a class of individuals who have unfortunately become the object of purchase and sale … and are so excluded from society that they are left to an altogether arbitrary and often hard and capricious treatment without hope of any improvement in their situation. It was only by buying them out of this miserable state and preparing them for a better future that the colony would be able to help these slaves, the “worthy object of the solicitude of European humanity”. As Thonning envisaged it, each slave’s purchase would be a matter of record and would only be entered into with the slave’s consent: he would engage himself to fifteen years of servitude against the promise of emancipation. In the meantime, he would be protected by the laws of the colony, and upon his emancipation, he would be provided with the tools necessary to make a living for himself, employing the skills taught him during his period of service; his freedom would thereafter be guaranteed by the colony. This was altogether in keeping with the principles of “the English emancipation bill, modified in accordance with local circumstances”, Thonning said; the plan would apply only to slaves actually trapped in the traffic, and not to local family slaves in the enclave. All this language appears to have replaced the argument that Thonning had advanced that “the existing treaties regarding the slave trade only apply to seaward deportation from Africa and are thus not a hindrance to obtaining unfree laborers to remain in Guinea”. Events had caught up with Thonning’s plans, and he realized that Denmark’s treaty obligations would indeed prohibit the import of slaves by sea from along the coast.22 The colony’s dependence on slaves purchased from the interior would itself define the scope of the undertaking, at least in the beginning. Large slave transports no longer make their way to the Gold Coast, while an increasing slave trade to Egypt and from Tripoli to Turkey appears to indicate that it is turning to northern and northeastern Africa, and thus goes through the great sand deserts,

22 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 142, Forandringer og Tillæg til §16 pag. 142, 143, and 144b. 554 chapter thirteen with sorrowful consequences for the slaves. A few transports still moved through the Danish territory from the northeast to markets in Fante and Akyem, as well as to Asante. The numbers were small, compared to exports through Accra and the eastern Gold Coast in earlier times, and it might not be possible to obtain more than a few hundred slaves in the first years, but, Thonning, predicted, the supply would expand to meet demand. No slave over the age of thirty was to be purchased, for the promise of emancipation after fifteen years’ service would otherwise be rather hollow. The sexes among the purchased slaves should be balanced, “to meet propriety’s demand for monogamous marriages”.23 Without unfree labor, Thonning stressed, plantation agriculture here could not succeed. As much as this procedure at first glance may seem to resist the spirit of the times in Europe, yet it will upon further consideration be seen that slavery in Guinea, as regards unfree labor, is quite a different and far milder state of affairs than that which hitherto has only been known from the West Indian colonies; just as it upon closer reflection will be judged that agricultural colonial plantations, if they are arranged as far as possible in agreement with the natives’ social constitution, are, if not the only, then hopefully the most effective way in which the natives’ industrious and religious state can be influenced, and by which a movement in the direction of European culture can be produced”.24 The “fundamental rule” of the colony would be “that the master must com- port himself towards his unfree laborers as their solicitous supporter and protector, with a patriarchal authority”, as indeed was customary in African society, in which, although the condition of the slave “has its dark sides”, people disdained the man who mistreated his family slaves.25 The laws of the colony would protect the slave against any arbitrary treatment; regulate his rights and duties; guarantee both with a well-ordered police force; secure to him complete sustenance and health care …; give him as much freedom as is consistent with his work duties and with good order; open to him the way to a trade and possession of inviolable property; give him the opportunity to start a family, and in such a way that the prevalent polygamy is guarded against; by sober and

23 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 144d-f. 24 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 145–146. 25 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 147–151. the commission in a changed colonial climate 555

wise proceeding remove him from fetishism and make him a participant in the Christian religion and its moral tenets; tend by means of a suitable … school system to the children’s religious and moral development; emancipate him after [fifteen] years’ service; [provide him with sufficient land] to support him after emancipation, if it is cultivated diligently with provisions and colonial plants, against that time giving him every third day of his working time free so he can prepare by building on and planting the plot of land allotted him for his future sustenance; upon emancipation equip him, from the plantation he has served, with the weaponry prescribed for the whole colony, so he could take his place in the free militia. All this, Thonning argued, while appropriate to the norms of African society, very significantly improved the condition of the slave by introducing the rule of law to the institution of slavery: “Already hereby African slavery will enter the transition to the condition of the free employee among our farmers”.26 Thonning identified Liberia, founded in 1823, as a model: the settlers there had been given a house and ten acres of land, some of it already cleared, upon their arrival, with the option to purchase more. Governor Rehling, of the Danish East Indian establishments, had called at Monrovia on his way Tranquebar in 1835, Thonning related, and had reported that the colony stretched sixteen miles inland on both sides of the Mesurado River. So far, however, only provisions were being grown, and Thonning thought it would be some time before the Liberians produced crops for export. In a Danish colony, the freedmen, “accustomed to the work” when they received their lots and now motivated by “the power of fashion” to emulate the dress and styles of the Europeans and rich Danish-Africans among them, could be expected to produce commodity crops beyond the bare needs of sustenance. Thonning guessed that West Indian rates of production might be double those of the new African colony but argued that higher costs in the islands ate up that advantage, even leaving aside the moral aspects of the comparison. If such a colony does not meet with particular misfortune, but is led with wisdom, there is every probability that it will gradually provide growing employment for \industry,/ trade, and shipping, and that it in time could transform itself into a Christian \filial/ state, from which religion and its moral tenets could spread themselves to the natives to counter the Islamism spreading from the interior lands by the Niger River, as well as work towards

26 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 151–154. 556 chapter thirteen

the modification of serfdom and the abolition of human sacrifices at burials.27 Thonning now proceeded to a consideration of the European position in Africa. He underlined his proposition’s basic assumption: Africa seems more and more to be gaining in significance, and it is indubitable that the consequences of the end of the transport of slaves [and here he inserted “by sea”] and of the emancipation that has begun in the English colonies must direct the attention of the colonizing powers to western Africa, where there is both fertile land and a sufficient labor force to replace what the American colonies will produce less of. As examples, he mentioned England’s “Expedition to the Portuguese Congo, under the pretext, contrary to all geographic probability, of hoping to discover the mouth of the Niger River”, as well as its interest in Fernando Po, both as a refuge for Africans rescued from slave ships and as a base from which to control the expanding trade from the mouths of the Niger. Disputes between the English and the French in Senegal and between the English and the Portuguese on the lower Guinea Coast “show that territorial or trade rights in these regions are no longer an indifferent matter, and for a long succession of years no European nation has voluntarily given up its possessions on the coast of West Africa, but have maintained them at significant cost”; Thonning managed to dredge up some figures, in francs, for France’s recent administrative costs in Senegambia.28 In response to the objection from one of the other commissioners that, although the English had a huge territory available to them at Sierra Leone, no coffee was being produced there, which seemed to indicate that the African climate or soils were not suitable for its cultivation, Thonning cited the parliamentary reports on Sierra Leone examined by the Guinea Commission, which, he said, had concluded that the failure of coffee in Sierra Leone was attributable entirely to poor management, insufficient supervision of the workers, and the untimely deaths of active governors. On the whole, the English had been entirely preoccupied with trade, and indeed they had succeeded in monopolizing it to such a degree that Denmark’s African trade “is of so little profit to the mother state that the maintenance of the establishments for that reason will not

27 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 153– 155, in margin. 28 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 157–159. the commission in a changed colonial climate 557 be advisable” (“if there were no other reasons for it”, Thonning was careful to add later).29 Thonning related that rumor had it that the British government had a new agricultural colonial effort on the coast in mind, but that nothing concrete had yet emerged. The British could be counted on to keep a jealous eye on any other such development, but it could also be presumed, he argued, that if a Danish colony is established according to the principles given above, and thus becomes a significant instrument for emancipation, education, and the introduction of the Christian religion in Guinea, it will have the sentiment of both the English nation and regime in its favor, for the queen’s prince consort Albert has assumed the chair of the English Society for the Suppression of the Slave Trade and the Civilization of Africa. It was highly desirable, nevertheless, that the Danish government should negotiate the extinction of the English and Dutch claims at Accra.30 At present, expenditures on the Guinea establishments sufficed merely to maintain the status quo. Three fifths of the budget remained in domestic circulation, paying for industrial products, shipping, and such, but the remaining investment in Africa brought home nothing at all. Having permitted himself this little back-swing, Thonning evoked very long-standing policy with this underlined statement: “Since the Establishments are, in the circumstances already described, not profitable for the time being, their maintenance must be dictated by the interest the state can expect of the Danish Guinea possessions in the future”.31 He then wrapped up the Commission’s arguments. The end of the Atlantic slave trade and emancipation would so reduce production that the Americas would be unable to meet European demand for tropical commodities. Even in Brazil, “the propaganda for emancipation in its equinoctial provinces” was already gathering great momentum, “and the regime does not appear to possess sufficient means to resist it”. African colonies would be in a good position to compete with East Indian producers: costs would be lower, and the sea route was incomparably shorter. When, as a result of emancipation, the cost of sugar production on

29 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, insertions at p. 163, pp. 164–165. 30 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 165–168. 31 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 171– 172, 174–175. 558 chapter thirteen

St. Croix exceeded the crop’s market value, Denmark had nowhere else to turn but West Africa, except for the Nicobar Islands, the Danish possession in the eastern Indian Ocean. These islands, Thonning said, were remote, indefensible, and not uniformly fertile; their cultivation would have to be undertaken with hired laborers from China, India, or Malaya, and these workers would have to be held to their contracts by an expensive police force. The islands had no resources of their own to support a colonization, except an excellent harbor: the place would be more suitable for the establishment of a free port serving the Far Eastern trade. The African possession, on the other hand, was secure and, except for the little English fort Prampram, undisputed. No hindrance to an agricultural colonization need be expected to be placed in the way by the Africans, so long as their own rights to already cultivated land, perhaps a tenth of the area under consideration, were not infringed upon; “there is thus more disposable land than Denmark will perhaps ever be in a position to colonize”. The geography of the territory was so varied “that it can through expert choices and cultivation produce all intertropical colonial products that are the object of large-scale European commerce”, including the oil of the native oil palm, English industrial uses of which could perhaps inspire comparable Danish applications. The land was rich in raw materials, iron being the only building material that was lacking; settlers would also have to import clothing, wheat flour, butter, cheese, wine, and the like.32 There had hitherto been few opportunities for the employment of European settlers on the coast, so there was no acclimatized stock of European descent, but Thonning reckoned that the recruitment of the subordinate class of colonists, which can become the stem from which plantation owners faithful to the fatherland and other independent civil [elements] in the colony can spring, will scarcely be to reckon among the difficulties, for many well-behaved craftsmen, gardeners, office clerks, and such often lack a livelihood and wish to try their fate in foreign lands; the need for skilled planters was “only a passing circumstance”. Inexpensive defensive works and wise treatment of the tribes would secure life and property, and “the territory’s original inhabitants” would be of great use to the colony. “Strictly-observed statutory relations between the ruling orders and the working orders” would be so much in the workers’ interest that they themselves would have every reason to defend the colony, unlike in

32 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 175–182. the commission in a changed colonial climate 559 the West Indies, where the colonies were obliged to arm themselves against their own people.33 Every tropical colony had made its start without draft animals; here, the local cattle and buffalo could be trained for immediate domestic use until a stock of horses, donkeys, and mules could be obtained and bred. The countryside was passable for roads except in the mountains and in the marshlands of the Volta, where water transport would be essential. The enclave shared the lack of a good harbor with the entire east coast of India, from its southernmost point to the Ganges, and with the town of Frederiksted, an important open roadstead on St. Croix. Shipping was driven away from those coasts in the hurricane or typhoon season, and in this respect the Guinea Coast was favored. The sea voyage to the coast took about the same amount of time as that to the West Indies, although the return voyage took several weeks longer, “because of the circuitous route that must be taken to use the trade winds”.34 The coast was so open that it would be difficult to monopolize trade for Danish shipping, and it would be some time before the crown could expect to impose taxation on its colonists; the participation of private capital was not to be expected, and “thus the whole structure must be set up on the regime’s initiative and for several years maintained at the regime’s expense, until acclimatized colonists and their descendants can gradually, with their own accumulated resources, continue their work in the running of larger plantations, just as this has been the norm in the West Indian colonies”.35 Perhaps the greatest difficulty would be to find “competent personnel” to manage the undertaking, for the whole project assuredly would depend on the “energy, knowledge, judgment, and honesty with which it was set in motion and thereafter managed”. (Here Thonning was doubtless alluding to his own burdens as a colonial administrator, but the history of the place bore him out; he had himself sent many an officer down to the coast and had often been disappointed.) He was careful to say that a colonization would “involve the difficulty that is inseparable from such undertakings in intertropical lands”; the unhealthy climate, in particular, a “circumstance just as unfavorable as unavoidable”, although it was no worse than

33 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 182–184. 34 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 185–187. 35 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 188–190. 560 chapter thirteen elsewhere in the colonial tropics, would claim many lives until the land was taken under cultivation.36 All this, the Commission’s report concluded, represented its effort to “assemble an overview of the most essential advantages and difficulties”. The difficulties, Thonning at first wrote, “are certainly significant”, but he recast this slightly to read that they were “not insignificant”. They were no different, at any rate, than had been encountered in both the West and the East Indies, and “in several respects even less, whereas the resources for a colonization seem to be greater here than commonly”; this last he later changed to read, “are in reality greater here than any other place, for the colony here will be not just a plantation colony, but also a commercial colony between Europe and the large hinterland”. When to this is added our experience that the intertropical agricultural colonies have supplied and still supply their motherlands’ trade, industry, shipping, and navies significant advantages, and some, especially the Spanish in the West Indies and the Dutch in the East Indies, furthermore yield great income to the mother state’s finances, and that even the surplus income of St. Croix has been significant in comparison to the small size of the colony, … we regard it as inadvisable: to give up a possession of such significant extent, which can one day possibly be of similar character (which last Thonning in a margin rephrased to read: “of an interest that cannot be predicted”) “and which, if once it is given up, can scarcely be got back”.37 Referring now, as a closing formality, back to the royal charge to the Commission, Thonning, in response to King Frederik’s inquiry as to “whether the establishments should be maintained in the manner which is now followed?”, rejected any notion that the establishments could be maintained for less than was currently budgeted. The King had then asked, “if circumstances make it advisable that a colonization plan should be put into execution?” Thonning declared, with justice, that the Commission had tried to touch on everything that might bear on the question: “in our most humble opinion there are several facts that speak for the country’s use for intertropical colonial cultivation”. The main questions remaining open were

36 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 192– 193, 188 in margin. 37 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 193–195. the commission in a changed colonial climate 561

the demands of the colonization on the [national] finances and the diplomatic question with England regarding Akvapim, which can only be judged by Your Majesty’s wisdom and royal overview of the capacities of the finances and diplomatic relations. It will rest essentially on these two circumstances whether—and at what scale—and when the establishment of a colony can be set in motion. Apparently hoping to throw the matter back onto the king’s desk, for the original resolution of 1833 had required of the Commission a “well- grounded proposal regarding the way in which this can most appropriately occur”, the report stated that when those two questions were decided, a detailed plan … could be prepared in such a way that it was commensurate with the pecuniary resources that most graciously might be determined, and with the demands, discussed in this report, of spreading the Christian religion, civilization, and the abolition of slavery, all with the reasonable hope of a good result.38 Former Governor Findt, in a letter of March 22, 1841, had a great deal to say about Thonning’s draft of the Commission’s opinion.39 Thonning wrote his initial response to Findt’s remarks directly on Findt’s letter, writing per- pendicularly across Findt’s lines in red ink. Findt thought that Thonning had devoted too much space to the discussion of “Danish Guinea’s location, extent, and boundaries as well as considerations of Your Majesty’s rights to this territory”; in Findt’s view, “the determination of a prospective colony’s western border cannot be of the importance Hr. Councilor assumes”, for the Europeans on the coast “in general own only their forts and the latter’s surroundings to the distance of a cannon shot, except Denmark”, for Captain Isert had obtained for Denmark the greatest part of the land in Akuapem. He had no doubt about Denmark’s claims to the land in the Accra territory north and east of Fort Christiansborg, where there were already Danish plantations on the ground. He saw no possibility that the Dutch would make trouble for a Danish colony: Fort Crevecoeur was a ruin, manned by an under-officer and a couple of inventory slaves. (Findt failed to note that this was also

38 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 195–202. 39 GK IV, Daterede Udarbeidelser af Commissionens Medlemmer, Flindt [sic] & Thonning 1841, Findt, Copenhagen, March 22, 1841, Det danske Guineas Beliggenhed, Udstrækning og Grændser samt Betragtninger over Deres Majestæts Rettigheder til dette territorium…. Thonning identified twenty-five main points in Findt’s statement, which he marked in red pencil on Findt’s original. A fair copy of Findt’s note was included in a volume of copied attachments to the Commission’s final opinion (item No. 1044). 562 chapter thirteen more or less the state of the three lower Danish forts, on which Denmark’s own territorial claim to the east rested.) Maclean’s protestations regarding Akuapem and Akyem had been dealt with to Findt’s satisfaction in the Chamber of Customs’s report to the Department for Foreign Affairs in 1837. Findt was sure that Denmark would be able to negotiate with the English for Vernon’s Fort, at which no garrison was kept, and for Great and Little Prampram; it would at any rate be some time before the colony extended so far east that it might be desirable to ship colonial products off the coast there. There are indications among Thonning’s notes that he was not entirely so sanguine about this matter,40 but he here acquiesced in Findt’s opinion, with which, he wrote, “the plurality concurs, and it has thus been employed in the editing in the various places where there is a question of political relations”. Findt argued that it was a serious obstacle to the colonial plan that, because Europeans could not be expected to work in the fields in the dangerous climate of the West African coast, the project would depend on African overseers, who would have to be trained for their task before any colonial progress could be made. Thonning responded:” regarding the overseers mentioned here, I only intended the lower-level supervision of the workers that has be constantly present in the field, for which negroes or mulattoes are used in all colonies, since subordinate European overseers would moreover be too expensive to maintain in the Indies. What Guinea thus has in common with all Indian colonies cannot be classified as any particular hindrance to colonization. Findt wanted a long passage inserted at the end of Thonning’s section of “ ‘General Remarks on Agriculture’ ”, namely, ‘But there are also many circumstances and local obstacles that make it uncertain that plantations will immediately succeed in said mountain region, f. ex. the astonishing numbers of ants, the sun’s burning rays, which often scorch away the plants in the places where there is no shade, etc.’ He had himself seen the coffee trees at Bibease and especially on the Lutterodt plantation in fine bloom, he said, “but when the harvest came they produced only a small yield, and neither the Europeans, who lived at Accra, nor the plantation negroes on the spot could provide an

40 In loose notes in association with Findt’s letter, Thonning had expressed doubt that the Commission’s report should “express itself so decidedly”, since the matter was still in the hands of the Department for Foreign Affairs: GK IV, Daterede Udarbeidelser af Commissionens Medlemmer, Flindt & Thonning 1841, undated notes folded into a modern sheet of yellow archival paper. the commission in a changed colonial climate 563 explanation of the cause of it”. Thonning cared little for Findt’s ants, at any rate: the ants, he said, were no worse than in Cayenne, Suriname, Demerara “and most other uncultivated places, and termites are easy to eradicate by killing the mother, of which only one is found in each hill, in a particular spot”. He thought the entire species could be extirpated. “Wherever Europeans reside in the Indies they know very well how to eradicate such difficult guests” in buildings. As for the African heat, he wrote, “the sun is the same as the sun everywhere at 6° latitude”. Findt thought that Thonning had rather overstated “the difficulties of the transport from the mountains in Aqvapim”. The distance to Christiansborg was “only 30 miles and the soil is so hard in this country that it is only necessary to clear away bushes and grass and level the surface to get a good road, which can be traveled with wagons, donkeys, mules, or oxen”. He, too, cited the relative ease of the connections, served mainly by mules and horses, over the mountains between La Guaira and Caracas and between Porto Cabello and Valencia. “This is one of the least of the difficulties of a colony in Aqvapim”. Thonning responded that building a wagon road into the mountains would be too expensive an undertaking, that there were no mules or donkeys in the African establishments, and that depending on porters for all transport would indeed be very expensive, “and very unjust, for the carrying of loads is some of the heavi- est work the negroes have”. Findt went on:

From what I have experienced, the unhealthiness on the coast lies in the damp air generated by the heat of the sun on the sea and in standing waters; … whereas the unhealthiness up in the country is caused by the uncultivated land and the many animals and plants that rot and ferment in the sun’s heat; the Legon hill is therefore the healthiest place in this district of Guinea, for the land here is still sandy and bare, there is no standing water and no plants that could rot or spread unhealthy air, nor are rotting animals encountered here, for the animals seek out the wooded and fertile places, and, finally, the damp air that prevails on the beach has completely disappeared here. This is also the place where the first settlers, in the case plantations are established, must have their residence, here houses must be built for them with magazines and a hospital…. The Coast of Guinea has cost many victims, but it is not only the unhealthy climate that is to blame, but it is a lack of sensible medical help; it is because the Europeans have often let themselves be treated by ignorant negroes, and have even committed the folly of seeking the help of the fetishes. Thonning agreed with all this, and noted that he had incorporated it at the appropriate places in the report. 564 chapter thirteen

On the relationship between an agricultural colony and the Africans, Findt wrote that “it is both the negro tribes’ own interest and the Govern ment’s moral power that has given it supremacy over the negro tribes, whereby it has decided many disputes”. The Africans usually did not turn to the Danes except in particularly troublesome cases, regarding the Danish Government on the coast as a supreme court,

whose verdicts they subject themselves to, both because they have faith in the whites’ wisdom and honesty, and because the coastal negroes do not find in their imperfect laws that guarantee that they might desire at the higher stage of culture they have attained by dealings with the Europeans. With this Thonning had no argument, but Findt went on to say that he thought it detrimental to the Government’s influence that spirits were so often served to the leading Africans at political gatherings in the forts. Thon ning argued that all important assemblies, including those among the Africans themselves, “open with a schnapps”. It was an important custom. Findt next observed that it was Thonning’s opinion

that a colony will not have much to fear from the natives in its initial weaker state, since it is probable that such a colony will open sources of income to the natives that can awaken and sustain their interests. Of this there is assuredly no doubt, for the negro’s main passion is covetousness and avarice, but on the other side the negroes are very jealous of the Europeans and always fear that they might obtain some benefit of their country and exhaust the sources of wealth they themselves do not know how to employ. The Government has had several proofs of this, for the negroes have often opposed themselves to the Europeans’ intended journeys into the interior of the country, just as they also in all possible ways tried to get Lieut. Lind on his journey in the sloop Laurine Mathilde up the Volta River to Malfi and later by canoe to the Akvambo country to desist from this intention and in particular opposed themselves to his investigations of the woods, in return for which they promised to supply him with all the trees he wished”. Thonning invoked his own experience in his response to this:

During my three-year residence in Guinea I traveled a great deal, and lived a great deal among the negroes, but never observed in the slightest any such jealousy …. My experience was quite the opposite; since my journeys had precisely as their object the investigation of their country, woods, plants, products, their history, condition, religion, customs, etc., the negroes understood this very well, and always willingly accommodated me with answers to my questions, and they brought me unasked things that they thought might be of interest to me, and it was clearly their desire that I might discover something that could make their country interesting to the whites. The the commission in a changed colonial climate 565

negroes never laid any obstacles in the way of my travels, but hoped I would come and received me with jubilance and hospitable friendship. Nor do I know of any circumstances that would confirm [Findt’s] opinion of the natives; for Isert’s treaty, as well as his and Flindt’s and the other Europeans’ plantations in fact testify to the contrary. With regard to the fact that Lind is said to have been hindered in his travel and investigation of the woods, this appears to stem from a misunderstanding, for Lind went as far up the Volta as rocks and rapids permitted his vessel, or from Lind’s personality, whom the negroes called the man with the iron will or the iron man. Misunderstanding could also easily arise from Lind’s felling trees in the woods, because of the relationship that existed in the time of the slave trade, when the whites had monopolized the fuel trade with the slave ships, in return for which they bought the fuel from the natives, who themselves cut it. Flindt, Schiønning, and others felled many trees for buildings without encountering any hindrance in so doing. Th.” “With regard to the manning of towers, I agree with Hr. [Thonning]”, Findt wrote, “but not as to the garrisons [themselves], for the number of Europeans here must be preponderant, so the garrison is not bribed to give the towers up to the enemy”. Thonning replied that “Briberies of this sort are by no means common among the negroes; they are, rather, among the characteristics of the Europeans”. In any case, he said, “only the most trusted folk, who have something to lose, will be used for the garrison”. Findt suggested that temporary structures on Legon Hill, where settlers should spend a seasoning period, could perhaps most easily be built of wood in Sweden and then shipped in sections to the coast and erected there. Remarking on the terror that prevailed when a large number of people were smitten by the fever at one time, Findt thought it would be a good idea to send colonists down in relatively small groups. Thonning agreed that the colonial government should base itself at Legon, but he did not agree that prefabricated Swedish buildings would be a good idea because of the cost of the transport; also, since the rooms would have to be quite deep and the houses would have to be equipped with verandas, because of the heat, the wooden structures would simply be too tempting to ants and termites, and cockroaches, scorpions, and millipedes would infest every joint and crack. The local African building style, perhaps improved with foundations of stone or brick, would be the cheapest solution. Findt recommended bringing some Africans up to Europe to be taught the more difficult crafts—carpentry and smithing. On the other hand, he foresaw no shortage of masons. Thonning felt that it was premature to discuss this, but noted that Europeans who labored in workshops, 566 chapter thirteen especially with fire, like smiths, seemed to do well in the climate on the coast, unlike, for example, women, who stayed indoors most of the day. Findt was convinced that the first colonists must count among their number men who were “expert in colonial agriculture”, even if the first commercial plantings were of relatively easy crops like coffee, cotton, tobacco, and cacao. He referred his fellow commissioners back to his suggestion in 1828 that four of the richest Africans’ sons be sent to the West Indies for training. The Chamber of Customs had tried to find such people among the freedmen of the Danish West Indies and had been informed that none were to be found there, but Findt was sure that in Brazil three or four very serviceable colonists could be found to manage nurseries and model plantations, with some free West Indian coloreds or freed slaves as overseers. “I should similarly suggest to the commission that all the young mulattoes and negroes now on the coast who were brought up here or in England and are to be regarded as Europeans”, as well as seven or eight of the sons of Accra’s richest men, should be sent “to Portorico to learn the occupation of coffee, sugar, tobacco, and cacao agriculture”. When they returned to the coast after two or three years, “they would be able, if their families assisted them with slaves, to establish plantations, if suitable pieces of land had been cleared for them in advance and they were each given a subsidy” of several thousand rigsdaler.

A stock of colonists would hereby be created who were related to the Accras, and whom [the latter], for their own advantage’s sake, would have to support. In general it should be sought to interest the inhabitants of the country in colonial agriculture, failing which no colony in Guinea will succeed. Thonning was quite in agreement with all of this, and perhaps a little surprised: “this is already expressed in the report”, he wrote.

Experts in colonial agriculture would also, long ago, in accordance with Captain Findt’s suggestion of 1828, have been sought either from Portorico or Brazil, if it had not been against the late king’s wish to seek such people in the foreign colonies, and since only sugar is cultivated in the Danish islands, which crop precisely cannot be begun with in Guinea, no one from the Danish West Indies could be found serviceable. Sending Danish subjects to Brazil or Puerto Rico Thonning thought would be very expensive, however, and the result uncertain, and the experts thus trained would in any case not be available in the first crucial years. Findt felt that all the other colonists should be Danes, “preferably young gardeners, whose morality had been ascertained in advance and whose constitution was suited to the tragic climate”. Twenty-five of them should the commission in a changed colonial climate 567 sent out every other year, and each of these, after they had become acclimatized, should be given a house and a plot of about two hundred acres, some beasts of burden, and a loan of several thousand rigsdaler for the purchase of slaves. Thonning here cautioned the Commission that “the development hereof will depend on the scope that is decided upon for the colonization’s field of action and belongs in any case under the details of the colonization, regarding which there can be no discussion in the present opinion”. Findt stressed the importance to the colony of “2 to 3 competent doctors, who have practiced in the tropical climates, and a pharmacist”, who would reside at a hospital on Legon Hill: “medicine and provisions must never be lacking”. Findt also pointed out that the colonists would have to be trained to work with draft oxen. He and some young artillery officers had attempted “to train some young bulls from Christiansborg’s stock of cattle to pull in a yoke, but it did not succeed, they were wild and unman- ageable”. Thonning remarked that it might be possible to recruit colonists from some other colony in which buffaloes were commonly used. Findt objected to Thonning’s favorable description of the natives of the country. In Findt’s view, This portrait of the character of the coastal negroes is too flattering to them, for only the negroes’ good qualities are named here without the bad being taken into consideration—the coastal negro is strong, indeed, but lazy, has a sound mind, but is superstitious and in a raw state of nature, optimistic, but, far from being good-natured, he is on the contrary cruel, vengeful, and greedy, to which can be added the fear he has that the Europeans might make some use of the land he regards as his lawful property and which he himself does not know how to use. Thonning here—for lack of space, he said—deferred comment to another place. Findt was not happy with Thonning’s comparison of a future colony in the Danish enclave with “the already existing establishment Liberia for free coloreds from North America”. That colony was merely a dumping ground, intended only as a refuge for demoralized and marginalized free- coloreds, Findt argued; it had none of the Danish colony’s economic and moral “prospects”. In addition, he thought the terms under which Thonning had suggested the Danish colony’s laborers should work their way to freedom were too liberal. Thonning responded, “I do not comprehend that this comparison is superfluous or should be left out”. Both were nineteenth-century colonies, based on new principles, and both would in the end depend on free labor. 568 chapter thirteen

They were thus quite comparable, “although both colonies variously diverge in their nature and tendency”. On the subject of the terms of emancipation, Thonning again chose to bide his time before replying. Findt, as he approached his conclusions, professed himself largely in agreement with Thonning. The “district Denmark owns in Guinea is particularly fertile, already produces many useful plants, besides provisions, and has in its lap raw materials, especially for buildings, which make it suitable for plantations and colonization”. Merely maintaining the forts, which involved annual state expenditures of about thirty thousand rigsdaler without yielding any return at all, would be the least “advisable” of the alternatives outlined by the king in his charge. His Majesty King Frederik the 6th, as well as the High Collegium, in the time I was governor in Guinea, regarded these establishments as a prospective colony that could replace St. Croix in the West Indies, when once the latter, upon emancipation of the slaves, was lost to Denmark; all the orders I received at that time testify to that, and in particular that of judging whether Major Wrisberg’s plan for the establishment of a criminal colony in Guinea was feasible. It was especially important to [His Majesty] to obtain for trade, industry, and commodity-exportation in Denmark an equivalent to St. Croix, and the establishments in Guinea were maintained with that aim, until it was thought timely and the country’s finances and other circumstances permitted a colonization to be carried out. That time has now come, the country’s finances are steadily improving and its industry and production on an increasing rise, Great Britain has already emancipated the slaves in its West Indian possessions, and a similar development could soon be expected in the Danish West Indies. “The time has therefore come to make a decision regarding these establishments”. If the Guinea Commission could not be assured, Findt said, that a Guinea colony would be of profit to the mother country, whether for financial or for diplomatic reasons or because competition from South American and particularly Brazilian plantations would be too stiff, then the possessions should be sold or abandoned. If, on the other hand, there was a good chance that in the course of a couple of decades this fruitful land could be developed, then the Danish government should follow the English example and for a time “contract out the establishments to one of the merchants resident there, who in return for a certain payment would maintain the main fort Christiansborg, pay the negroes their customs”, and maintain as many soldiers as were necessary to defend the fort, show the flag, and “secure the Danish merchants their existence for the present time”. the commission in a changed colonial climate 569

[Richter], who was raised in England [and] is a wise and cultured man with a very significant fortune, would be particularly be well-suited to this, for he has been able to secure to himself extraordinarily great influence, not only on the negroes of the coast but on all the surrounding negro tribes; to this can be added that he was born in Guinea, belongs to the Accras’ great family, and in most cases advises and leads his countrymen. The question of whether a colonial plan could be put into effect depended on so many factors that “a single member’s individual opinion about this will scarcely have any significance, but that only the Commission’s collected energies will be able to work through this task”. Having thus indirectly admonished Thonning that he could not ignore the opinions of his fellow commissioners, Findt said that the most important of these factors were the financial situation, “regarding which [Holten] especially will be able to enlighten the Commission”; diplomatic relations with Great Britain, which, having “sacrificed 20 million £ Sterling to emancipate the slaves in their West Indian possessions, [might] oppose the establishment of a slave colony so close to their possessions in Guinea”; and calculations of what a new plantation costs in Brazil, which is the land that can best be compared with Guinea, with comparisons to what plantations in Guinea will cost, and whether plantations, with the now existing prices on colonial goods, will be profitable. Severin Wedel, Thonning’s former subordinate at the Chamber of Customs, but whose star was now in the bureaucratic ascendant, opposed himself to the colonial project altogether in his comments on Thonning’s draft.41 Wedel gingerly suggested in his opening lines that the Commission’s original charge—to determine whether to maintain the establishments as hitherto or to attempt a colonization—had in effect been superseded by the new royal directive to the Chamber of Customs “to supply such facts as might serve as the basis for the disposal of the establishments, which, according to the royal resolution of 2nd November 1840, is to be undertaken by the Royal Department for Foreign Affairs”. Thonning composedly replied, in his annotations on Wedel’s original, “The king, upon an occasion provided by the chairman of the Commission, has stated: that he will not make a decision on the disposal of the establishments until the case in hand has been concluded”. No other record that Schønheyder, as

41 GK IV, Daterede Udarbeidelser af Commissionens Medlemmer, Flindt & Thonning 1841, Wedel, Copenhagen, April 12, 1841, Note i Anledning af det i Circulation blandt Commissionens Medlemmer satte Udkast til en allerunderdanigste Betænkning angaaende de danske Etablissementer paa Kysten af Guinea. 570 chapter thirteen chairman, had made any such approach to the king regarding the status of the Guinea Commission has been found, but Thonning appears to have been quite confident of the matter. Wedel, lacking any personal experience in the tropical colonies, would not presume to comment on Thonning’s colonial plan, but he permitted himself nonetheless to “put forth my individual opinion of the advisability of commencing such an experiment”. Earlier plantation efforts seemed to him to “advise against attempting any further experiments”; it would scarcely be wise

to enter into an undertaking that would not succeed for a merchant resident in Guinea, who must be assumed not only to employ the greatest possible care for the successful advance of same, but who also is closely familiar with the climatic and local considerations that should be kept in mind in the working of a plantation. This ran entirely counter to the thrust of the reports on the existing plantations that the Commission had obtained from the Government on the coast, but Wedel had perhaps not delved as deeply as he might have into the supporting documentation Thonning had assembled. Wedel also warned that the nation’s investment in a plantation colony would be thrown away in the event of a sea war. He also endorsed Findt’s statements regarding the

characteristics and way of thinking of the natives, that it must be feared that these will become insuperable obstacles to every colonization experiment at public expense, even if the latter is calculated and organized so as to awaken the natives’ interest in its progress. Wedel argued that the new South American republics, “as their political relations are gradually settled and the population turns to peaceful pursuits, will become competitors in the trade in the same products that are suitable for cultivation in Guinea”. A Danish colony in Africa would be unlikely to be able to compete with these,

unless special preference in sales to the mother state is given, but whereby the free and unhindered commercial connections now commonly aimed at will be subjected to new and harmful strictures and the colony thus become a heavy burden for the mother state, whose consumers will be paying tax for an establishment that could not otherwise survive. To this Thonning responded mildly in an annotation, “The interests of the colony ought naturally to be subordinated to the mother state’s, and the opposite can by no means be the intent”. the commission in a changed colonial climate 571

Wedel found it

inadvisable that Denmark, as long as England and Holland do not set the example, should commence such a risky undertaking, which will entail large sacrifices for the state, and even if such an example, against all probability, was provided I must still regard it as rash from the Danish side to imitate same until the necessary experience was obtained about whether same would succeed. If the project was to succeed at all, the state must invest heavily and with an iron will; money and lives would simply be wasted on a piecemeal colonization.

“In addition hereto, disposable capital in amounts that cannot be predicted would be demanded from the treasury, … for in this regard no estimate has been or can be made, but which must nevertheless be so significant that it on that ground alone would be dangerous for the administration to commit itself to an undertaking that will never be able to yield direct income to the treasury, nor which … will become of such essential interest to Danish commerce and shipping that capital should be applied to it that, used in many other ways, would be able to create far larger and more essential benefit. Thonning replied rather airily that with two or three hundred thousand rigsdaler a year

much can be accomplished towards the colonization’s further development, and it would scarcely be appropriate to use more in the first 2 to 3 years. Then the progress of the colonization and the state of the finances will suggest to the mother state what it should undertake in its interest. Wedel then returned to the question of whether the establishments should be maintained as at present. He totted up the state’s expenditures on the establishments since the currently applicable budget had been drafted in 1816, after the war, which sum, after twenty-five years, naturally seemed rather a large one;

when there is added to this the sacrifice of capable officers and other people that in the said period of years have been sent out, then I think I dare with full confidence express myself to the effect that these establishments are extremely burdensome to the Danish nation. The “unfortunate result” of experiments with a mill with which to grind maize for export to the West Indies and with the Laurine Mathilde “show all too clearly that any effort that aims at major trade connections is fruitless”. 572 chapter thirteen

Since 1820, Wedel went on, the officers had been paid entirely in trade goods, and this put them in direct competition with the merchants whom they were supposed to serve. Thonning responded that this was insignificant; he doubted that the officers handled more than a twentieth of the trade at Accra. In sum, Wedel wrote, “I would have to vote that the administration should rather give up the establishments on the coast of Guinea than continue to bear the not insignificant costs that they cost the treasury”, were it not that it would be “offensive to the national sentiment” to abandon a claim so long maintained; furthermore, Denmark was bound by international conventions to maintain a legal venue on the coast to receive and condemn Danish slave ships stopped at sea.

Under these circumstances it must presumably be regarded as less fitting if Denmark, which took the first step towards halting the slave trade, were to withdraw from participation in the humane provisions that other states have lately adopted for its complete suppression. For this reason there should for the time being be no talk of abandoning the establishments. The auditor Wedel had now arrived at the matter that appears to have been closest to his heart: how could the cost of maintaining the establishments be reduced? Findt’s idea of licensing the establishments to Richter would not relieve Denmark of its obligation to have legally qualified officers on the spot to handle condemnations of slave ships. These positions could not be done without, but the staff in the forts was otherwise altogether too large, Wedel thought. He wanted to eliminate the two supernumerary assistants’ posts: if the staff was paid in currency instead of in goods, the cost of warehouse bookkeeping and supervision would fall away. The extra payment to the catechist for learning the language (which Pastor Tørsleff had in any case not yet earned, he said) could be dispensed with. (Thonning thought this would be a shame and pointed out that in Tranquebar the priest always received a supplement for learning Tamil.) Wedel also saw no reason to keep a doctor in the establishments, since there were so few people to treat; the Danes could always resort to the doctors at the English forts. He concluded that “If there might be found someone who would purchase its possessions, etc. on the coast from Denmark, then I must regard any sum, however slight, as a true profit”. The Commission met to discuss Thonning’s draft and Findt’s and Wedel’s comments on it on May 6, shortly before Findt was to sail with his the commission in a changed colonial climate 573 cadet ship.42 Holten was unable to attend this meeting, and Hambro was abroad, so the assembled commissioners were Schønheyder, Thonning, Findt, and Wedel. Thonning suggested that it might be advisable to give a seat on the Commission to Peter Garlieb, under whose supervision the colonial office now fell, but the other Commissioners found this unnecessary. According to Thonning’s brief minute, it was decided that Thonning “should as far as possible try to determine the costs of a colony and security measures in Guinea”. Henrik Richter wrote to Thonning twice during the summer of 1841, and the letters are preserved among the Guinea Commission’s papers. He had received three letters from Thonning, in two different ships, he wrote in June,43 “together with the 6 Bornholm 8-day clockworks and accessories, all in good condition”. (The Bornholm clock was a painted grandfather clock.44) It may be that Thonning had kept his hand in the Guinea Coast trade over the years; Richter presumably did not require six clockworks for his own use; on the other hand, it may also be that Thonning had not escaped falling into Richter’s debt: “the money you remitted me through the Government has similarly come properly into my hands”, for which Richter expressed his thanks profusely. We were all much surprised that neither a new governor was sent out with one of the ships nor someone here on the coast named to it. Now there is a very strong rumor abroad among both the Danes and the Englishmen that the establishments are to be sold and that it is the Englishmen that will buy them, which Richter prayed heaven might forbid. “There is also a rumor here that the establishments are to be closed down, enfin there are so many rumors here that one does not know what to believe”. He asked Thonning to advance his, Richter’s, own application for the governor’s post. Trade was more or less at a standstill, he reported. “Our priest, Pastor [Tørsleff], who was the only sensible and intelligent man in the fort, has also left us and gone home with an American ship via Boston and then on to England and so to Denmark”. The rainy season had been insufficiently wet, and Richter feared “that we will come to suffer from water shortage in

42 GK I, Mødereferat 6/5/1841, Thonning’s notes. 43 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance, Breve fra alle om Guinea, Richter, Danish Accra, June 13, 1841, to Thonning. 44 See, for example, Berlingske Tidende, May 1, 1994, section 4, p. 2. 574 chapter thirteen a couple of months’ time”. They were daily expecting the arrival of two iron-hulled steam vessels and two other ships, “which are destined for the Niger River, and are said to have cost in England £61,000 Sterling; with same, 2 Assianthe princes Maclean took home with him in June 1836 to be educated there will be coming out to the coast”. “The slave trade is still being continued in the country by the negroes and some mulattoes”. It had proved impossible to dislodge a Spaniard in this trade at Atokko, just on the other side of the Volta. Richter asked Thonning not to bandy news of this about, lest his own name come to be associated with it. The captain of a British vessel, calling at Christiansborg, had offered to drive this Spaniard off, but Richter did not know what answer he had received. He asked Thonning for news, and closed, “A pro- pos! How goes it with Christensen?” They had heard on the coast that his legal career was advancing nicely. In September, Richter wrote again:45 My dear friend and benefactor: About two months ago I received a quite unexpected and unwelcome letter from Major Philip Wrisberg. In same letter he proclaims to me in a very triumphant tone that you had retired from the [Chamber of Customs…. He tells me also in same letter that the 2 gentlemen that had come into the Collegium were such intimate good friends of his that he could through them have anything he wished arranged in the Collegium, and for this reason he offers me his services that if I should want anything arranged in the High Collegium to write it to him and he would through his intimate friends have it arranged for me”. However, it gives me great pain, my good old friend, that you have left the Collegium; now it is as if I am quite abandoned, since I have no one to bring my troubles to or to rely on. He asked his old friend to write to him from time to time: If you will just send your letters in an envelope addressed to Mssrs. W.B. Hutton & Sons in London, they will come safely to my hands…. Conditions on the coast are now miserable. At the fort there are now only 3 European officers besides Interim Governor Dall, namely Herr Warehouse Manager Wulff (a Jew),46 Regiment’s Surgeon Sannom, and Corporal Ordrup. I hear that Governor Dall has applied to be repatriated after 7 years. I would wish that His Majesty would most graciously appoint me as governor of the establishments [as requested in] the most humble application I sent in last year. I do not think that His Majesty will come to regret it.

45 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance, Breve fra alle om Guinea, Richter, Danish Accra, September 13, 1841, to Thonning. 46 See A Danish Jew in West Africa and Da Guinea var Dansk. the commission in a changed colonial climate 575

This season has been very sickly, some Europeans among the Englishmen have died and a number of the negroes. We will get a very bad coffee harvest this year, I think I will get scarcely 100 lb., it is for the lack of rain since we have had a very bad rain season. He signed himself “Your old faithful and devoted friend H. Richter”. In October, having apparently chewed on the matter over the summer, Thonning circulated his responses to Findt’s and Wedel’s comments on his draft of the Guinea Commission’s final opinion. He took little trouble to conceal his distaste for Findt’s (and Wedel’s) contemptuous and hateful characterizations of the Africans, and the tension within the Commis sion is quite palpable: Thonning’s response to Findt’s remarks was subsequently heavily marked up, and in more than one hand, it appears.47 Thonning objected first to Findt’s suggestion, regarding plantation laborers, “that the coastal negroes are strong, indeed, but lazy”. (Here Thonning added in pencil: “Capt. Findt furthermore confuses my statements about the plantation laborers with the coastal negroes, but the idea of the whole opinion is to not make the coastal negroes into steady plantation laborers”.) I must protest with the factual proofs of experience against this and the other allegations. He is only lazy who works so little that he comes to lack necessaries…. The coast negro is thus not lazy, for it is an incontrovertible fact that the nations in this landscape produce so much that no individual, be he slave or free or as poor as can be, old or feeble, suffers from want of the necessaries. [Crop failure sometimes drove prices up, but] hunger, such as one would find in a lazy people, has not existed here in man’s memory or in any tradition known to me. It cannot be called laziness that the negroes do not work much more than is demanded by the requirements of their way of life, … and that the negroes in general do not work to obtain what they regard as an unnecessary abundance; these are characteristics that they have in common with the whole human race (only with individual exceptions); it can be called ease, but not laziness. Referring to passages in the opinion, Thonning said he hoped he had dealt sufficiently with the work that could be accomplished with hired and slave labor; he added that the slaves to which he referred were not the people of the coast, but “Dunko negroes from the interior of Africa, which in their day in the West Indies were more sought-after and more dearly [bought] as willing workers than most other negroes”.

47 GK IV, Daterede Udarbeidelser af Commissionens Medlemmer, Flindt & Thonning 1841, Hr. Capt. Findts Nota af 22/3/41 med besvarelse af 29/10/41 og __/11/43, where there is to be found only Thonning’s reply of October 29, 1841. 576 chapter thirteen

Findt had next complained “that the coastal negroes have sound minds but are superstitious”. Thonning responded: I have thought it unnecessary in the opinion to touch on the negroes’ religious system, … because a colony can with slight expenditures buy themselves out of the hindrances that fetishism might be thought to place in the way. But since the negroes’ religion is brought up in Hr. Captain Findt’s note, I ought to elucidate its character and its influence on a colonization. The principle of the negroes’ faith or superstition has in some aspects similarity with the southern European peasantry’s, but is on the other hand in other respects altogether opposite: just as the Catholic has his angels, ghosts, relics, and witches, the negro has his corresponding fetishes…. The Catholic directs his wishes, adoration, and offerings to the angels, the negro to the fetishes. Their relics and amulets have quite the same meaning and credence. “Their practices against witches” were also quite comparable, and, as everywhere, it was especially old women that were the victims of such persecution. Both the Catholic and the negro hope and fear, although with the difference that the Catholic hopes more of his idols, but the negro fears his more. On the other hand, the effect of their superstition is completely different in their stance toward others, for the raw Catholic is a propagandist, fanatic, even a murderer out of religious fervor or out of religious contempt towards those who believe otherwise; but the negro is altogether indifferent to others’ religious system; even among themselves each can in this regard think and act as he will. The raw Catholic swears a false oath with silent reservation, but the negroes believe that the fetish will surely punish perjury. (In the margin, one of the members of the Commission penciled in what appears to be the single word “scandal”, and several lines of this material are struck out, first in pencil and then in ink.) Thonning concluded his comparison: “The Catholic commits misdeeds toward other people with confidence of absolution, but I know of nothing similar of fetishism”. Thonning was presumably as firmly entrenched in his own Lutheran society as it is be expected of a man of rank, but it is not impossible that all this, coming from a man of his generation and of his extraordinary experience abroad, was an oblique attack not merely on Catholicism but on religion in general. The Danish Government had already forbidden all nearby fetishes to protect runaways belonging to Danish Christians, Thonning said, and if “the natives’ weekly fetish day, which is a day of rest from cultivation and fishery, falls on another day than the Christian Sunday day of rest, …” then some similar accommodation could doubtless be arrived at, “if it might the commission in a changed colonial climate 577 not in any case be found reasonable to permit the serfs two free days a week”. He suggested that it might not be objected to if the fetish day was used to exercise the militia. All in all, Thonning thought the fetishes would not hinder a colony’s development, and could indeed often be turned to its purposes. “I put it now to my fellow commissioners’ kind consideration whether they might find that there is reason to provide a description of the natives’ religious belief and superstition in the opinion, to show its influence on a European colony”. In response to Findt’s statement that “the negroes are in a raw state of nature”, Thonning wrote, perhaps overreacting to Findt’s hyperbole, Also this I must contradict with factual proofs; for the negroes divide themselves into definite tribes or nations, have fixed property, agriculture, husbandry, industry, and trade; they live assembled in quite large towns, and have a certain social development; they form municipalities and states of several hundred thousand with formal regimes and constitution; … treaties can be entered into with them, which are honestly observed, for example the Isert treaty of 1788 regarding property in land in Akvapim and the peace treaty with Asiantee of 1831.48 These people were “far from the raw state of nature” characteristic of the Indians of America and the peoples of some of the islands of the South Pacific. Nor can the negroes’ condition be compared with the … state of nature in which great nomadic hordes live, [such as] some of the descendants of the Scythian peoples in Middle Asia and of Arabic North Africa; which condition almost does not permit European agricultural colonization; whereas in Danish Guinea, especially beneath the Akvapim mountains, there have for more than 40 50 years been European plantations of provisions, cotton, and coffee without the slightest protection other than the negroes’ respect for law and rights, and for the Danish Government’s supremacy. In a margin is a penciled note: “Here [Thonning] contradicts himself, for in his answer to Wedel’s remarks on p. 3 he relates how the negroes in 1811 and 12 destroyed both Schiønning’s and the other whites’ already significant plantations”. To which Thonning replied in another penciled annotation: “NB: Capt. [[Findt] should note that in 1811 there was war between Asiante and the coastal negroes and in 1812 between Akra and Akvapim”. Schiønning had taken a part in both affairs, “and as governor and Danish

48 The Isert treaty’s provisions regarding land are open to interpretation: see Jeppesen, pp. 51–52, to which Nørregaard refers on pp. 273 and 382 of the second edition of Guldkysten but not in the translation Danish settlements, and Kwamena-Poh, p. 100. 578 chapter thirteen he naturally drew the storm down on all Danes. However, both Schiønning and the Danes were more gently treated than could be expected of Europeans as enemies. Th.” Findt had written of the Africans of the strand: “far from being good- natured, he is on the contrary cruel, vengeful, and greedy”. Thonning replied, in a considerably marked-up passage: Since cruelty and vengefulness are here ascribed to the coastal negroes as prominent vices, it arouses a natural concern that Danish colonists will be dangerously exposed to them. I do not know where my honored friend and colleague in the Commission got this view, but it does not agree with the experience that I, during my three-year residence among these negroes, had occasion to obtain. It is a justice owed the negroes, in judging the character of their humanity, that it be judged relatively and not isolated, and the coastal negroes and the other Danish negroes in no way possess these vices to a greater degree or greater extent than the human race in general; on the contrary, examples can be sought in vain of such ingenious cruelty and mur- derousness as the history of the cultured nations is unfortunately so rich in [strike-through sic]. I know of only one instance, which is in fact more than 50 years old, in which the negroes have committed the murder of a Danish European out of revenge. The Danes had namely in 1784 driven the Kvitta negroes from their town and there erected the fort Prindsenssteen; a large number of the exiled Kvittas would not enter into a treaty or submit themselves to the fort, but settled in a related town some miles farther east outside the Danish territory. The Danish commandant at Prindsenssteen had thereafter had a couple of these negroes, who in their affairs had come to the town under the fort, killed in an outrageous manner; this crime had to be avenged. A Danish factor named Tessin, working for the Company, was at that time traveling overland from Popo to Prindsenssteen and had to pass fairly close to where the exiled Kvitta had settled; “his journey was so little kept secret that even some of the hostile Kvittas warned him that he would be attacked and killed by the families of the Kvittas who had been killed”. He had paid no heed and was taken by a mob and stabbed to death. Now, if one without prejudice considers this single case of its kind and bears in mind that these Kvittas were in a state of war with the Danes, that the Danish Commandant had himself had their relatives murdered; and that they had no other means to prevent or frighten the Danes from repeating such murders, one will scarcely be justified in judging these coastal negroes to be cruel or vengeful because they grasped the only means whereby they could provide for their security. Even Tessin’s comportment demonstrates confidence that this revenge would not be carried out, the commission in a changed colonial climate 579 since he had elected to come overland instead of along the coast by canoe in perfect safety.49 Furthermore, Thonning maintained, “assassination, which in southern Europe is so common a consequence of vengefulness, is extremely rare”. He had never heard of such a thing in his time on the coast. Here there was a long insertion: A common sign of vengefulness in a people is also its common resort to poison; I have, however, not been able to discover either by the symptoms of illness or any other investigation that the negroes are in possession of any preparation that in undetectable dose can cause death. It is only the often very hasty mortality of the climate sickness that is the true cause I have been able to find of the common rumors here in the capital of poisoning in Guinea. The negroes make no use of poisoned weapons, either, which also is a sign of a vengeful mind, and yet snake venom is an easily obtainable agent for this. The Africans believed that such things as crocodile gall and human men- strual effluent were exceedingly poisonous—“it is in fact a criminally deadly matter to be in possession of crocodile gall, and yet it is so little a poison that in Egypt it is used internally as medicine. Nor is the usual recourse for secret revenge putative poisons but spells” cast through the intercession of fetishes, and these curses were regarded with such serious- ness that they were punishable by law.50 In wars with related peoples, the lives of prisoners were generally spared, “and in war between unrelated nations only the hopelessly wounded are killed on the field of battle and the highest ranking prisoners while the troops are still stirred up by the battle”. Thonning related that in the war between the Asante and the British in 1823 the English prisoners and wounded were killed immediately on the field, whereas a young officer who was not captured until a little later was spared and well handled. Similarly, in 1826, when the Asante and the Danes had fought at Dodowa, “all mercy was shown when the outcome of the battle was decided. It is not necessary to go very far back in the history of European warfare”, Thonning wrote, to find great cruelly and vengefulness, f. ex. under Wallenstein;51 not to speak of the Europeans’ wars in America and even at present in Algeria. The like of unnatural cruelty and tortures, as European religious and political

49 See Nørregård, Danish settlements, pp. 154–155. 50 See Hopkins, “A poisonous plant of the genus Datura”. 51 Albrecht Wallenstein, whose army ravaged Jutland during the Thirty Years’ War. 580 chapter thirteen

fanaticism or the prior treatment of slaves in America are so horribly rich in, will be sought in vain among the Danish negroes. Religious human sacrifice or the killing slaves upon the death of the magnate, to serve them in the next life, is not customary in the coastal region.52 Thonning now threw Findt’s own words in the old Commission of Inves tigation’s report of April 1828 back at him: “ ‘The inhabitants along the west coast [i.e., ‘bank’] of the River Volta are some of the best negroes in whose midst it could be wished to found a colony’. But any particular deviation in fundamental character”, Thonning said, “is hardly to be found in the Danish territory”. The Akuapem, especially, were highly regarded for their good faith and reliability. “There remains still for me to take this occasion to represent the circumstances that have led me to attribute to the negroes ‘good-nature’, which Hr. Capt. Findt is of the opinion they do not possess”. Thonning ascribed both the mildness with which slaves were treated and the Africans’ willingness in legal processes to settle for less than the law provided as indicative of their “good nature”. “As far as the relationship to the Europeans goes, it is a fact: that the Europeans, no less here than else where in the Indies, treat the natives with arrogant contempt, and that the negroes tolerate this comportment, often from the lowest European officer”. It was “good nature” and not mere self interest, “that moves the natives to permit a total of scarcely ten whites to live unchallenged everywhere among them and to exercise a significant supremacy. “In his note on p. 6, Capt. Findt stated that ‘The negroes’ main passion is greed and avarice’, and on p. 10 repeats that he is ‘greedy’ ”. Thonning begged to be permitted “again, with facts, to bring the Danish negro before the court of reasonableness”. The African family lived “in a certain ease, so there is not produced much more than the family’s needs”. (There was here a little marginal exchange: Findt penciled in, “Here [Thonning] admits the negroes’ laziness under the name of ease”; Thonning referred him to his earlier rebuttal.) They cared so little for surplus that they had difficulty raising even small quantities of cash, and in pressing circumstances had to borrow. (Findt noted: “NB or rather to mortgage their children who are later sold”.) Thonning argued that under the heading “Greed” must fall theft, robbery, fraud—i. e., as he defined it, “the desire to get others’ property in an

52 See Wilks, Asante in the nineteenth century, pp. 592–594, and Gareth Austin, “Between abolition and Jihad: the Asante response to the ending of the Atlantic slave trade, 1807– 1896”, in From slave trade to legitimate commerce, pp. 93–118, on pp. 102–103. the commission in a changed colonial climate 581 illegal manner”. “That the negroes have a tendency to theft can scarcely be doubted, for the negro is human”. However, Thonning pointed out, The negroes’ housekeeping is not at all arranged to prevent theft; everything is accessible both day and night; … that a house-negro takes a schnapps or a pc. of tobacco for his own use is not regarded as theft, if he does not break a lock or a hiding place for that reason. “It is unheard of that the roads in the Danish territory in peace time and since so-called panyarring has been abolished here should be unsafe for life and property”. (The word “abolished” is underlined in pencil, and there is a marginal note: “NB, is not abolished”. Thonning replied, “[it] is, according to official reports from Gov. Mørck, abolished. Th.”)53 As for fraud, Thonning argued, everyone tried to get the best prices they could for their goods, “but since the negroes’ wares consist of crops and the whites’ of manufactured and factory wares, it is easy to judge on whose side the fraud is easiest”.54 I must ask pardon for having discussed the character of the natives with so much thoroughness, but Hr. Councilor of State Wedel’s note p. 3, No. 5, has made me aware what decisive results he believes he found in Hr. Captain Findt’s portrayal … of the natives’ attributes and mentality. Which results, however, can scarcely be understood to be Hr. Captain Findt’s opinion, as [they] would be diametrically opposed to his official declaration of 1828, which is quoted verbatim above. “Incorrectly”, Findt wrote sourly in the margin. Before he had written all this, Thonning had angrily indulged himself in a sheet of notes: “If it might be permitted the negroes to throw out a characterization of the Europeans in Guinea, it would probably [include] vengefulness, greed, avarice, fraud”; the Europeans were “ignorant of the country’s laws, customs, and rights, conceited, arrogant, violent, given to drink, lustful, gluttons”.55 He now concluded, in any case, that there was more than a century’s experience to indicate that colonists would have nothing to fear unless they themselves committed some grave offense, such as the murder of one of the Africans. Again one of his readers referred in an annotation to the

53 See Gareth Austin, Labour, land and capital in Ghana: from slavery to free labour in Asante, 1807–1956 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005), pp. 141–142. 54 See Hernæs, Slaves, Danes, and African Coast society, p. 357. 55 GK IV, Daterede Udarbeidelser af Commissionens Medlemmer, Flindt & Thonning 1841, loose, undated notes of Thonning’s, folded into a modern sheet of yellow archival paper. 582 chapter thirteen destruction of plantations in the past, and Thonning responded that they had been looted by the Asante in the course of a war. Thonning reserved the last word in this controversy for himself. Permitting himself the use of the first person, and underlining the whole passage, he wrote in the Commission’s final opinion: “I have most humbly permitted myself to present the actual facts and existing circumstances as I found them in Danish Guinea, and as a result believe with conviction that it can be assumed that a plantation colony has as little now as in the past to fear from the character of the negroes, for the latter has, after many years’ experience, shown itself so accommodating and well disposed”.56 Findt had also disagreed with Thonning on the subject of the eventual emancipation of the colony’s slaves. In response, Thonning reminded the Commission that The plan of colonization according to the draft is: to found and organize a colony for intertropical commercial products, which shall be bound to the motherland’s trade and shipping; to combine the spread of enlightenment, the Christian religion, and morals with the colonization; to educate the colony’s unfree workers to become independent agriculturalists and by means of a conditional emancipation or release and an equipage from the discharging master and from the colony’s land put them in a position to support themselves by their own enterprise; and finally as far as possible to influence the natives of the country by example in the same direction. Thonning had proposed that the slaves should be emancipated after fifteen years, Findt merely that the slaves be permitted to work towards the purchase of their freedom in their spare time. Thonning said that his proposal was modeled on the English emancipation system in the West Indies, where a seven-year rule was in effect. The British government was subsidizing this emancipation program with twenty million pounds sterling, however, which Denmark could not afford, so Thonning felt that a fifteen- year term of slavery was a workable compromise. Thonning could not advise licensing the establishments to Richter as Findt had recommended. “With all my regard for [Richter’s] loyalty, I fear nevertheless that the temptation to take advantage of the commercial advantages are too great for a man who was brought up and has lived his whole life with mercantile views”. The Danish government would never be sure that he was acting in the nation’s best interest. Richter’s

56 GK, Betænkningen, pp. 319–320. the commission in a changed colonial climate 583 strength seemed to be fading, too, Thonning judged, and none of the other merchants would be able to replace him in such a responsible position. Finally, the possessions could not be maintained at less expense than at present. Even if the prize court at Christiansborg were formally closed, Thonning said, the slave-trade treaty of July 26, 1834 would require Denmark to send commissioners to Sierra Leone, as France and other nations were already obliged to do. This might entail even more expense than could be saved by putting the administration of the fort into private hands. Thonning now quickly recapitulated the main points of the opinion he had drafted, and drew from it all the conclusion, which he put to the rest of the Commission, that, in the revolution occurring in colonial production—which now extends to the mainland of the East Indies, especially for sugar, and to the East Indian islands especially for coffee, in which Brazil at a certain point will compete, until the actual halting of the slave trade hampers the further expansion of colonization, and the influence of emancipation puts it also there in decline—it would be inadvisable to give up a possession so conveniently located and of such extent and potential value to the Danish economy. Nor could merely retaining possession of the claim be accomplished “with a simpler organization” or at smaller expense than at present. Second, he wrote, that while the circumstances are favorable to such a colonization, and as far as Denmark is concerned, more advantageous than anywhere else, [these circumstances] are nevertheless of such character, that the colonization can only be prepared and brought to a certain maturity by measures taken [by] and the pecuniary resources of the administration…. That the colonization must be sufficiently advanced by the administration [that] it can offer the presumption of security of persons and property, that its plantation system has experienced and expert guides and can obtain whatever skilled labor and beasts of burden are necessary on the spot; that its population can produce the necessary provisions of all kinds and other necessaries from among the country’s productions, if it does not pay better to purchase form the natives; and finally that the plantations can be laid out, planted, built upon, and staffed with workers and other things needed for the continuation of cultivation, which plantations—for palm oil, coffee, cotton, tobacco, provisions, or livestock breeding—might on suitable terms … be turned over, by lease, life tenancy, copyhold, or as property, to acclimatized colonists, who, by being in royal service or living in the colony are known to the local administration and offer the reasonable hope of being active and industrious planters. 584 chapter thirteen

The significant expense that the colonization will thus be to the national finances for several years and the English Governor M’lean’s legal question regarding the Danes’ right to Akvapim, Thonning regarded to be the crucial questions, the royal resolution of which any more detailed colonization plan must await. He later made a note in the margin here, “M’lean’s intrigues the Commiss. feels it is unnecessary to take into consideration, for the treaty regarding Aquapim is decisive—Th.” The letter goes on: “The draft of the opinion, after having circulated to the Commission, was thus summarily taken up at its last meeting”, in May, 1841. Since it was here agreed that the royal rights to Akvapim are so indisputable, that no uncertainty regarding this should be raised, I think that there can be much less regarding the question that Hr. Capt. Findt sets forth in his note p. 16, second point, namely regarding England’s agreement to the establishment of such a colony; for the treaties of 30/11 '31, 22/3 '33, and 26/7'34 are altogether irrelevant to the procurement of unfree laborers to remain and perform their service in their own country; it is [in] accordance with the inhabitants’ statu quo, which has not changed and cannot be changed by any [European] treaty or legislation. When the Dutch had arranged for the Asante and others to provide men for military service in the East Indies, “whence they will very likely never come back to their homes”, the slave-trade treaty had not prevented it, Thonning pointed out; this Danish project would encounter no opposition on that account. It is only an expansion of an already established plantation enterprise in Guinea, with the help of which it is intended to modify Guinean slavery in the spirit of humanity and the English emancipation act, such that those in Guinean slavery that enter the colony’s service are assured emancipation after the elapse of a certain number of years, and in the meantime a legally regulated position that protects them from arbitrary treatment, gives them rights about like contractually bound free servants, secures them the possession of the fortunes they have earned for themselves and the right to buy themselves free before the term of emancipation, and, finally, prepares for them a free, useful, and independent position with a small property and civil rights as long as they remain in the colony and perform their duties as colonial citizens. This relationship could much rather advance a claim, as a matter of principle, to support from the English side, as the only sure way to commence emancipation and religion in this part of Africa. “Otherwise”, Thonning ended his response to Findt’s remarks on the draft opinion, “the financial aspect was regarded as the main matter during the the commission in a changed colonial climate 585

Commission’s deliberations today”;57 it had been decided to attempt a calculation of the costs of founding a colony. Thonning undertook to draft a plan for a colonization according to the demands of the times and the circumstances of the locality, as well as to calculate the costs thereof, which subject will obviously encounter numerous difficulties, for all earlier colonies based on agriculture give very little experience that could serve as a guide for a colony that must be carried out according to altogether new tenets, and in which there is so much latitude in our thinking that there can scarcely be anything that will not open dissension”. In another letter of the same date, Thonning turned to Wedel’s objections to a colony.58 Wedel had suggested that the history of colonial efforts in the Danish territory clearly advised against any further such efforts. Thonning wrote that he simply had no idea how Wedel had arrived at this conclusion from the material laid before him in the commission’s draft report. “I must therefore presume that my discussion was not clear enough”, he said, rather politely, and recapitulated the history of Danish efforts to establish plantation agriculture in the enclave: A. Isert began his plantation with very limited means 21 December 1788, and his report, with documents enclosed, to Minister of State Schimmelmann and Brandt of 16 January 1789 show that he entertained complete confidence in the progress of the colonization, but he died a month to the day after having taken the land into possession and begun the plantation. Thonning referred Wedel to the relevant pages in the opinion. B. Flindt, assistant to Isert, was promoted in his place, but without the means to maintain or continue the plantation and, discontented, therefore traveled home shortly after. C. Lieutenant-colonel v. Rohr was fitted out from America at some cost, but he together with all the preparations disappeared without trace at sea. D. The above-named Flindt, who was sent out from Copenhagen as v. Rohr’s assistant, in the meantime began a plantation of cotton and provisions; the mercantile government supplied him only with the most insignificant and inappropriate means, but Flindt’s tireless diligence showed what could be accomplished in a short time with the fruitful soil. When, however, report of v. Rohr’s loss came to Copenhagen, orders were immediately given

57 The word “today” appears to refer to May 6, 1841, when the Commission had met. 58 GK IV, Daterede Udarbeidelser af Commissionens Medlemmer, Flindt & Thonning 1841, Hr. Etatsr. Wedel’s Nota 12/4 41 med Besvarelse af 29/10 41 og den sammes Nota af 8 maj 1843 med 1 Bilag, which in fact contains only Thonning’s Oplysninger og Anmærkninger til Hr. Etatsraad Wedels Note ved det circulerede Udkast til en Betænkning ang. de danske Besiddelser i Guinea. 586 chapter thirteen

to terminate Flindt’s plantation, before it was known how far it had come. It thus began and ended in 1 3/4 year. E. Gov. [Johan] Peter Wriesberg in the middle of 1797 began a little cotton planting on 16 acres 2/3 of a mile north of Christiansborg. This I found 2 1/2 years from then upon my arrival to Guinea in an excellent state and fruitfulness although the region there lacks rain and the ground is not fertile for any other cultivation. But at the same time Gov. Wrisberg was repatriated, and his successor allowed it to be so completely neglected and to fall into decline that the plentiful fruit was not even gathered. F. Schiønning, who was governor during the war, at the end of 1807 began on private account a plantation in the Akvapim country for coffee and provisions, in which after the elapse of a year there were planted out 26,700 coffee trees and ca. 8,000 banana plants. The coffee planting was gradually doubled, but because of an unusual drought in 1809 so many of this young planting died that, in an survey that was taken in Novemb. 1810, there were only 36,000 healthy and strong coffee trees of various ages, from which Schiønning calculated his next harvest at ca. 20,000 lb. But now in 1811 and 1812 war occurred between the negroes, in which Schiønning’s judgment and conduct were such that he was regarded almost as an enemy by both sides, for which reason his and the other Danish whites’ plantations in Akvapim [were] destroyed, the buildings burnt down, the laborers chased off, and the coffee bushes overgrown and partly choked by wild brush. Schiønning died shortly after, and with him the enterprise that had brought forth this plantation culture, subsequently crushed by chance circumstances. Here a penciled annotation in the margin read, “[Thonning] reveals here how much his good negroes can be trusted”. Thonning replied beneath: “NB: In response to Capt. Findt’s I will be content to state this circumstance: that Schiønning’s duplicity had made both parties his enemies”. He went on, “the good civilized Europeans do not spare enemy property, either—and the Asianthees were enemies—and it was the Asiantes that burned the plantations”. Governor Steffens and the Council declare on this subject as follows on 6 Febr., 1821: the state of the late Interim Governor Schiønning’s plantation in its day shows sufficiently what the establishments with successful direction in peacetime and with some subsidy could become. This plantation, which, under the name of Frederiksgave, is under the Government’s direction, lacks the Government’s supervision altogether and is left to the laziness of a few serfs, so there is scarcely anything left of Schiønning’s energetic and very promising beginning. G. As for the other private efforts by the merchants, [Thonning wrote,] The cultivation of coffee is a secondary affair on the merchants’ plantations, [and] it is insignificant and lacking and of no interest to the owner, who very seldom visits his plantations but leaves it to his negroes, of whom it is only required to supply a fixed quantity of certain provisions and otherwise let the coffee bushes shift for themselves. the commission in a changed colonial climate 587

I therefore cannot concur with Councilor of State Wedel’s conclusion ‘that it should advise against entering into an undertaking’ such as this. Hr. Councilor of State Wedel is not familiar with the character of the Guinean merchant corps and has adopted much too elevated an idea of their condition, knowledge, and education; for [Richter] is the only actual merchant, all the others are small tradesmen; they are all without the least scientific training, and none of them has ever seen systematic colonial agriculture, except perhaps Balck, who at a young age was a mariner at St. Croix and for many years a seaman in Guinea, and thus scarcely thought at the time about man- aging plantations. Truly no conclusion can be drawn from the quite indifferent merchants’ efforts with the cultivation of coffee and cotton that would diminish the good expectations that Flindt’s, Peder Wriesberg’s, and Schiønning’s experiments, begun but too soon interrupted, give occasion for. Wedel had recoiled from the sacrifice of lives, money, and time that a colonization would entail. Thonning argued firmly: Without money, time, and climate victims, no intertropical colony can arise. As regards money, there can scarcely be any intertropical country where the colonization’s needs can be had at such reasonable prices; as regards time, it will depend on the resources of money, intelligence, and energy with which the colony is run; as regards climate victims, it will be recalled that St. Croix was just as unhealthy when it became Danish in 1736,59 and the so flourishing colonies [of Suriname, Demerara], and all the Dutch East Indian colonies did not lag far behind Guinea as long as they were uncultivated. Wedel did not think that a Danish colony in Africa would be able to compete with South American plantations. Thonning responded, As I am hereby made aware that insufficient attention is paid in the draft to these countries’ competition in the trade in colonial products, I have now on p. 175 of the draft inserted my reflections on Brazil. The formerly Spanish provinces that abut the Gulf of Mexico have never partaken energetically in this competition, and then really only with indigo, cocoa, and tobacco; the size of their present population, their indolence, and the abolition of the slave trade do not lead one to assume an increasing production. The formerly Spanish provinces that abut the Pacific Ocean are almost equally dis- tantly located as the East Indies, they are not organized for intertropical colonial agriculture, for which Chili also lies too temperately, and the population is of the same character as that just mentioned.

59 The Danes commenced their settlement of St. Croix in 1734. See Hopkins, “Danish cadastral survey of St. Croix”, pp. 60, 70–71. 588 chapter thirteen

Thonning grew a little impatient when he read Wedel’s calculation of what it had cost since 1816 to maintain the establishments: “What Guinea has cost hitherto is not the question in the matter, but what it will cost in the future either simply to maintain … or also to colonize”. To Wedel’s statement that Danish merchants were reluctant to enter the African trade Thonning responded: The Guinean trade is at present without doubt the most difficult, but therefore also very advantageous when it succeeds. When a very few voyages for dyewoods and the palm-oil trade deep in the Bight of Guinea are excepted, it cannot be conducted at any single point; one must begin in the west and end at the east end of the Guinea Coast, on a stretch of 12 to 1600 miles, (here someone, probably the naval man Findt, wrote “incorrect” in the margin, although Thonning’s statement is accurate enough), and must often be continued with several succeeding voyages. It demands particularly detailed knowledge of which goods are needed and what can be accomplished in each place in that long stretch, and since barter cannot be audited, a supercargo of strict honesty and discretion is required. All of the European forts are only of little other use than to protect the traders resident in the place, whereby, however, the goods are made more expensive by passing through other hands. Since this trade also requires just as complete and as cheap an assortment of goods as the English merchant can obtain, it is obvious that this trade does not suit the Danish commercial conjunctures. (Findt, if it was he, wrote in the margin, “suits Denmark better than England” and referred to the Commission of Investigation’s report in 1828.) Thonning went on, “This is also why the English are the only Eu[ro] pean trading nation in Guinea, for the French go no farther than to the northern portion of Senegambia. The Americans bring only tobacco and rum, and the Brazilians tobacco, as articles that are consumed in great quantity and cannot be had so cheaply from England”. (A penciled note here said: “The Americans bring rum, tobacco, provisions, and wood products”.60) Thonning concluded that the Danes could only reasonably trade directly to Christiansborg, and that the territory was therefore “of altogether too insignificant use for trade”. Balthazar Christensen’s arguments in the Copenhagen papers had apparently not impressed him: it was settlement and plantation production, not commerce, that Thonning was committed to.

60 See the appendices on imports from the United States to Gambia, Sierra Leone, and the Gold Coast in Brooks, Yankee traders, pp. 301–302, 305–306, 309. the commission in a changed colonial climate 589

Wedel had complained also that the mill sent down to the coast to grind maize had been a fiasco and that the Laurine Mathilde had proved useless. Thonning responded: The mill’s purpose was to grind maize for the West Indies, and the sloop’s to seek ship timbers in the River Volta. The orders for this went out directly from the king, and both things were of such great possible benefit that the cost of experiments with them deserved to be defrayed, even if individual views, familiar with the local geography, advised against it; the Collegium therefore did not find the occasion to lay forth the Prognostica that I in my day presented in the Collegium and are now to found in the Indies Department’s documents, but which were unfortunately all too much confirmed by the event. (Here Findt, who thought that this was directed at him, wrote in a margin that the mill had failed because the Chamber of Customs had not sent down a drying oven as well; the Laurine Mathilde, he said, had been sent down at the urging of Wrisberg and Richelieu. Thonning argued the point in a note of his own, saying that the sun would have dried the corn sufficiently if it had been ground on the plantations, at some remove from the sea.) Thonning called Wedel’s suggestion that it would be best for Danish merchants trading on the coast if the officers in the establishments were paid in money, rather than in trade goods, “a theoretical probability that does not fit concrete circumstances at all”.61 It was Wedel’s understanding that English officers on the coast were paid in money, but Thonning doubted that this could be the case, for how could they realize their wages without trading, “in a country where even gold is a commod ity and all trade is barter…. Holland also covers of the costs of the establishments with goods”. The quantity of wares in question was triflingly small, Thonning said, and all the goods sent down to the officers, according to the cargo manifests for the voyages of 1838 and 1840, had been domestic Danish products, whose export benefited the country’s industries. Furthermore, there was no regularly negotiable currency in which it would be fair to pay the officers. Doubloons and piastres could not always be exchanged; a quantity of them had once had to be sent home to Denmark from the coast. Cowries were subject to fluctuations in the rate of exchange and were only useful in small transactions. Gold dust was the closest thing to a standard, but trade in gold was a tricky business.

61 On payment in goods, see Metcalfe, Maclean of the Gold Coast, pp. 100–102. 590 chapter thirteen

A good assortment of goods, on the other hand, is the only always current and best means of payment…. But the thing is: that a Danish merchant, be he ever so knowledgeable and experienced, nevertheless cannot, any more than the Dutch and French, compete in the Guinea trade with the English…. With regard to the private merchants in Danish Guinea, by the way, there is not one of them all that commissions wares from Denmark; none of them contributes to the expenses of the establishments for the protection they enjoy, and they are of no other benefit to Denmark than that they, for the sake of their own security, increase the Danish militia with their negroes. Danish officers, on the other hand, would sell Danish goods and bring their little fortunes back with them to Denmark.

One single such fortunate official, of whom in the past there were several, and most recently Governor Peder Wriesberg, would be of more value to Denmark than all of the private locally habituated merchants, who all, with the exception of Lutterodt and Svanekiær, are natives, none of whose fortune, whether as working capital, inheritance, or in any way, does Denmark any good. Finally I must remark that it is on the whole an advantage to trade that the Government, not simply out of official obligation, but also out of personal interest, is encouraged to keep the interior trade routes and all commercial connections with the natives open. Thonning underlined his next remark, perhaps for Wedel’s benefit in particular: “The Guinea trade has so many peculiarities that it cannot be judged according to common principles”. And even in Denmark, he said, “a large portion of the official corps is paid in grain, which he must trade, and whereby he enters into competition with the country’s most important producers”. Wedel had suggested a number of measures he thought would cut the cost of supplying the establishments. Thonning countered some of the auditor’s concerns:

‘The procuring, purchasing, and sending out’ are attended to with good and suitable goods at the cheapest prices to complete satisfaction by the trading house Prætorius for 2%, which commission is very low, when one sees the detail of articles every invoice shows. ‘Loss through spoilage of the goods, leakage, etc. and risk during the cargoes’ transfer’ has in the last 25 years since 1816 been extremely insignificant, so that they cannot come into any consideration, with the exception of a single loss in January 1823, when the ship Rosencrantz was caught by a hurricane [sic] in the Bay of Biscay and sought shelter in Penzance, which gave an official on board [this was Richelieu], who was indeed later exposed for criminality, the opportunity for significant misappropriation of the royal cargo. the commission in a changed colonial climate 591

Thonning explained that a certain allowance was made for damage to tobacco and evaporation of spirits; the losses were insignificant, “and no loss at all is borne by the national finances beyond the budgeted appropriation”. At the end of November, 1841, Schønheyder notified Thonning that Findt had passed the draft of the Commission’s opinion and the various commentary thereupon to Wedel. “There still lacks, however, the so important calculation of the costs of a colonization”.62 In January, 1842, Thonning began going over his draft with Pastor Tørsleff, who had lately returned from the coast.63 In February, Captain Findt died, and the Guinea Commission was in effect reduced to the three members of the central administration: Thonning, Schønheyder, and Wedel.64 Late in March, Thonning submitted to Schønheyder a draft of the second part of the Commission’s report, dealing with a plan for a colonization.65 This section opened: “We have already in the foregoing [most humbly presented] the general bases for a colonization”.66 Unforeseeable eventualities made the planning of the actual execution of such a colonization rather difficult, however. The Commission referred back to the “principles and motives” already expressed, which were: to open new outlets for the nation’s trade and production; and, second, to contribute to the current demands of European humanitarianism to abolish the slave trade and expand the Christian religion by opening the way for Guinean slaves to become free citizens and industrious land-owners under Your Majesty’s empowering law; and by the teaching of religion to become members of a Christian society, from which religion could be brought to the natives and “fetishism supplanted”. The second result would depend entirely on the first, however, and so the Commission here laid forth a “justified proposal for colonization for intertropical commercial products in Danish Guinea, as far as concerns material interests”. The colony would be placed in the Akuapem territory,

62 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance, Schønheyder, Copenhagen, November, 30, 1841, to Thonning. 63 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance, Tørsleff, Copenhagen, January 21, 1842, and Thonning’s notes. 64 Topsøe-Jensen, “Findt, Jens Peter”. 65 GK IV, a note on 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea. 66 The document is a tangle of subsequent changes and insertions. 592 chapter thirteen west of the mountain Abode, although the land was somewhat less fertile there than farther east, for it was healthier, and closer to Christiansborg, with its “tribe of expert oarsmen”.67 A number of Danes already had plantations of provisions and coffee there, and the hill of Legon, undoubtedly the healthiest spot in all Danish Guinea, was a crucial station halfway between the sea and the mountains. Here the seat of the colonial government should be established, and here European settlers and craftsmen should be acclimatized; everyone whose presence in the immediate vicinity of the plantations was not required should be based here.68 The royal claim to land established by Isert’s treaty would have to be asserted at the start, and within that territory Danish law, modified to suit local circumstances, would prevail.69 The colonial government would consist of the governor and his council-members, who would be directly responsible for the plantations, as well as for legal affairs, the military, the bookkeeping, and such. The government should also include five assistants, who if possible would be “competent polytechnicians”, four Danish- African under-assistants, two or three military officers, an ordained catechist, a seminarian, a doctor, and a surgeon and his assistant. All were to enjoy free passage to the coast, a residence built in the manner of the country, a raise in emolument of twenty-five percent after five years, free travel home and a spell of half pay after six years or a supplemental payment equal to that if they elected to stay on the coast, provided the Government approved their continued service. The existing standing budget would otherwise remain operative, except that all expenses would be charged directly to the colony.70 The entire process should commence with the transfer of the seat of the government from Christiansborg to Legon. Temporary shelter for the workers and their supervisors should be erected first, and then stocks of stone, wood, and lime should be assembled. Brickworks should be constructed wherever appropriate. Water tanks should be dug and streams dammed. The Government house and residences for the European officials should be built with heavy flat roofs and breastworks for light artillery; they should be surrounded by ring walls, so they could serve as block-houses. All these structures were to be situated as the local government found best.71

67 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, Tillæg pp. 1–2. 68 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, Tillæg p. 3. 69 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, Tillæg p. 3. 70 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, Tillæg pp. 4–6. 71 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, Tillæg pp. 6–7. the commission in a changed colonial climate 593

“Native unfree workers” were to be procured, and plantings of all sorts of essential fruits and provisions were to be laid out, the produce to be distributed to the laborers so these would be spared the need to cultivate their own food. Families would be given an allowance and permitted to handle their domestic daily economy as they saw fit, but unmarried workers would actually have their food prepared and provided by the colonial administration.72 Nurseries of coffee, oil palms, and other useful plants, such as thorny plants for hedges and bamboo, “which has so many useful and inexpensive uses in the hot countries, but hitherto exists only in some few thickets, for the plant is not indigenous in Guinea, should be laid out. Horned cattle were to be obtained from Anlo, where the largest animals were to be found, and where they were reasonably tame; cattle herders to tend the animals and keep them out of the local Africans’ provisions, which were customarily not fenced, could be recruited there, too. Other domestic animals should be reared forthwith, so they could be distributed to the colonists arriving from Denmark.73 The first people sent out from Denmark, besides the administrative personnel, should be a number of carpenters, masons, smiths, “joiners, gunsmiths, wheelwrights, tile-makers, gardeners” (who would have supervision of the details of the plantations and provision crops), and veterinarians, who were to be in charge of the breeding and training of the work animals. All of these were to receive free second-class travel and 260 rigsdaler a year, obliging themselves in return to serve for two years and to not thereafter seek service under any foreign government in Guinea. Then, after six years, they were to be offered the choice of the cost of travel home and two years at half pay or of remaining on the coast, in which case they would receive the half-pay in addition to their regular salaries. The most suitable of these skilled workers were to be offered plantation lots on favorable terms, the transfers of land to them entailing certain commitments to cultivate it. Here, in a margin, Thonning inserted that three or four men experienced with coffee, cotton, tobacco, cocoa, and other such tropical crops should be engaged as soon as possible to instruct the colonists in their cultivation and in general to “take an active part depending on the circumstances”. He thought it might be possible for the Government to hire such individuals off ships from Bahia, which often visited the coast. With the exception of these men, command of the Danish language should be

72 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, Tillæg p. 7. 73 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, Tillæg pp. 7–8. 594 chapter thirteen required of everyone sent out, so as to maintain the essential cultural bond between colony and motherland.74 (Here Thonning was perhaps thinking of the cultural make-up of the Danish West Indies, where English or creole Dutch were spoken on the streets, in the newspapers, in the homes of most of the planters and merchants, and even, out of necessity, in the halls of the administration.)75 The most promising of the young “villeins” were to be trained as apprentices in each of the skilled crafts, and the rest were to be allotted to the supervisors of the various gangs breaking stone, felling trees, digging water-holes, erecting buildings, tending the domestic creatures, cultivating provisions, and transporting supplies. Everyone, without exception, including privately owned “serfs unfree laborers”, was to take part in militia exercises.76 A quantity of matériel was to be sent out from Denmark with the first opportune ship, including a number of light Swedish iron guns (half of them three-pounders, the other half sixes), all manner of tools for the craftsmen’s workshops, long timbers and planks for the Government building, cement and tile for cisterns, nails, locks, hinges, glass, paint, and tar. If there were room in the ship, it would advisable to send prefabricated doors and windows. The colony would also need saws, axes, cutlasses for clearing brush, extirpators, plows, spades, and other agricultural implements. A number of ox-drawn vehicles should be sent down to serve as models, as should wheels and tack, which would be difficult to manufacture on the coast at first. Corn and malt for the colony’s own use could be ground with a horse-driven mill; such work was otherwise still done by hand by the African women, using two stones, and “wastes much time”. A certain capital in the form of trade goods would have to be sent down; porcelain and kitchenware and such should also be kept on hand, so the settlers could requisition domestic necessaries against their wage accounts. An apothecary’s office should be stocked, and a set of surgical instruments should be sent out, if none was already on hand at Fort Christiansborg.77 The Government will herewith be in a position to initiate and advance the colonization with the energy and in the scope … appropriate to the size of

74 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, Tillæg pp. 8–9. 75 See, for example, Gøbel, A guide to sources for the history of the Danish West Indies, pp. 18–19, 25, 26. 76 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, Tillæg p. 9. 77 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, Tillæg pp. 9–12. the commission in a changed colonial climate 595

the labor force that in the first years can be obtained, until it becomes known in the country that a large number of unfree workers will be needed in the colony and the supply is thereafter increased. Whatever else might be found necessary the Government could request when it sent in its monthly reports, and Thonning in a margin indicated that these reports should include “filled-out forms” showing: the numbers of the colony’s slaves at the beginning and end of each month, classified by sex and age; the number of work days and sick days for men, women, and half-grown boys and girls; what work the days had been occupied with and the result thereof; the area of the various colonial and provisions crops under cultivation; an accounting of the domestic animals; and the colony’s income, expenditures, and current “pecuniary status”. These reports should be regularly laid before the king and guide his further decisions about the colony.78 Thonning appears to have hoped hereby to be able to exercise more direct control than he had ever actually found possible; it may be, also, that his more immediate intent, in using this language, was to demonstrate that this was not a bottomless pit of unaccountable expense that was being opened up. No attempt was to be made to cultivate colonial export crops until a solid agricultural basis for the colony had been established at Legon, which Thonning thought would take two or three years, allowing for a limited work force in the beginning and for the need to expend considerable time and labor on construction. The first step towards more expansive plantation cultivation farther inland should be the establishment of defensive works, if only to forestall trouble. On a suitable stretch of land (duly purchased from the Africans wherever it might already be under cultivation), advantageous sites for watch-towers should be chosen and the terrain around them surveyed and demarcated in such a way that the cor- ners of four rectangular plantations met at each tower, where the necessary plantation buildings would also be erected. Clearing and fencing, making use of plants already raised in the colony’s nurseries, should keep pace with construction.79

78 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, Tillæg p. 12. 79 Thonning regarded fencing as essential, not only to keep wild animals out and domestic animals in, but to discourage the Africans in the neighborhood of the plantations from squatting on the land and thus, according to the terms of Isert’s treaty, preventing the Danes’ occupying it without the expense of purchasing it: GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, Tillæg pp. 13–15. 596 chapter thirteen

Care was to be taken with the allocation within each plantation of land for export crops, provisions, pasturage and waterholes for the animals, and woodlots of several acres (which would “attract the rainclouds and make the area comfortable”); as well as for the main buildings, the laborers’ village and small lots for their private gardens, and roads. Decisions about situating all these things depended so utterly on local conditions that it would be impossible to prescribe a set of rules; this matter had to be left to the local administration. The size of the plantations should be sufficient to accommodate their dual agricultural function: they were to be large agricultural workings on the West Indian model (suitably adjusted to local circumstances), and at the same time there must be room for the smaller peasant holdings to be worked, in time, by the emancipated laborers. It was important to plan for farms on quite a large scale, “which can yield their owners of European extraction a very good and encouraging outcome, and in time bear with ease their quota-portion of the colony’s taxation and public expenditures”. Thonning thought the plantation lots should be half again as large as those on St. Croix, where the plantations had originally been surveyed into 150-acre rectangles (at forty thousand square feet to the St. Croix acre).80 The plantations on the Guinea Coast should be larger because coffee, cacao trees, oil palm, tobacco, and cotton all required more space than sugar and because the cultivation of provisions and animal husbandry would be essential to the colonial economy, whereas the planters of St. Croix grew only sugar cane and traded it for all their needs, because the soil and the dry climate would not permit any other course.81 Thonning then analyzed—in all the detail an experienced colonial bureaucrat was capable of marshaling, and down to the last odd rigsdaler—the costs of operating and maintaining a 225-acre plantation until, after three or four years of preparation, it could with some assurance of further success be turned over to a private planter. He warned, however, that such a financial projection could not be attempted with much confidence because so many unforeseen eventualities could intervene, especially, he added rather crisply in a margin, if “remissness or indolence should make their way into the administration, which would be the worst that can befall the colonization”. Nevertheless, he wrote, a calculation

80 See Hopkins, “The eighteenth-century invention of a measure in the Caribbean”. 81 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, Tillæg pp. 15–17. the commission in a changed colonial climate 597 of some sort was so essential to the assessment of the project that the Commission felt obliged to attempt it.82 Thonning figured that the plantation land, allowing for the cost of purchasing such tracts as were already under cultivation by African farmers and for the execution of the necessary formalities, would cost a rigsdaler per acre (and here he explained to his royal reader that 225 acres equaled about 160 Danish tønder of land [each of which units equaled about an English acre and a third]). The fortification of each of the four plantations adjoining each watch-tower would cost 750 rigsdaler. The cost of each plantation’s participation in the colonial militia would come to about a thousand rigsdaler, or perhaps less. A comfortable house for a planter and his household could be built at the feet of the Akuapem hills by hired labor for about a thousand rigsdaler. These houses would typically be of two stories, with flat roofs to catch rainwater, which would be led into cisterns. The house walls would be of uncut stone mortared with clay, finished inside and out with plaster. Except for ironwork, glass, paint, and cement, the houses could be built entirely of local materials. They would provide shelter, but without “luxury or decoration”, and this, indeed, Thonning said, was how Europeans customarily lived on the coast. One or two smaller dwellings for the plantation overseers and a storehouse would perhaps cost another eight hundred rigsdaler. The plantation “serfs” (this word was otherwise altered to “unfree workers” throughout this draft) could erect shelter for themselves in native style, and for this there would be no costs beyond the normal expense of their keep.83 The number of agricultural workers needed to work plantations of coffee, oil palm, tobacco, or cotton would fall after the initial work of building, clearing, fencing, and planting; each plantation could then make do with a hundred workers. Each able-bodied slave man would cost between 32 and 40 rigsdaler, a woman 24 to 32, and boys and girls 12 to 16 rigsdaler each, but these prices could be expected to rise in response to the demand, so Thonning allowed forty rigsdaler per slave, or four thousand rigsdaler in all, for forty adult men, a like number of women, and twenty boys and girls. For plantation inventory he calculated five hundred rigsdaler. Four hundred rigsdaler would pay for the necessary oxen, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and fowls. Plant stock would be locally produced, and the labor involved he intended to count among general operating costs; for

82 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, ad Tillæg p. 17, a. 83 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, ad Tillæg p. 17, a-c. 598 chapter thirteen unforeseen expenses he reckoned 1,325 rigsdaler. The total cost of setting up a working plantation would thus be 10,000 rigdaler.84 For each plantation’s annual costs, Thonning reckoned the interest on the state’s original 10,000-rigsdaler investment at four percent, or four hundred rigsdaler. New construction, carried out by the plantation’s own laborers with materials they themselves produced, would come to no more than fifty rigsdaler a year. The militia would take forty rigsdaler. One rigsdaler a month would permit the workers a standard of living comparable to that of a free person, and this would cost altogether 1,200 rigsdaler. Annual maintenance of inventory would cost a hundred rigsdaler. The gar- dener in charge of the plantings until the plantation could be put into private hands would be paid 260 rigsdaler a year, besides his shelter and board. Two Danish-African supervisors would each draw wages of 75 rigsdaler a year. Incidental expenses might amount to 225 rigsdaler, and the total annual expenses of each plantation would be 2,500 rigsdaler.85 Beyond that, there would be the cost of the colonial administration, but some of this expense, Thonning pointed out, would tend to invigorate the Danish economy as a whole. However, there would be no direct return on the state’s investment until “a significant number of plantations have come to fruitful production and can be subjected to duties, land tax, and other imposts suited to the circumstances”. Expenses for the church and for the school and health systems should be regarded as necessary national investments; but “public or municipal burdens”, such as road work, to the degree that they involved labor rather than money, would be borne by the plantation slaves, and so the expense to the plantations of these obligations could be reckoned as part of the workers’ maintenance costs. Replacement of deceased slaves would not be counted as a separate expense, because, after the initial work of establishing the colony, there would be less need for laborers, and because births would in any case balance deaths; furthermore, the workers’ steadily increasing competence would tend to reduce the need for large numbers of them. Nothing would be allowed at this stage for the needs of the private planter, on the assumption that the plantations would not be alienated from the crown until they were in working condition and generating a return over expenses; the planter’s style of life and the size of his family were in any case not calcu- lable in advance. Much could assuredly be saved, however, by living simply off the land. Although butter, cheese, flour, tea, sugar, spices, spirits,

84 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, ad Tillæg p. 17, c-f. 85 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, ad Tillæg p. 17, f-g. the commission in a changed colonial climate 599 clothing, and housewares would have to be imported, Thonning reckoned that by living moderately, a planter could limit the cost of these things to between four hundred and six hundred rigsdaler a year. He made no allowance for the consumption of such things by a plantation overseer in charge of the plantation before it was transferred into private hands.86 Thonning then estimated each plantation’s annual production and income. Of 225 acres, 110 were to be devoted to coffee, the rest to provisions, building grounds, pasture, gardens, and woods. These 115 acres, he reckoned, would be sufficient to meet all the needs of the labor force, either directly or through trade; fish and salt, in particular, would have to be bartered for. Nevertheless, the plantation would have to be able to cover expenses of about three thousand rigsdaler a year in ready money before it could be transferred into private hands without the new owner’s coming to grief. Thonning’s calculation was based solely on coffee production, for too little was known of the cultivation of oil palms, and other commodity crops would be raised only later. He allowed for 1,300 coffee trees per acre, of which perhaps a thousand would bear after four years, each tree yielding an average of a pound of beans each year. He then cited Edward Bancroft, who, he said, had toured British Guiana in 1766; there the trees were kept five feet apart and pruned into pyramidal shapes and gave up a pound and a half of beans twice a year, for a total of 4,800 pounds per acre. The French consul in Rio de Janeiro, Baron Langsdorff, reported that production there was at least four pounds a year per tree, and that he had seen trees that yielded seven and even fourteen or fifteen pounds, but that in the West Indian Islands a pound per tree per year was usual. (A tiny newspaper clipping mentioning Langsdorff’s name is glued into the margin of Thonning’s draft here.) Thonning figured the coffee would be worth ten rigsdaler a hundredweight, so that a plantation cultivating 110 acres of coffee should yield eleven thousand rigsdaler a year. Subtracting expenses, the profit should be 8,500 rigsdaler, out of which could easily be borne a small land tax, a payment of two percent on the principal for the original investment, other “appropriate” taxes, and the cost of equipping emancipated slaves’ homesteads, with money left over for expansion. Thonning noted that he had estimated the price of coffee quite low and had assumed that payment for it would actually be in European goods (at wholesale prices) rather than in cash.87

86 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, ad Tillæg p. 17, h-l. 87 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, ad Tillæg p. 17, l-o. 600 chapter thirteen

Thonning reckoned that a quarter of the acreage to be allotted to coffee could be planted every year and that the trees would be a year or two old when they were set out. After four years, a full harvest could be expected from the five- or six-year-old trees on 27 1/2 acres, yielding 2,750 rigsdaler a year, while a similar acreage would produce perhaps one third that amount, while the remaining fifty-five acres produced nothing as yet. A four-year-old plantation could thus yield 3,660 rigsdaler, and after expenses the planter would still have the enjoyment of 1,160 rigsdaler and the natural products of the land besides. Seven or eight years after the start of the colonial project, a number of planters would be supporting themselves sufficiently well as to regard the place as their “family home”, with bright prospects for all.88 However, the necessary initial capital for such a long period would be difficult to raise, and none of this could be expected to be done on private hand. Nor would state guarantees and tax abatements suffice: “private enterprise will not be encouraged to begin plantations on its own account until a small, acclimatized, prosperous population of Danish planters has appeared through the transfer of such royal plantations to private owners”. (Thonning more or less discounted the value of coffee production by the emancipated slaves, but reminded his reader of the importance of their service in the colonial militia.)89 The development of the private market for plantations would depend on the extent of the state’s initial investment and the energy with which the project was pursued, Thonning concluded. Considering the extraordinary growth in Brazil in recent decades and similar developments in Sumatra, Ceylon, and elsewhere in the East, there can be well-grounded hope that an active and well-supported and consistently carried out plantation enterprise in Guinea must be able to succeed, if it does not take advantage of the conjunctures too late, and that it in palm-oil production will have a significant resource, which is still quite peculiar to Guinea, and has not hitherto been under planned cultivation with European expertise and means.90 The Commission then proceeded to a “justified proposal for colonization in Guinea as regards … philanthropic interests, \especially the security of the slaves against arbitrary treatment, the abolition of slavery, and the

88 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, ad Tillæg p. 17, o-p. 89 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, ad Tillæg p. 17, q-r. 90 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, ad Tillæg p. 17, r. the commission in a changed colonial climate 601 dissemination of the Christian religion/”. (As Thonning corrected this draft, he everywhere changed ‘philanthropic’ to ‘moral’.)91 The Commission had determined that a fifteen-year term of unfree servitude would be necessary to cover the original cost of the servant, of his maintenance for fifteen years, and of establishing him as a free agriculturalist useful to both his family and the colony. Thonning characterized this long servitude as a “period of apprenticeship”, during which the workers would become accustomed to a “the condition of a citizen and a subject”. For adults, the fifteen years would be counted from the time of their arrival in the colony, and for children, from their fifteenth birthday, before which, Thonning assumed, they would have been of greater expense than utility. At the age of thirty, they would have the maturity of judgment to appreciate and take advantage of what the colony then offered them. On the other hand, no new slave over the age of thirty should be brought into the colony, for, upon their attaining to emancipation, at forty-five, they would have relatively few working years before them and would fairly soon become a burden to the colony, rather than contributing to its growth. In the case of bad behavior or absence, the period of servitude would be extended. (This provision would not apply to periods of illness, however.) Official ledgers would be kept to maintain order in the system. Every slave would have the right to purchase his own freedom, the price to be determined by a lawful appraisal of his value. Once free, the former slave would enjoy all the rights of a free-born person and could never revert to the condition of a slave within the colony; all free subjects would be regarded as citizens of the colony in their relations with the local Africans. The working week for unfree field laborers and craftsmen would be set at five days a week, eight to ten hours per day, depending on the season and the demands of the work. All slaves of weapons-bearing age would be regarded as members of the colony’s defensive force, which was to be drilled weekly.92 The relationship between master and unfree laborer was to be closely regulated by law, each party having certain rights and obligations. The slaves were to be protected by the police power of the colony against high- handed treatment. No more force was to be employed than was necessary to make the worker fulfill his obligations to his owner, to the civil authorities, or to “propriety”. Crimes too serious to be punishable by common “domestic discipline” would be subject to the jurisdiction of the police.

91 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, ad Tillæg p. 17, r. 92 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, ad Tillæg p. 17, t-x. 602 chapter thirteen

Truly troublesome slaves were to be subject to exile, the value of their remaining period of servitude to be made up to the owner by the Gov ernment. Any owner found to employ excessively harsh discipline was to be deprived of the right to hold slaves. Outside working hours and the times set aside for religious instruction and militia training, the slaves’ time was to be their own, and anything produced in that time was to be theirs to dispose of as they saw fit. The owner was to supply his people with everything they needed, to arbitrate in disputes among them, and to serve as their protector, “just as the family father in his patriarchal rôle [does] among the natives”. With such provisions, Thonning argued, the beneficial elements in the usual relationship between an African owner and a slave would be preserved and adopted in the colony, and the more arbitrary, such as might put the slave “in a deplorable position”, would be abolished by law: the slave, indeed, aside from his obligation to serve, would be in no worse a condition than a free agricultural laborer for hire in Denmark, and in fact in a better, because proper provision for the support of his wife and children would be guaranteed in the colony, which was not the case in Denmark.93 So as to encourage monogamous marital relations among the slaves, it would be important to bring equal numbers of men and women into the colony. The ideal of Christian marriages would be elusive until all had been duly catechized and baptized and confirmed, which would take some time and indeed might not be achieved until children born in the colony had been brought up in the schools, but Thonning expressed confidence that marriages could be placed on a proper basis under the eye of the “morality police”. Arrangements should be made for couples to belong to the same master and to be provided with a common house and a larger plot of land than usual and perhaps some domestic comforts. They should be given the choice of whether to partake in the general mess or to manage their own kitchens, foodstuffs being in any case supplied by the colony; the women should be allowed an extra hour off at midday to prepare the couples’ lunches, and they should be permitted to attend to the care of their children as much and for as long as possible, depending on school schedules and the demands of the plantation work. They should be given allowances for the children’s food and clothing, and couples should be permitted to buy one another’s and their children’s freedom on especially favorable terms, so that they could all enter freedom together. All of these

93 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, ad Tillæg p. 17, x-z. the commission in a changed colonial climate 603 steps would encourage “morality, industry, satisfaction, and attachment to the condition and the family home the colony provides the unfree”, Thonning wrote, contrasting this state of affairs starkly with their prior circumstances, as drifting objects of commerce, without home, family, or friends, subject to the most “arbitrary treatment … until the colony took them up and incorporated them in a condition which alleviates the former miseries and approaches a state of freedom, to which it forms a transition”.94 Upon their emancipation, the former slaves would so placed by the colony as to be able to support themselves and their families. All possible circumstances could not be predicted, Thonning allowed, for some would be single, others married with children; some would be field hands, some house servants, others craftsmen, but, in general, they should receive a plot of land sufficient to support them, “when it is cultivated with diligence”, and the lot should be prepared for them in advance, so that it was immediately cultivable. To accomplish this, the workers, in the last three years before their emancipation, should be allowed time to work on the lot and the new home they would soon be able to call their own. Furthermore, other slaves should be made available to assist them with the things they could not do alone. The land was to be laid out and planted with coffee, cotton, and oil palms, as well as with provisions, and the colonial authorities were to see to it that those crops were being properly cared for. Plants and creatures that the former slave had raised on the small plot of land assigned him during his servitude could then be moved to his new place.95 The manumitted slaves would then join the citizenry of the colony. They would be liable for the general taxation, or, lacking money, could perform some other service, most especially militia duty. Their weapons were to be supplied by the plantation on which they had formerly served, and in fact these would be the same weapons they were already accustomed to using. Measures would be taken to see to it that these guns did not get into circulation among the local Africans in the even of the freed- man’s death. The freedmen, being unable to return to the lands of their birth, would call the colony their home, and there would thus arise a new local class of farmers familiar with the cultivation of commodity crops, who would be inclined to emulate the Europeans’ style of living and would

94 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, ad Tillæg p. 17, z-ø. 95 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, ad Tillæg p. 17, ø-aa. 604 chapter thirteen themselves therefore be interested in expanding their little farms and producing more goods for market.96 In a section dealing with “Church and education”, Thonning provided a well-honed overview of the Africans’ religion, “so that Your Majesty can most graciously judge what hope can be provided for the spreading of the Christian religion”. It was a religion motivated more by fear than by love, he wrote, but it was inculcated in the people from birth and would not be easy to eliminate from the culture. The king was informed that the religion included conceptions of one powerful god and a multitude of local fetishes and their holy places and objects. Only the major fetishes had their own priests, “who allow themselves to be paid, under the guise of sacrifices to the fetish, and they communicate the fetish’s favor according to their judgment of the concrete circumstances and according to the size of the sacrifice”. The people carried many amulets—“insignificant trifles”—and, as he had done elsewhere, Thonning compared the cultivation of this religion to that of the Catholic church, with its angels, relics, and offerings. Indeed, he said, it would be “much easier to introduce Chris tianity in its Catholic form”, but, he hastened to insert, Lutheranism would of course never be excluded. The “well-founded hope” could at any rate be entertained that Lutheran Christianity will spread from there, since the negroes’ religious system is just a superstitious fantasy that stands in no connection with their division into the condition of free and slave or with any caste system that connects the religion with political or common personal interests, as in the religion of the Hindus. The Commission felt, indeed, that Christianity could only be successfully spread from a core in a colony such as that they were proposing, and the Basel Mission’s utter lack of religious impact in Akuapem for a decade or more was pointed out.97 Thonning argued against any further reliance on missionaries, in part because of the high mortality that could be expected among them, but especially because of the difficulty they would encounter with the local language, “in which the missionary must teach”, and of which he should have sufficient command that he can not merely express himself with proficiency, but can also create a comprehensible terminology for the religious concepts that the negroes in

96 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, ad Tillæg p. 17, aa-ab. 97 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, ad Tillæg p. 17, ac-ae the commission in a changed colonial climate 605

their limited language have no words for, and which otherwise become confused by the use of analogous appellations. None of the languages and dialects used in the Danish territory could serve as the language of religion, for, Thonning thought, they could never become written languages, which would be essential to maintaining the stability of the religious concepts conveyed in them. The languages are several and are used by too small numbers of people, for in the coastal regions west of the Volta the Akra language and a very diver- gent dialect, which is called Adampi, are used, east of the Volta the Anlo language, in the mountain country a dialect of Asiante, and in a stretch of 20 to 25 miles by the Volta north of Ada a dialect of the Krepe language. The colony itself would embody a “conflux” of adult populations from all over the interior of Africa who could not understand one another or the colony’s local African neighbors. The pidgin that was likely to arise would be no more suitable than the local African languages for religious instruction, which the Commission thought could not be expected to have much effect until it could be offered in a commonly understood written language. That language would necessarily be Danish. The more confused the pidgin that developed in the colony, Thonning predicted, the easier it would be for Danish to take hold, “after what experience has shown in the West Indian colonies, where the language of the masters has become the negroes’”. If the African children of the colony were instructed in Danish, it could be expected that it would spread to the neighboring peoples sufficiently to somewhat ease the dissemination of the religion. All this would take a long time, and the Commission therefore recommended that expenditures in this area should be limited to the salaries of an ordained catechist and teacher and a seminarian to serve as his assistant, this being sufficient for the present population of mulatto children in the establishments. Seminarians, accustomed to a modest country life and well acquainted with agriculture, would become a useful group of plantation “managers and leaseholders”. If private missionary organizations were to be allowed to operate among the Africans, it must be under the Government’s supervision and the instruction must be in Danish, “without the least deviation from the Augsberg Confession”.98 Having read through this draft of the Commission’s report, Schønheyder returned it to Thonning a month letter, with a letter stating that he thought

98 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, ad Tillæg p. 17, ae-ah, and ad p. 291, marginal insertion. 606 chapter thirteen the Commission now had a sufficient “explanation of the current conditions in Danish Guinea and the latter’s qualifications for further development”.99 Although nothing significant regarding the country and its people had been omitted, as far as he could see, I would like, however, that there might be added a collected result of what has been stated, which can in an instant show His Majesty what sums, if the plan is approved, would have to be defrayed by the treasury, both immediately and in the first years, compared with what could in time be expected as income, aside from the unquantifiable advantages that the establishments could bring” [underlining, apparently Thonning’s, in red pencil]. The chairman hated to impose further on Thonning after all the work he had done, and could doubtless have composed such an abstract himself from the report, “but your own statement will always be the most reliable”. According to Thonning’s note on the cover of one of the drafts of the report, he now added to the Commission’s report a “calculation” such as Schønheyder had requested.100 The colonial operation would depend, first of all, on the number of laborers that could be obtained: “hereby is drawn a certain limit for the colony’s initial undertaking and thus for the money resources that could find application hereupon”. This limit would be only temporary, for the supply of slaves would increase to meet the demand, but much time would also pass in the preparatory stages, including the transportation of European settlers to Africa and their acclimatization. All of this would consume funds, and Thonning now totted up the costs to the state each year until the government-run plantations were passed into private hands and uncultivated public lands were sold.101 The colonial administration in Denmark itself would require a supplement of four hundred rigsdaler for the West Indian warehouse administrator (the commissary in charge of procuring and shipping supplies to the colonies), plus four hundred rigsdaler for a copyist in the colonial office and fifty rigsdaler more for office costs. The cost of the administration on the coast would amount, for the governor, two council-members, two other officers, two assistants, and four under-assistants, to 11,744 rigsdaler. For a catechist, a seminarian, a doctor and his assistant, and equipment

99 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance, Schønheyder, Copenhagen, April 11, 1842, to Thonning (spelled “Thaaning”, which would be pronounced the same). 100 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, a note in Thonning’s hand on the cover. 101 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, pp. ad [sic] 291–2 the commission in a changed colonial climate 607 and medicine Thonning reckoned 7,200 rigsdaler. The salaries of craftsmen, planters, and other colonists would amount to twenty thousand rigsdaler. Building materials and tools costing a total of 17,280 rigsdaler would be required. Annual purchases of between five hundred and eight hundred unfree laborers and allowances for their sustenance would consume 63,488 rigsdaler. Thonning allowed 3,200 rigsdaler for agricultural implements and other equipment for the plantations themselves, and another 3,200 for the purchase of such land in Akuapem as might already be under cultivation by the Africans. Draft animals would cost 4,800 rigsdaler, and freight and the price of passage to Guinea for five cabin passengers and twenty-five others would amount to 22,000 rigsdaler. Wages for the military officers and non-commissioned men, weapons sufficient for an annual expansion of the militia of about three hundred men, powder and shot for military exercises, a quantity of cannons and ammunition, and normal maintenance at forts Fredensborg, Kongenssteen, and Prindsenssteen would amount to 22,563 rigsdaler. The currently budgeted payments to local African dignitaries would have to be increased to 4,800 rigsdaler a year. Thonning calculated that inflation in costs would be offset by the steadily expanding production (all of which, in the beginning, would be credited to the royal account), but, to be on the safe side, he allowed a further 18,915 rigsdaler for unforeseen expenses.102 Altogether, it would cost two hundred thousand rigsdaler a year to found a new colony in Guinea. If less was invested, then administrative costs, which could not be reduced from current levels, would be dispro- portionately high; on the other hand, it would not be advisable to spend more until the government had more experience on which to base its decisions. “It will in any case take several years before the colony can be without subsidy from the motherland”, and increasing the initial investment would do nothing to shorten the time that must elapse until then. Thonning allowed two or three years for general preparations; only then could actual work on the plantations commence. It would then take four years to put a plantation into such a state that it could responsibly be alienated into private hands. Thus for seven years there would be no returns to the state on an annual investment of two hundred thousand rigsdaler. Whether, after the elapse of these 7 years, this annual employment of 200,000 [rigsdaler] should be extended, be reduced, or cease, it would be

102 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, pp. 292–296. 608 chapter thirteen

untimely to state decisively now, since in such a long time, many unforeseen events can occur that make every earlier calculation invalid. Economic conjunctures at that time would determine the state’s further course. The most important of these circumstances would doubtless be on the one hand the disruption of West Indian colonial agriculture by slave- emancipation; on the other hand the strongly increasing competition of the East Indies; whereas Brazil’s now radical growth will be close to achieving its maximum for lack of laborers, when the slave trade in reality halts and even more when the news of West Indian emancipation has the effect of restricting production there, too.103 If the project were executed “with expertise, diligence, and judgment by the local administration, and there occur no particular misfortunes in the course of political events”, the Commission hoped that when twenty or thirty plantations had passed into private hands, the government’s direct participation in agriculture could end, and the colony would then be in a position to repay its debt to the mother country. The plantations would inevitably vary in value, and the initial costs of the first of them would doubtless be much higher than would subsequently be the case; the first buyers should perhaps be offered especially advantage terms. The pricing mechanism when the plantations were purchased from the state should doubtless be auctions. The colony’s books should be divided into two accounts, the one for common expenditures for the Government, schools, plant nurseries, public buildings, roads, and the like, and the other for particular expenses for the plantations, including the cost of purchasing land from the local Africans, clearing, fencing, planting, and building. On the credit side, all taxes, fees, and proceeds from the sale of uncultivated lots would go into the first account, and all income from production, even before the properties passed into private hands, was to go into the plantations’ accounts.104 There would be no income at all until the plantations were operating and goods were being shipped, but the colony would nevertheless be of “material interest to the motherland” right from the start, for a great deal of the capital invested would remain in circulation in Denmark to purchase all the domestically-produced products that would be needed—spirits, powder, weapons, all sorts of manufactured goods and provisions—to say nothing of shipping costs, commissions, and the like,

103 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, pp. 296–301. 104 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, pp. 301–306 the commission in a changed colonial climate 609 even though these flows of funds could not be calculated in the liquidation of the investment nor directly affect the treasury. In addition, the king was reminded, the colony would advance the nation’s moral interests: the Christian religion would be spread in Africa and large numbers of people born into slavery would be provided with an avenue out of that condition, as would their children.105 The Guinea Commission’s report concluded: Further details of the here most humbly justified proposal must await what Your Majesty in royal deliberation and decision most graciously will determine regarding the future of Danish Guinea, in particular: either the termination of the possession; or maintenance of the territorial claim indefinitely; or the colonization of the territory and what must be expended thereupon immediately and annually. If in the last eventuality the colonization begins according to this or some other plan, the plan’s further elaboration and its modification according to circumstances that may arise should doubtless originate from the local administration to be judged and decided upon by Your Majesty’s Colonial Department. We thus in deepest humility submit the result of our investigations regarding Danish Guinea and the most humble opinion based thereupon.106 Thonning returned the draft to Schønheyder on July 20.107 Schønheyder wrote back two weeks later:108 What would be desirable is a calculation of probability of whether after the 7 years the income could cover the expenses, when a surplus could be hoped for, and whether, in a favorable case, the above-mentioned debit, with the further subsidies that will have been necessary, can be expected to be covered. He asked Thonning “whether you might not wish to try to give your fine work, which is enclosed herewith, the addition discussed here”. A month later, Thonning wrote to Schønheyder,109 perhaps a trifle wearily, that a “calculation of probability” of returns to the treasury, and of

105 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, pp. 306–307, quotation on p. 307. 106 GK IV, 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea, pp. 308–309. 107 GK IV, annotation on 2 deel af Commissions Betænkningen ang. Guinea. 108 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance, Schønheyder, Copenhagen, July 4, 1842 (marked in pencil “Should be August”), to “Thoning”. 109 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Thonning, [Copenhagen], September 14, 1842, to Schønheyder, draft. 610 chapter thirteen whether these would actually cover the state’s outlays on an African colony, “will depend on so many eventualities and must be reckoned so far into the future that it would scarcely be fitting say any more about it” than had been already. The nation’s interest in the colony “cannot be reckoned in money and does not directly benefit the treasury”. Profits on the colony’s developing production in the early years would in any case go towards the colony’s operating costs and expansion; it would be years before there would be resources available to liquidate the colony’s debt to the treasury. Thonning doubted that the colony would be able to cover its own administrative costs before fifty or sixty plantations had passed into private ownership. (Revenues would depend entirely on agricultural production, he said, “for trade in goods with the natives must remain free and untaxed, as long as it is so under the English and Dutch governments on the Gold Coast”.) This he calculated would take twenty years, assuming that the first few plantations were put in private hands after seven years and that five more plantations were alienated every year thereafter. Income would depend on fluctuating demand for plantation land, and, furthermore, the government would have to offer the land on credit. Experience in the West Indies indicated that “demand cannot develop until the colonists themselves have accumulated the assets or the credit for it, for no capitalist will move from Europe to tropical colonies to buy uncultivated lands”.

It will also be in the interest of the mother state to encourage the expansion of cultivation with low prices on the first properties; besides that, the colony’s philanthropic intent can reasonably and fittingly demand that [the treasury] contribute thereto with a portion of this income. All in all, Thonning thought it might be thirty years before the treasury actually realized a profit on the colony, “although when one sees the rapid boom that colonial plantations now have in the East Indies, it is not unlikely that balance and surplus can occur earlier”.

However, all this shows how difficult it will be to present, for such a distant future, a calculation that could not be compromised by individual views and arbitrarily motivated judgment, which equally easily could find that the calculation promises either too much or too little. Wedel was Thonning’s most immediate problem, but he was doubt less also thinking a little beyond the narrow circle of his fellow commissioners when he wrote those words. “I therefore think that there is already the commission in a changed colonial climate 611 calculated sufficiently in the opinion, and that the Commission, in going farther, could easily expose itself to unreasonable judgments”. At the end of September, Schønheyder forwarded this letter and the second part of the draft of the Commission’s opinion to Wedel, who then sat on the matter for quite some time.110 In January, 1843, Thonning, doubtless trying to stir him up, asked Wedel for an item from the file of attachments to the commission’s report. Wedel wrote back: I send you herewith everything that is in my possession concerning the Guinean matter and request you, dear Thonning, to remove whatever you might wish yourself. The map I did not receive and assume it remains with Schønheider. Wedel asked for the file back as soon as could be, “as I hope quite soon to be able to get to work on the matter”. Thonning made a note that he returned the papers the same day he received them,111 and there appears to have been no further word from Wedel until May. Late in 1842, a vigorous if markedly unsteady new Danish voice from the Guinea Coast began to make itself heard. In January, 1842, B.J.C. Wilkens, newly appointed governor of the African establishments, and Edward Carstensen, a new assistant, had departed Copenhagen for Hamburg. Carstensen came out of a family of diplomats. His brother Georg, before founding Tivoli Gardens, published a series of prestigious Copenhagen weeklies. The historian Georg Nørregård speculated that Edward Carstensen may have assisted his brother with these periodicals: “In any case, he learned to use a pen”.112 From Cuxhaven at the mouth of the Elbe, Carstensen recorded in his diary, they crossed the Channel on an almost deserted steamer: “we could almost convince ourselves that the administration had chartered a steamship to carry ‘the Government’ to the capital of England”.113 In London,

110 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Schønheyder, Copenhagen, August 18, 1843, to Thonning, indicating that the draft had been sent to Wedel on September 25, 1842. 111 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Wedel, January 10, 1843, to Thonning; Thonning’s annotation on Wedel’s note. 112 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. [9]-10; Søllinge and Thomsen, Vol. 1, pp. 164–165, 173, 178. 113 Privatarkiv No. 5258, Edward J.A. Carstensen, where there is a diary and a typed, duplicated transcription thereof, with a brief autobiographical introduction: Edw. Carstensen, “Noter mit liv angaaende”; reading here from the transcript, p. 19. I am very grateful to Selena Winsnes for making available to me a copy of the typescript. See also a manuscript copy of a portion of the diary at the Royal Library, originally attributed to Lieutenant Svedstrup [Ny kgl. Samling, 4146, 4°]. 612 chapter thirteen they were entertained at the Hambro home, but Carstensen does not record that the dinner conversation touched on Denmark’s Guinea possessions.114 On March 26, he and Wilkens took ship for the Guinea Coast in the ship Sophia; they arrived at Christiansborg, having called first at Cape Coast, on May 18.115 At 2 o’cl. we went ashore; when I walked into the fort, when I stepped inside the fort gate, it seemed to me as if Dante’s well-known words were inscribed above; I felt quite heavy at heart; with Champagne the sensation passed; in a short time the acquaintances were made, and life on the Guinea Coast was now in earnest begun; perhaps quite soon ended!116 On July 10, less than two months after his arrival on the coast, Carstensen married the beautiful fourteen-year-old Eurafrican girl Severine Brock, the daughter of Peter Thonning’s nephew Niels Brock (who had died by 1837).117 By August, Wilkens, who, Carstensen had recorded, was careless about his health—at Cape Coast, “Maclean and Wilkens strolled like mad people along the edge of the surf, which from time to time reached to their hips”—was dead of dysentery, and Carstensen, at the age of twenty-six, found himself the governor of Danish Guinea.118 In September, Carstensen reported to the Chamber of Customs that the plantation Frederiksgave affords a luxuriant prospect of fertility and productive power; the coffee trees can scarcely bear the weight of the numerous fruit, and the harvest beginning in this month will doubtless be unusually rich.119 The following month, Carstensen, who was both articulate and energetic, if a trifle precipitate, reported that new disputes with the English at Fort St. James over Danish rights in Akuapem and Akyem had arisen. He had discussed the matter with Commandant Topp and the merchant Bannerman, and the result of the otherwise particularly peacefully and amicably carried on debates was that I, as my ultimatum, declared: that Mr. Bannerman’s

114 Carstensen, “Noter mit liv angaaende”, p. 25. 115 GK II, Bilage (undenfor Designationerne), Thonning’s notes. 116 Carstensen, “Noter mit liv angaaende”, p. 31. 117 Carstensen, “Noter mit liv angaaende”, pp. 31–35; GJ 488/1837. 118 Carstensen, “Noter mit liv angaaende”, pp. 11, 29, 37–40: Carstensen had admonished him to be more sensible, and Wilkens had said, “ ‘If I have to think about caution in everything I undertake I would rather die!!’ ”; Larsen, p. 137. 119 GJ(S) 271/1842, an extract of GJ 270/1842, the government on the coast, September 6, 1842, filed at GJS 539/1844; Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 19–23. It is not necessarily to be supposed that Carstensen had visited the royal plantation. the commission in a changed colonial climate 613

private [transactions] should be respected and protected by the Danish Government, but that I in no manner could admit that Hr. Bannerman or Hr. Hanson, by buying people and land in Aquapim, thereby made the country British. Bannerman and Topp advanced Maclean’s old arguments that the territory had been won from the Asante by the British. Carstensen had suggested that until word was received from their governments in England and Denmark, “everything should remain at the status quo”, and Topp had agreed.120 Carstensen urged his government to resolve the matter as expeditiously as possible. “Significant changes are at hand for the English possessions on this Coast”, he wrote. A Dr. Madden had traveled down the coast on a commission of inquiry about a year before, he related:

he inspected everything (à vol d’oiseau [or ‘as the crow flies’) and wrote everything down; he was a half a day in English Accra and this time was sufficient for him to judge of the advantages of the country; perhaps to be able to provide information about the Danish-Guinean possessions he drove here to the fort, asked if it was for sale, and, upon the negative response, returned to Accra (this was related to me word for word by the Englishmen in Accra).121 “There is nothing official yet regarding the said changes”, Carstensen wrote, “but from reliable sources I can report the following: expenditures on the English possessions on this Coast are budgeted at 24,000 £ instead of the earlier 4,000 £; military commandants are to be appointed to all the forts”. The construction of new forts was envisaged, and it was thought that in the course of the following year the English would have eight well-garrisoned forts between Appolonia and Ouidah. He thought it “highly desirable” that he should be provided with a clarification from home of what the local Danish government’s relations with the English should be. Commandant Topp has informed me that his instructions order him to ignore Denmark’s claims to Akim and Aquapim; such an instruction in the hands of a newly arrived and eager to serve commandant can provide the government only too often with opportunities for complaints and protests.

120 GJ 288/1843, Carstensen, Christiansborg, October 26, 1842, in Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 27–29; see also Kwamena-Poh, p. 108. On J.W. Hanson or Hansen, see Metcalfe, Maclean of the Gold Coast, p. 111. 121 Carstensens indberetninger, p. 30, and note 2; see Metcalfe, Great Britain and Ghana, pp. 160–183, and Reynolds, Trade and economic change on the Gold Coast, p. 96. 614 chapter thirteen

I take the respectful liberty of recommending this matter to the notice of the high Collegium.122 Carstensen at the same time wrote directly to Garlieb, the head of the colonial office:123 he was convinced that it has been neglected to inform the Danish administration of many changes in the country, which for the former could have motivated beneficial decisions regarding the Danish-Guinean possessions. As a main development that in the past decade has expressed itself more and more distinctly can be mentioned: the influence of the Europeans on the Gold Coast has increased to the degree that such measures as earlier were even feared that the natives should learn that they were being considered are now put into effect without resistance—an example of this is the destruction by the English of fetish houses whose priests had offended the English government; what I already have done repeatedly, namely when the fetish is brought up during palavers, explained to the negroes the frauds the fetish priests practice, scarcely any governor before 1830 would have dared to enter into. The Akims and the Aquapims are slavishly subordinate and know that their existence alone depends on the Ashantees’ fear of the whites. The coastal inhabitants are the commercial agents … of the English, and the plentiful trade this provides them makes them secure and reliable partisans of the Europeans…. As is well known, the Danes have no commerce on the coast; a consequence hereof is that the English harvest the benefit of the traffic of the Danish Guinean possessions, while Denmark bears the burden of an expensive administration. Carstensen came to the conclusion that it would be best, under the circumstances, if Denmark and England came to an agreement on common sovereignty over Akim and Aquapim, on a common endeavor, through the encouragement of agricultural efforts and protection, through the free appearance [here] of missionaries, to reach the goal that England sets itself and Denmark first set itself: the civilization of the negroes. There was no talk here of abandoning the Danish position on the coast, but the Chamber of Customs’s reaction to this communication was to write to the Department for Foreign Affairs regarding the disposal of the possessions. (This may represent Frederik Lowzow’s last effort to settle the Guinea question once and for all; he was replaced as director of the Chamber of Customs by Kristian Albrekt Bluhme a couple of weeks

122 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 30–31. 123 GJ 289/1843, Carstensen, Christiansborg, October 26, 1842, to Garlieb, in Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 32–34. the commission in a changed colonial climate 615 later.)124 The Guinea Commission had never provided the information the Chamber had requested of it in this connection early in 1841, and the Commission was not now consulted in the matter.125 “The royal Department [for Foreign Affairs] will be fully aware”, the Chamber of Customs wrote, “that the West Coast of Africa, especially the coast of Guinea, has recently attracted more general notice. Particularly in England voices have spoke out in favor of the civilization of Africa”; this was perhaps an allusion to the Society for the Suppression of the Slave Trade and the Civilization of Africa, which had been organized in 1839. Its president, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, had published The African slave trade; in 1840, a substantially revised version appeared under the title The African slave trade and its remedy.126 The remedy Buxton had in mind was the agricultural colonization of West Africa and the development of a broad-based commerce that could undercut the economic dominance of the illicit slave trade. It seemed now to the Chamber of Customs that Great Britain’s efforts to suppress the Atlantic slave trade would require an increased British presence on the coast. This thrust to English policy was now confirmed by dispatches from the acting Danish governor on the coast, the Chamber reported. This the English’s interest in the oft-mentioned Coast does not come forth as a single isolated matter, however. Report indicates that Belgium also wishes to have a colony in Africa; the free states of North America are said to aspire to a stretch of the West Coast of Africa in which to establish a colony like Liberia, and, according to the public papers, also the French administration now has it in mind to set up three different factories along the coast of Guinea, which are to serve as staple centers for the French trade; and to carry out of this plan the French government in Senegal is said to have already received the needful official charge. Of these factories it is said that one is to be placed at Cape Palma, one at the Gambo River, and a third at a place yet to be decided upon between these two endpoints, and since the Danish establishments lie particularly conveniently for this purpose, it seems that the latter possessions might be of especial interest to France also. The Chamber, then, finding these circumstances particularly favorable to the disposal of the establishments, took it upon itself to remind the Department for Foreign Affairs of the royal order of November 2, 1840.

124 Kringelbach, Den civile centraladministrations embedsetat, p. 208. 125 GJ 288/1843; Guin. Kopibog, February 2, 1843 (No. 247), to the Department for Foreign Affairs, ad GJ 288/1843. 126 Thomas Fowell Buxton, The African slave trade and its remedy (London: John Murray, 1840). 616 chapter thirteen

The Chamber of Customs attached to its letter a description of the Danish possessions on the coast, a short essay that had none of the substance and polish of Thonning’s work, to say nothing of his enthusiasm for Denmark’s African colonial future. The Chamber, using the same arguments that Thonning had been deploying for thirty years, now arrived at conclusions directly contrary to those he had so many time, and with success, laid before Frederik VI. Thonning had argued that an important tropical territory, already under Danish control, was suitable for large- scale plantation agriculture and should sooner or later be colonized; the Chamber of Customs now stood that idea on its head and reasoned that the enclave’s agricultural potential would make it attractive to some great power with the resources to develop it. The Danish had a claim, according to the Chamber’s letter to the Department for Foreign Affairs, to an eighty-mile stretch of land between Christiansborg and Fort Prindsenssteen; in what seems rather a literal reading of the usual metaphor, Garlieb (presuming it was he who drafted the letter) declared that the belt of territory in which Danish authority was recognized was one cannon shot in width. The peoples of Akuapem and Akyem, farther inland, also flew the Danish flag. At a certain distance from the sea the land was “very fertile and suited to the cultivation of all tropical colonial products”. In the area of the Akuapem hills there was an extensive tract of land suitable for coffee plantations; the royal plantation here produced “particularly good coffee. Various kinds of palm trees grow here and produce the very important product oil, as well as palm wine”. None of it seemed to mean anything to Garlieb, and the description, on the whole, reads rather like a schoolboy’s geography lesson. The banks of the Volta, which was navigable for thirty miles inland, were mostly very fertile,

very suited to the cultivation of sugar, just as a kind of indigo is said to grow wild here. The sea is rich in fish at every season and the fishery is easy and inexpensive. Among its various advantages are embraced an unusual richness of terrestrial animal creations, and various work- and domestic animals are at home on the coast. The country is therefore inhabited by a vigorous and on the whole intelligent race, who are inclined to acknowledge the Europeans’ sovereignty and for a long stretch of years have been tied to them by the bonds of material interest. These elements lead, according to the statements of experts, to the opinion that the country must be regarded as well suited to be colonized. Denmark’s own ability to take advantage of this circumstance, Garlieb rather lamely suggested, was limited by “the difficulty during wartime the commission in a changed colonial climate 617 conditions of providing these distant possessions with sufficient protec tion”. However, he wrote, “at a time when several foreign countries covet possessions on the coast of Guinea, the conclusion that the country is regarded as suitable to be colonized strikes the Collegium as of great significance”. The Danes had no naval force on the coast, the Chamber pointed out, and the garrison at Christiansborg was unable to prevent trafficking in slaves at the eastern end of the territory, in particular out of the Volta. England, however, with its naval might, would have no trouble securing this stretch of coast. The existing forts could be restored at little expense. The Chamber offered to provide more information if the Department for Foreign Affairs so desired, and closed by expressing the hope that Denmark might in future be able to take advantage of the commercial development of the very possession that it recommended should be disposed of: “it would be very important”, the Chamber sternly admonished the Department, “that our commerce and shipping to the coast not be admitted under less favorable terms than the commerce and shipping of the nation that would come into possession of the country”. This communication was quickly rendered into a representation to the king that the sale of the Danish establishments be pursued—a policy, to be sure, that the king had already authorized in November of 1840. King Christian’s affirmation came early in April, 1843,127 and a few days later the Department for Foreign Affairs notified the Chamber of Customs that it was initiating inquiries in London regarding the sale of the establishments and asked the Chamber to suggest a suitable price.128 The king appears to have been in little hurry about it, however, and directed the Department to inform the Chamber that since considerable time was likely to elapse, regardless of the result of these diplomatic inquiries, “it would scarcely be advisable on that account to postpone filling the open positions in said colonies”. Furthermore, it would be important that royal officers on the coast should be “intimately familiar with conditions” there during any negotiations. The Chamber of Customs somehow arrived at the figure of £285,000 sterling, although it acknowledged in its response to the Department for Foreign Affairs that the establishments produced no revenue and that the

127 DfuA, Forestillinger, 1843–45, representation of March 27, 1843, resolution April 5, 1843; a draft of this at DfuA, Almindelige Korrespondancesager, sub Lit. G. Guinea. 128 GJ 339/1843, DfuA, April 8, 1843. 618 chapter thirteen forts themselves had all been built so long ago that their present worth would be impossible to calculate.129 Late in August, word arrived from the Government on the coast, and was passed on to the Department for Foreign Affairs, that Governor Maclean had been recalled and that the English government had taken over the direct administration of the Gold Coast establishments.130 A new governor was expected any day, and it was said that a regiment of black West Indian troops would be brought in to man the various forts. “The Dutch here on the coast”, on the other hand, “have given up on seeing better days come for their possessions”. Bitter price competition had all but destroyed trade on the coast, and “the Guinea Coast’s golden times have vanished without trace”. A French flotilla had visited, the Government reported, and the French display a particular interest in the Danish establishments with the thought of possibly seeing them under the tricolor flag; on the other hand, the English cannot imagine the latter possibility without unmistakable displeasure. If it is the intent to part with the establishments, the rivalry between England and France, put properly to use, will lead to the goal. Early in 1843, Governor Carstensen addressed “[a] matter that in the fatherland is regarded with interest”, namely the possibility that the possessions could be turned to advantage through the production of colonial staples.131 “That this possibility is unfortunately all too distant”, Carstensen wrote, “I will endeavor to represent below. The Gold Coast is that portion of the very extensive Guinea Coast which is least suited to cultivation, and the main explanation for this lies in the lack of rivers and watercourses and in the soil’s stony character”. Even the Africans of the coast, he said, could cultivate their food crops only at a considerable remove inland, and the difficulty of transporting the produce to the coast was a hindrance to an expansive agriculture. It would be difficult to bring about the cultivation of an introduced plant, as long as the natives in fact only raise the grains and edible roots of the country for the most strictly necessary use.

129 Guin. Kopibog, June 17, 1843, to the Department for Foreign Affairs (GJ 339/1843). 130 GJ 444/1843, government on the coast, May 28, 1843; Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 60–61; Guin. Kopibog, August 25, 1843, to the Department for Foreign Affairs. 131 GJ 364/1843, Carstensen, Christiansborg, February 10, 1843 (Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 43–45), duplicate journaled at GJ 459/1843, both filed at GJS 702/1849. The letter was also brought to the Guinea Commission’s attention: an archivist’s slip indicates that GJS 364/1843 was removed from a file in GK II marked “Sager ved Guineiske Journal. 1813. 1836. 1837. 1838. 1840. 1843. 1845–46” that can be seen to have once been several inches thick; see a penciled annotation at GJ 364/1843. the commission in a changed colonial climate 619

Production in a country always varies according to and is encouraged by consumption. If the Upper Coast and Principe could not market the coffee they produced in abundance, “how then can it be expected that the trade will seek the same product in a more distant place, where that product is subject to so many eventualities and thus cannot become a secure article of trade and demand?” His understanding of the matter was that not only the Danes but the English lost great sums on plantation agriculture on the Guinea Coast. “There now exist only 4 coffee plantations with in all something over half a score thousand trees (a single plantation in Brazil counts a hundred thousand trees and more)”. It had been a particularly good year, and the plantation Frederiksgave had yielded “a not insignificant quantity of coffee”, but the expense of producing it had been so great that no profit could be expected from the harvest.

The reason for this is the following: a fruitful year means the same as a rainy year; a rainy year is always accompanied by illness, especially the Guinea worm, whereby the plantation workers are prevented from taking part in the harvest and force the plantation owner to hire people for the gathering of the coffee beans. With all this the plantation Frederiksgave is the only one that deserves the name of a coffee plantation…. And still [Frederiksgave] in the possession of a private man would not last one year. Continued operation would lead the owner to the begging staff. The soil is the worst of all the surrounding plantations’. Water must be fetched from a long way off. Governor Mørck’s report to the high Collegium of the 5th April 1836 gives a highly reliable picture. Here we are presented with the spectacle of the young Carstensen, almost alone in the fort, reading the government’s archives, if only to amuse himself. He wrote, as always, with great assurance, but it does not appear, on the evidence of either his diary or his official reports, that he had himself yet visited the Akuapem plantations. He went on: “In accordance with the wishes of the high Collegium, I shall strive to look after the plantation enterprise here with diligence, its sorrowful aspect notwithstanding”. He promised to maintain and expand the coffee plantings and to plant as many as a thousand oil palms. The existing workforce could manage these tasks this year, but, in the future, he would need resources with which to obtain the necessary labor for an expanding planting. He warned the Chamber that the palms would not bear fruit for the first seven or nine years, depending on the soil, which at Frederiksgave was “extremely poor”. In addition, water was necessary to extract the oil from the nuts, and this was difficult to procure. 620 chapter thirteen

“I lay weight on these circumstances so as not, perhaps in the course time, to be upbraided for a shortsightedness, of which the officials to whom the plantation enterprise here has been entrusted most often cannot be acquitted”. Two months later, in April, 1843, Carstensen reported that Andreas Riis, the Danish missionary, had arrived back on the coast, bringing with him this time a party of two dozen black settlers from Jamaica.132 When Riis had returned to Europe from West Africa in 1840, he had presented an optimistic report on the prospects for the spread of Christianity there at the Basel Mission’s annual assembly.133 The Mission, appalled by the mortality among the people it had sent to Africa and undoubtedly influenced by Buxton, of the African Civilization Society, who was convinced that “[t]he West Indies will supply us with agents”,134 had come to the conclusion that any further efforts in Akuapem should rely on former slaves from the West Indies. It was presumed that such people would be immune to the dangers of the tropical climate, and, further, that they would be delighted to return to the land of their fathers.135 Riis had undertaken to organize this extraordinary new projection of Christian zeal from the plantation societies of the Antilles back to Africa and had sailed for the West Indies in May, 1842.136 His errand had been greeted with derision in the Danish West Indies (where the institution of slavery still obtained, it should be noted), and he had in the end found his missionaries in Jamaica, among congregations already involved in proselytizing work on Fernando Po, in the Gulf of Guinea. Six families and three bachelors were promised houses, garden plots, and the opportunity to help spread the Christian religion from Riis’s old base at Akuropon.137 The African Civilization Society provided funds for the purchase of horses, donkeys, and mules and their transportation from Jamaica to the Guinea Coast.138 These were English-speakers, of course, who were being brought into a Danish colonial territory—this was a highly international undertaking on

132 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 52–56, Carstensen, Christiansborg, May 20, 1843 (GJ 433/1843); see Kwamena-Poh, pp. 114–115. 133 Lorenzen, pp. 330–331. 134 Quoted from Buxton’s son’s memoir in Debrunner, p. 107; Buxton, The African slave trade and its remedy, pp. 491–495. Debrunner, p. 104, calls the elder Buxton’s book a “bestseller”. 135 Lorenzen, pp. 332–333; Smith, p. 35 136 Lorenzen, p. 333–334; Debrunner, pp. 107–108. 137 Smith, pp. 37–38. 138 Lorenzen, p. 334–335; Debrunner, pp. 108–109. See also C.H. Friis, Andreas Riis, et hundredeaarsminde (Copenhagen: Det danske Missionsselskab, 1932), pp. 18–19. the commission in a changed colonial climate 621 a polyglot although increasingly Anglophone Coast. (Among Riis’s companions was a European-educated African from Liberia named George Thompson.)139 Governor Carstensen himself went so far, in May, 1843, when he reported on the arrival of Riis’s party, as to urge the Danish government to permit him to introduce the teaching of English in the schools in the Danish establishments.140 The English language was “gaining ground widely on this Coast”, he reported, and “every state that owns possessions on the Guinea Coast should tie its endeavors for agriculture and civilization as closely as possible to England’s”. Riis’s undertaking would have the result, he wrote, that English would be spoken in Akuapem, and, in time, new schools would be built elsewhere in the country by English-speaking “emissaries” from Akuropon.141 “The planting of several useful West Indian plants is being begun on and will then, if same succeed, be sought to be disseminated in the country”. The little colony took hold. A number of the settlers returned to Jamaica, but, after a difficult time in the beginning, five West Indian families remained. Riis himself was recalled to Basel in 1845, accused of owning slaves and dealing in weapons. He ended his days in Norway,142 but the Christian community he planted in Akuapem proved hardy and expansive.143 In May, 1843, Wedel sent the latest draft of the Guinea Commission’s report to Schønheyder with his comments.144 Drawing upon Thonning’s figures, Wedel arrived at costs to the treasury of more than two million rigsbankdaler over seven years, without, he pointed out, taking into consideration unexpected costs, which would surely be considerable “in such an elaborate undertaking, carried out in such a distant land. It is even more difficult to state the income that could flow from the plantations”.145 He also professed to be much troubled by Findt’s suggestion, in his own

139 Smith, p. 36–37, Lorenzen, p. 334. 140 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 52–56, Carstensen, Christiansborg, May 20, 1843. 141 See also Kwamena-Poh, p. 117. 142 Smith, pp. 38–41. 143 Lorenzen, p. 338; Reynolds, “Abolition and economic change on the Gold Coast”, pp. 143–148; Rathbone, pp. 57–58; see also George MacDonald, The Gold Coast past and present (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969 [1898]), pp. 322–323. 144 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Wedel, Copenhagen, May 9, 1843, to Schønheyder. 145 GK IV, Daterede Udarbeidelser af Commissionens Medlemmer, Flindt & Thonning 1841, Wedel, Copenhagen, May 8, 1843, Note til den i Circulation satte Udkast til en Betænkning… samt Bemærkninger til min Note af 12 April 1841. 622 chapter thirteen remarks on the Commission’s opinion, that the coffee trees at Lutterodt’s plantation flowered well but, inexplicably, bore little fruit.

The reason must thus be in the local and climatic conditions themselves, which is furthermore advertised by the fact that neither the English nor the Dutch have actual coffee plantations in their Guinea establishments, although it can surely be assumed that efforts therewith have been made, or [would] be undertaken if insurmountable impediments did not oppose themselves to it. Too many lives would be lost in an effort to colonize on the coast, Wedel wrote.

Not only do the Danish establishments give a sorrowful proof of this, but the Niger expeditions undertaken from England have in the clearest way shown how dangerous the climate even at a distance from the sea is for the Europeans. Furthermore, he argued, a colony would be highly vulnerable in the case of war: the only reason the Danish establishments had not been occupied during the last war, as the Danish West Indies had, was that they were of no value whatsoever. A successful colony would assuredly be a valuable prize in a war, and the British, after all, had their “operatives” in the immediate vicinity of Fort Christiansborg. Wedel was uncowed by Thonning’s scathing rebuttals of his and Findt’s remarks on the “character” of the negroes, which he saw

as an insurmountable obstacle for the colonization and in which I am confirmed by all the printed reports that are to be had of the negroes’ character, which all agree with the picture the late Captain Findt provided. In this regard the Niger expeditions again provide relevant information just as a report on Ashantee by the Danish missionary Riis taken up in the Al[l]gemeine Zeitung fully elucidates how dangerous any undertaking is that touches on the natives’ supposed rights, the fetish system, domestic relations, and other interests. To resist the latter’s fanaticism and vengefulness will demand a larger European power than the colonization is calculated upon, and to eliminate this character among the negro tribes will demand several generations if it can ever be achieved. Here Thonning wrote in the margin, when he got hold of this document, “Riis lived for several years in Akvapim unmolested in all respects, and he lives there again just as unmolested…. And yet Riis is a missionary and thus in conflict with the natives’ fetish system”. Wedel felt that his views on competition from Brazil had been confirmed by recent market news. Brazilian production was increasing at a the commission in a changed colonial climate 623 great rate, and prices were falling. Guinea coffee would surely require the protection of tariffs. Having declared that further discussion of his and Findt’s dissenting views would be bootless, and indeed that he feared that their arguments would not “enjoy appropriate discussion” in Thonning’s report, Wedel again asked that their statements accompany the report as attachments, so the Chamber of Customs “would thereby be in a better position to review the different views that have expressed themselves in the matter”. It would in any case be “desirable if the Commission finishes its work as soon as possible”,146 and it seems likely that this last, at least, reflected prevailing opinion within the Chamber of Customs. Schønheyder forwarded Wedel’s remarks to Thonning rather late in the summer of 1843. He was not at all willing, he wrote, to see Wedel’s and Findt’s views given the formal prominence of dissenting opinions. There would be no disagreement, he was sure, on the greatest part of the report, and “on the points where [we are] not of the same opinion, the different views … are to be set forth, and referring His Majesty to seek them in the separately submitted opinions can thereby be avoided”.147 Thonning’s notes in this connection are preserved, on a folded sheet of paper into which various other notes and some newspaper clippings are stuffed.148 As he organized his material for this new editorial task that Schønheyder had laid on him, he referred to page and section numbers in Findt’s and Wedel’s original remarks, in his own rebuttals, and in Wedel’s new arguments. He noted first of all that Wedel had made no reply at all to his statement regarding King Christian’s assurance that the establishments would not be disposed of before the Guinea Commission was heard from. Thonning was now in a difficult political situation, to be sure, but he did not care to be rushed by his former subordinate. Thonning made a list of the portions of the report that would have to be revised to take Findt’s and Wedel’s opinions into account. His arguments regarding the fate of earlier plantation efforts in the Danish territory would have to be balanced by Findt’s and Wedel’s interpretations, as would sections on climate and mortality and on the colony’s isolation in the event of

146 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Wedel, Copenhagen, May 9, 1843, to Schønheyder. 147 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Schønheyder, Copenhagen, August 18, 1843, to Thonning. 148 GK IV, Daterede Udarbeidelser af Commissionens Medlemmer, Flindt & Thonning 1841, Materialer til den yderligere Besvarelse af Ws og Fs Noter. 624 chapter thirteen war. He thought a whole new section on the Africans’ mentality might be necessary—“the subject is important enough for it”. He made a note to himself, “I must ask Wedel for the information Riis [published] on Assiante in Algemein Zeitung”, for he had not seen the article, which Wedel had not thought to attach to his letter. (“W. talks about fanaticism!!”, Thonning wrote archly of Riis’s characterization of the Asante.) Regarding Brazilian competition, Thonning argued that lowered duties for the nation’s own colonial products would improve the market position of Danish African coffee, and again pointed out that African plantations would, in addition, stimulate Danish trade, shipping, and industrial production, “which are the object of one’s own colonies”. (Carstensen, on the coast, was thinking about the coffee market in more immediate and local terms: by the end of 1843, he had managed to dispose of some of the establishments’ small production of coffee for trade goods and reported that he knew of three ship captains who could be relied upon to take coffee for wares.)149 It is thereby, [Carstensen wrote] that the access to this barter trade will become known, and alone thereby that the coffee cultivation will gradually be able to spread among the negroes; so far no one has seen the coffee production at Frederiksgave yield any advantage; that there can be obtained this year 1 barrel of a 100 dozen knives for a little more than 1 barrel of coffee, will be for the negro a tangible argument that coffee cultivation can be profitable. Wedel had stated flatly “ ‘that the colony will never be able to bring direct income to the treasury’ ”, nor would Danish shipping and commerce benefit by it. “How does Wedel know all this?”, Thonning wished to know. Wedel had also complained that Thonning’s estimate of costs in the first two or three years had applied only to the preparations for a colonization and that no colonists at all would be settled in those first years. It was “as if”, Thonning wrote, “the preparations were not the essential beginning of the colony—I don’t grasp W.’s meaning”. Among the notes gathered here is a missive from Thonning to Schønheyder, or perhaps to the Commission at large.150 Explaining that Schønheyder had asked him to incorporate the Commission’s differences of opinion in the body of the report, he ran through some of Findt’s

149 GJ 539/1844, government on the coast, December 4, 1843, duplicate at 589/1844; Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 77–78. 150 GK IV, Daterede Udarbeidelser af Commissionens Medlemmer, Flindt & Thonning 1841, Materialer til den yderligere Besvarelse af Ws og Fs Noter, Thonning, November 17, 1843. the commission in a changed colonial climate 625 and Wedel’s concerns. Regarding some of Findt’s suggestions, Thonning thought it “not necessary to discuss ants and termites more than has been done in the opinion”, and similarly the sun’s heat: it was well understood that the place lay six degrees north of the Equator, and it was in no way hotter, but rather to be termed cooler than usual at that latitude. That the sun scorches plants and causes a portion of the fruit to fall off early is the case even in Denmark, but it is assuredly not more common [on the Guinea Coast than in Suriname and Cayenne], and scarcely so common as on various of the West Indian islands. He felt that he had dealt sufficiently with

the Europeans’ slight profit from their plantations and the cause of it. The quantity of either black or unripe beans that I have found in samples of coffee from Guinea, is sufficient proof of the carelessness with which the harvest is handled. Should W. wish something about this in the opinion, I will be glad to add it, Thonning wrote, adding, a trifle testily, “together with the appropriate evidence”. Elsewhere in his notes he exclaims that Wedel in his last communication had written “as if he is entirely familiar with the locality”: this was of course not Wedel’s rôle on the Commission, and Thonning saw no reason to simply insert Wedel’s or the late Findt’s opinions in the Commission’s report without comment, particularly not such opinions as he regarded to be without legitimate basis. Regarding “Transport in and from the mountain country”, Thonning went on,

F. is of the opinion that this will not be as difficult as I think and cites in comparison La Guaira, Carracas, Porto Cabello, and Valencia; I have, to be sure, traveled through Akvapim, but the close investigation that is required to determine where and how roads can be laid out, I had neither the time nor the strength for. I had to follow the negroes’ paths through the otherwise impenetrable woods, and these appear more to take the nearest than the easiest way. I do not think that more should be said about this than is already said in the opinion. Thonning also rejected Findt’s complaint regarding the customary liba- tions of spirits at palavers; Findt’s objection merely demonstrated “how little F. penetrated into the negroes’ conventional ways…. I think that nothing of this need be touched on in the representation”. Thonning accepted that place would have to be found in the report for Findt’s and Wedel’s concerns about “the negroes’ jealousy regarding the utilization of their land”, the circumstances of the colony in wartime, and “the negroes’ 626 chapter thirteen temperament”. On the other hand, he could not accept Findt’s suggestion that comparisons to Liberia were irrelevant; indeed, Sierra Leone would also have to be brought into the discussion, since Wedel had argued on the basis of information from the British colony that coffee could not be grown in Guinea. In March, 1844, Thonning submitted another revision of the Guinea Commission’s report to Schønheyder.151 In his cover letter, he agreed with Schønheyder that Findt’s and Wedel’s dissenting opinions should not be permitted to stand alone, where they might make an unfortunate impression on “any who are not intimately familiar with the altogether foreign conditions of the natives and the localities”; he had incorporated them in the report itself, together with “the most correct concrete circumstances”. He said that he had tried to include simply everything that might have a bearing on the matter, and that this had posed many difficulties, since all earlier colonies based on cultivation of the soil provide very little experience that can serve as guidance for a project that must be carried out according to entirely new principles and where such great differences of opinion on almost every subject were possible. “This has however necessitated significant revision and expansion of the earlier version, which I herewith, in a clean draft, have the honor of sending [you]”. (There is an old book-binding with most of the pages ripped out of it among the Commission’s papers; the date March 29, 1844 is penciled in on the last of the remaining pages. A table of contents is still attached to the binding, but the draft itself is to be found elsewhere.)152 Early in 1844, the Chamber of Customs wrote to the Department for Foreign Affairs that some repairs to Fort Christiansborg were necessary, but, before these were undertaken, the Chamber wished to know whether the transfer of the establishments could soon “be expected to be effected”.153 The Department for Foreign Affairs responded that England’s “disinclination to enter into a purchase is quite apparent”. The Danish representative in London was of the opinion that the British government was

151 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Thonning, March 29, 1844, to Schønheyder, apparently a draft, annotated in red pencil: “Brev hvorved den sidste Redaction af Guinea Sagen blev af Th sendt til Schønheider den 31 Mart 44”. 152 The book-binding is in GK IV; the draft, once again heavily annotated, is in GK V, marked on the last page in pencil “26/2 47 Th.” 153 Guin. Kopibog, February 6, 1844, to the Department for Foreign Affairs (ad GJ 444/1843 and 522/1844). the commission in a changed colonial climate 627 not likely to take any steps to acquire the Danish territory unless pressed to it by mercantile interests. At the same time, the English would not tolerate a sale of the Danish establishments to any other power that would be in any way detrimental to British interests on the coast.154 In the circumstances, the Department felt that it would be “inadvisable to commence negotiations to this end with the French administration”. In the meantime, the Department particularly wished to be advised of any tension with the British authorities on the coast “that possibly could in part be occasioned by less than careful conduct on Carstensen’s part”.

154 GJ 528/1844, Department for Foreign Affairs, February 17, 1844.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE TIDE AGAIN TURNS: NEW AFRICAN COLONIAL IMPETUS

In March, 1844, the restless Governor Carstensen elected, without first seeking the permission of the central administration, to travel home to Denmark to try to effect “something for the best of these possessions”.1 His way took him first down the coast to the Gabon River, back up to Gorée and Saint Louis on the Senegal (and up the river on a steamer as far as Podor), and thence to Brest.2 He called the Gabon “the best anchorage on the west coast of Africa; the entrance is 8–12 miles wide; there is no surf; the country on both river banks is of a marvelous fertility”.3 The French had erected a fort on the north bank of the river, he reported to the Chamber of Customs from Brest; “treaties have been entered into with chiefs on both river banks, and the country is now French”. The French have not neglected the cause of civilization in Africa. On the contrary, they will perhaps surpass other nations in undertakings to introduce agriculture in Africa. An easily discerned policy is at the root of these efforts: the emancipation of the negroes in the West Indies will wipe out the production of the Antilles. In Africa will then be sought, with negroes who work as slaves for negroes, what the ruined West Indian islands no longer offer. Saint Louis was “a city in the desert”, a town of ten thousand. The French education system here was so far advanced over efforts elsewhere on the coast “that it scarcely admits of any comparison”.4 In a second letter from Brest, Carstensen took care to account for his decision to return to Copenhagen without permission.5 He thought matters were at rather an urgent pass. The old Danish slaving forts were badly sited except to serve the slave trade, he wrote, and circumstances had not

1 Carstensen, “Noter mit liv angaaende”, p. 74. 2 On Saint Louis and Senegal in the colonial period, see James F. Searing, West African slavery and Atlantic commerce: the Senegal River valley, 1700–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 163–193, on Gorée and Saint Louis, Martin A. Klein, Slavery and colonial rule in French West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 21–25. 3 Carstensen, “Noter mit liv angaaende”, pp. 76–77. 4 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 88–90, Carstensen, Brest, June 30, 1844 (GJ 626/1844). 5 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 91–95, Carstensen, Brest, June 30, 1844 (GJ 627/1844). 630 chapter fourteen favored the development of the surrounding territory. The controlling Instruction of 1820, whose main thrust had been to maintain the Danish claim while cutting costs in every possible way, had left the fort Christiansborg a fortress without cannons, a factory without trade; it permits no intervention in the natives’ affairs. Nevertheless, just as Denmark gave the word for the end of the slave trade, it also seized the initiative with regard to the introduction of civilization and agriculture in Africa. The motherland’s attention was directed to the schools, to colonies, to industrial enterprises …; but the administration’s noble intentions stranded on both the untimely and expensive means chosen. Eager agents of change had pushed themselves too hard, and to no avail. “To ‘abandon’ the Danish-Guinean possessions”, Carstensen now wrote, almost four years after King Christian had ordered his government to avail itself of any opportunity to dispose of the territory, is a suggestion that reveals ignorance of conditions there…. Denmark cannot part with the Guinean possessions unless it can happen in an honorable way for the state. While England gives out hundreds of thousands in the name of the Guinean trade and African civilization, while France, in its Senegalese possessions, with tireless diligence advances the cause of civilization and prepares itself to energetically advance same on the Guinea Coast, … should Denmark step faint-heartedly back and destroy the Basel Mission’s gloriously begun and expensive work of civilization? It is in the administration’s interest to lay it upon its officials in Guinea to continuously and consistently keep the civilization of Africa in view. A plan for a unified and forceful cooperation [with the Basel Mission] must be hit upon—and followed. The work of civilization must especially be based on plantations; young people (mulattoes and negroes) are to be sent to the West Indies to learn there how to proceed with the cultivation of the sugar cane, the tobacco plant, and other tropical plants…. The Basel Mission has begun on an expensive institution of civilization and cultivation in the Aquapim mountains: the uncertainty regarding the existence of the Danish-Guinean possessions in the future hobbles its enterprise; the Danish local authority, which with regard to the administration of the country and its inhabitants must act without instructions, without knowing the regime’s plans for the country, cannot with the desirable energy provide the Mission the assistance and support without which nothing can be accomplished. The Danish-Guinean possessions should be given an organization whereby the greatest possible economies can be combined with the goal of the possessions: the introduction and diffusion in Africa of civilization and agriculture [and] trade with the mother country. In the interest of economy, Carstensen believed that it would be essential to transfer the ruins of Prindsenssteen and what remained of the Danish new african colonial impetus 631

“sovereignty” east of the Volta to “another nation, and preferably a nation whose influence on the Guinea Coast is not predominant”. Carstensen thought it especially important that a Danish naval vessel should visit the establishments once a year:6 a warship is to the negro a symbol of the might of the nation whose flag it flies; its presence, if only momentary, is sufficient to quell possible unrests, its precisely expected arrival to prevent them…. The Coast would be visited annually by Danes and thereby become known in Denmark; the secretive- ness, the mysteriousness that has covered up Guinean affairs and the Guinean officials’ dealings, will end. Carstensen recorded in his diary that he was well received when he presented himself at the Chamber of Customs: “what good fortune for me that Bluhme has replaced Lowzow”, he wrote in his diary. “With Bluhme one can talk and tell that one is heard and understood—my visit with Garlieb was what I had expected; an exchange of ideas with a man of feeling and interest in his specialty”. A royal audience was arranged, and the king, as Carstensen had been warned he would, immediately asked him “how I could defend my self-determined trip”. Carstensen “answered lightly to this”, and was commanded to present himself at the royal residence in the country at Sorgenfri a week later, on which occasion he conversed with the king for a full hour, and appears to have accounted for himself well.7 The Chamber of Customs laid all Carstensen’s suggestions formally before the king a few days later.8 “Bluhme was in before me”, Carstensen recorded in his diary. “When he came out he told me that all went very well—that all my suggestions were approved! The king’s last words to me were: your good services shall be duly appreciated!”9 The Chamber’s representation opened by saying although the Collegium was not entirely convinced that Carstensen’s errand warranted his having left his post, a royal reprimand might threaten the governor’s health when he returned to the coast. This was a bureaucratic nicety: the cultivated young governor clearly presented himself and his case with extraordinary confidence, for he appears to have turned Danish African colonial policy

6 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 99–101, Carstensen, Copenhagen, July 25, 1844 (GJ 646/1844). 7 Carstensen, “Noter mit liv angaaende”, pp. 83–84. 8 GTK, Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner for 1843 og 1844, representation of July 27, 1844, resolution, July 30, 1844. (GJ 650/1844). 9 Carstensen, “Noter mit liv angaaende”, p. 84. 632 chapter fourteen completely around. Suddenly, colonization in the enclave no longer seemed so outlandish a prospect. The Chamber of Customs, which only a year before had been urging the Department for Foreign Affairs to advance the matter of disposing of the African forts, was now so bold as to declare in its representation to the king that there could be no question of selling or abandoning the establishments. Carstensen’s argument that the main goal of the establishments should be the introduction of European civilization and agriculture in Africa, through the agency of the Basel missionaries, was passed on to the king without modification; indeed, it was to be left to Carstensen to develop a formal plan toward this end in cooperation with Andreas Riis. (None of this, to be sure, would cost the crown any new financial resources or the Chamber itself much administrative exertion.) The Chamber could not endorse Carstensen’s suggestion regarding a transfer of the territory east of the Volta to some other power, although it acknowledged the difficulty of exercising jurisdiction at such a distance from Fort Christiansborg. Gerhard Lind’s exploration up the river in the 1820s, the king was informed, had indicated that the river was navigable by relatively large vessels for twenty-five or thirty miles inland. Since, in addition, the landscape abutting the river is regarded as very fertile, it is not improbable that the river, in time, when the land could come under cultivation, will, as a means of transport for outgoing products and for ingoing bartered trade goods, achieve such a degree of importance that it is expedient to remain in sole possession of the river territory instead of sharing it with another nation, whereby collisions could easily arise. It was further pointed out that although Great Britain itself was not interested in such an addition to its territory, it was important not to give the British offense by offering the territory on the far side of the Volta to any other power. King Christian, having ordered in 1840 that the Guinea establishments were to be disposed of as soon as an opportunity to do so presented itself, now, in 1844, resolved “that for the time being it should neither be negotiated nor contemplated to transfer the possessions in Guinea to a foreign power, nor to abandon them”.10

10 GJ 650/1844, extract of royal resolution of July 30, 1844. In a letter to the Department for Foreign Affairs of January 7, 1845, the Chamber of Customs, pointing out that “the matter thus for the time being finds itself at quite another juncture”, asked the Department to take a rather firmer stance towards English complaints about the Danes’ administration of their territory on the coast, and “to assert the grounds that in our [communication] of 5 Dec. 1837 are thoroughly developed to prove Denmark’s suzerainty over Akim, Aqvapim, and Crobbo”: Guin. Kopibog, January 7, 1845, to the Department for Foreign Affairs (ad GJ 528/1844). new african colonial impetus 633

Three weeks later, having accomplished this much at least, and having secured a regular appointment to the governorship,11 Carstensen returned to Africa. He took with him a copy of Peter Thonning’s map of the possessions, for “use in the line of duty”: Thonning’s venerable colonial icon was thus trotted out again like an old war-horse and put in the hands of an energetic young administrator on his way back to fresh fields of endeavor, who even now had himself seen little of the territory it depicted.12 There is no other indication that Thonning or the Guinea Commission were consulted in the course of Carstensen’s flying trip home: the governor was now Denmark’s most vigorous and active agent for a colonial project on the coast. Carstensen’s disillusionment was quick and complete. Transported once again from the cultured capital by the Baltic, with its bustling harbor, ringing streets, and solid and comfortable buildings, news of several more deaths among the Danish community at Christiansborg “were the country’s greeting to me” as soon as a canoe laid alongside the ship.13 He wrote in his diary, “We went ashore. The fort looked so deserted and sad to me. Nicoline’s child, a beautiful little girl, also dead!”14 The political situation in Akuapem had become “extremely complicated”, and he summoned the various parties to the fort. “Since old times Ussu town has enjoyed the practice of exercising a brokering rôle between disputing parties called down to the fort”, Carstensen explained to the Chamber of Commerce in a report, “a privilege that in the future should never be allowed them, if it can be avoided”. A bloody fight broke out, and a number of townspeople and Akuapems were killed. That night, two captured Akuapem children were sacrificed in Osu, and “the town’s great drums were smeared with their blood”. Horrified, Carstensen laid hands on those culpable and recommended their deportation to the West Indies. He complained bitterly to the colonial office: That order and peace has been seen in Denmark to prevail in this country has often been mystifying. Quite a few and quite dark affairs went

11 Carstensen, “Noter mit liv angaaende”, pp. 84–85. 12 ad GJS 645/1844, Carstensen, Copenhagen, July 25, 1844. GJS 645/1844 is Mossin’s invoice for making this copy of the map, July 25, 1844; Guin. Kopibog, August 3, 1844, records that Mossin was paid. 13 Carstensens indberetninger, p. 102, Carstensen, Christiansborg, October 14, 1844 (GJ 758/1844). 14 Carstensen, “Noter mit liv angaaende”, p. 86. The unhappy mother was presumably Nicoline Brock, a mulatto schoolteacher, perhaps Carstensen’s sister-in-law; she is mentioned in Carstensens indberetninger, p. 60, Carstensen, Christiansborg, May 28, 1843 (GJ 443/1843). 634 chapter fourteen

unchallenged and unknown in Denmark: the reason for the Government’s silence was not always that there was nothing to report!15 In the midst of this, Carstensen promised Andreas Riis that a fort would be built at Akuropon.16 In March, 1845, he drafted a new Instrux for the establishments, in which it was declared that “the Government will keep in view that the establishments can only through agriculture, through the creation of plantations for tropical products, elevate themselves into possessions remunerative to the mother state”,17 but by April his mood was such that he wrote to the Chamber of Customs18 that everything he had seen makes it my solemn duty to declare that I can do nothing here in the face of the general depravity, against obstacles that a person’s utmost powers and ready willingness cannot possibly overcome. If I, following a chimerical hope, have contributed to the retention of these establishments, then I have brought a heavy responsibility on myself; this thought haunts me now and will haunt me in the future—and repeated deaths among officials coming out will hit me harder than ever. In this state of mind, in the conviction that, as it is and has been, thus will everything here remain, only all too long, the accompanying short treatise is written down, in which my thought was: to obtain for the state a garden [in exchange] for a churchyard, to send out subjects to life and activity instead of to inaction and death. Carstensen opened this treatise with a quote from Chateaubriand— “An excessive population is the scourge of empires”—and with a Latin passage from Seneca on the many causes of emigration, which he translated (“it goes about like this”, he wrote) for his interlocutors at the Chamber of Customs. Overpopulation was the great driving force of European emigration, Carstensen believed, and would remain so. England had colonized “the globe’s most important and most fertile points—also France is now trying, closely watched by England, to expand beyond the

15 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 102–104 and note p. 104, Carstensen, Christiansborg, January 13, 1845 (GJ 81/1845); see Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 212. A drum confiscated by Carstensen on this occasion is now in the Ethnographic Collection at Denmark’s National Museum: Jens Yde, “Etnografisk Samlings taletrommer”, Fra Nationalmueseets arbejdsmark, 1945, pp. 18–24, on p. 22. 16 Carstensens indberetninger, p. 86 (November 26–27, 1844). 17 Carstensens indberetninger, p. 132, Carstensen, Christiansborg, March 8, 1845 (GJ 57/1845). 18 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 135–140, Carstensen, Christiansborg, April 11, 1845 (GJ 104/1845). new african colonial impetus 635 motherland”. Migrations from the north of Europe, on the other hand, “are lost energies for these countries; they become citizens in a foreign state”. Denmark has no colonies; for the essence of the latter requires planters from the motherland. The West Indian islands are trade factories, built on slave labor; the East Indian possessions are factories whom new trade routes and changed conjunctures have robbed of all significance for Denmark; the Guinean establishments were factories for the slave trade; that trade has ended, but nothing has come in its stead. There was scarcely any emigration from Denmark at that time, to be sure, but Carstensen predicted that “a series of years of peace will create dangerous overpopulation for Denmark, as more or less for every European state, and thus make emigration a pressing necessity”, if poverty, crime, and unrest were to be warded off.

If, therefore, Denmark does not now seize the opportunity, it will, to judge by the present condition of the globe, never offer itself…. The only place on the globe, where Denmark still, but not for long, can have the hope of instituting an effective colonization is Australia and in particular its southwestern part. Here the climate is like south Spain’s; the extremely sparse native population, treated by nature in so stepmotherly a fashion, will put no hindrances in the way of the settler.19 The place was “sufficiently removed” from the haunts of Malay pirates, he said. While England would doubtless frown on an Australian colonial undertaking by a major power, it will not hinder the smaller Nordic powers from stepping forth as coloniz- ers in said country, and thus benefiting it…. Should England’s claims on Australia be so extensive that Denmark should already now be too late to take a full part in colonization, perhaps a sacrifice can be offered to achieve a purpose that will be of such benefit to our descendants, but that the latter will themselves be excluded from achieving: Denmark could trade its possessions in India and Africa to England for an Australian territory. All the necessary domestic animals, seeds, and trees could be obtained from existing Australian settlements. The first Danish colonization should be undertaken by the state, and this seed would soon “sprout forth into

19 Carstensen had perhaps been reading a book sent down to the coast in the time of Findt’s and Hein’s Commission of Investigation: David Collins and Philip Gidley King, An account of the English colony in New South Wales: with remarks on the dispositions, customs, manners, &c., of the native inhabitants of that country (London: Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1798). 636 chapter fourteen a shady tree, under which many will seek lee and shade. The original colonists will soon be able to receive new emigrants, to supply the latter with the necessaries of life—and the colony will be founded”. Carstensen wrote in his diary, A short and understandable plan for a colony for emigrants from Dk. is finished. My wish is now that the administration will do something about this matter—and with pleasure I will sacrifice peace and comfort to win, with work and effort, for my less favored fellow citizens an existence that, if not luxurious, is nevertheless carefree in the proper sense of the word. This idea (chateau en Australie) is now necessary to me; [without it,] I would not be able to stand this monotonous existence, this poverty [of] my surroundings for intellectual intercourse, for sociable collaboration; I live with myself and my thoughts—and the hope of seeing my thoughts one day realized in deed keeps up my spirits and strength.20 According to the Chamber of Customs’s Guinea correspondence journal,21 Carstensen’s desperate Australian proposition was simply filed away, but it at some point made its way into the Guinea Commission’s files. Schønheyder, working his way through a list of documents, pointed out that Carstensen’s letter of April 11, 1845, was not mentioned in the Commission’s report, although the document was in the Commission’s hands. Thonning replied, on the same sheet, a little impatiently, “it is a notion to colonize in the South Sea and does not belong here. Th.”22 Carstensen’s Australian idea was perhaps not so bizarre. King Christian also indulged himself in colonial dreams. In May, 1845, even as negotiations for the sale of the Danish possessions at Tranquebar and Serampore to the British East India Company were proceeding,23 the king notified the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences and Letters, of which he was the president, that he had decided to send the corvette Galathea around the world on a voyage of scientific and economic investigation, “and in particular to the Nicobar Islands, over which we have sovereignty, to undertake a scientific investigation of this island group’s natural products and use for cultivation and commerce”. Coal was one of the natural products the king was

20 Carstensen, “Noter mit liv angaaende”, pp. 108–109. 21 GJ 104/1845. 22 GK IV, Schønheyders bemærkning til udkast til betænkning og Thonnings anmærkninger dertil, Schønheyder’s undated notes, annotated by Thonning; GK II, file marked “Guinea” and “GJ 104/1845”, containing only an archivist’s removal slip, on which is written “No file?” It is not clear what, if anything, was removed; Carstensen’s proposal is in any case in its place in the Guinea Journal files. 23 Nørregaard, “Englands køb”, pp. 403–405. new african colonial impetus 637 most interested in, and he appears to have had it in mind that a Danish entrepôt and coaling station could be established in the islands to compete with Singapore itself, which had been founded only two or three decades before.24 Galathea called at the Nicobar Islands in the course of its circumnavigation of the globe in the years 1845–1847, but King Christian’s dream for the islands never came to anything.25 At the end of January, 1845, Peter Thonning delivered his latest revisions of the Guinea Commission’s report, including new material about Mørck’s and Carstensen’s gloomy assessments of the climate and soils on the coast, to Schønheyder.26 (Schønheyder was permitted to retire from government service in April, 1845, but he continued his work for the Guinea Commi ssion. His handwriting deteriorates progressively in the long course of the Commission’s investigation, and he is reported to have been quite senile by the spring of 1847.27) By May 16, Thonning had received “the Guinean case back from Excel. Schønheider, and his draft of a letter with which he wishes to send it to the G.T.K. [i. e., the Chamber of Customs]”.28 A week later, Thonning and Schønheyder met to discuss the report, and Thonning made a few notes on wordings to be changed, passages to be underlined, and insertions of references to attachments. The relative costs of distilling rum in Africa and in St. Croix were to be looked into. He was to investigate what Carstensen’s recent reports had to say about the royal

24 Garboe, Vol. 2, p. 161. D. Rosen, a missionary who had lived in the islands for years, had published a book in 1839 intended to “contribute to the resolution of the question: whether there is a possibility for Denmark to use the Nicobar Islands as colonies”: Erindringer fra mit Ophold paa de Nicobarske Øer (Copenhagen: by the author, 1839). (An inscription on the back fly-leaf of the Royal Library’s exemplar of this book states that “This book was taken on the expedition for the investigation of the Nicobar Islands in 1845–47”, which is to say the Galathea expedition.) An H.P. Giessing had published a tract on the colonization of the Nicobar Islands four years before, Om deportationscolonier og Dødstraffe tilligemed en historisk Fremstilling af den først danske Sydhavshvalfangerexpedition (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1841), and among Christian VIII’s personal archives (Kongehuset, Christian VIII’s Arkiv, Sager vedr. kongens videnskabelige interesser, o. 1811–45, bundle 277, Notater om videnskabelige institutioner o. l.) there is a manuscript report from this same Giessing regarding the islands of Bali and Lombok. 25 Rasch, pp. 247–259. 26 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Thonning’s note. 27 Privatarkiv No. 5227, Bruun, Peter Daniel, box 3, Rentekammer directeur J.F.G. Schønheyder, “hans Liv og Levnet fortalt af hans Søn til hans Børnebørne osv. osv”, manuscript, Odense, May, 1853, p. 27; see Jørgen Svane, “Rentekammerdirektør, Geheimekonferensraad Johan Franciscus Gottlieb Schønheyders Levned”, Personalhistorisk Tidsskrift, 9th series, vol. 2, 1930, pp. 122–139, on p. 138; Kringelbach, Den civile centraladministrations embedsetat, p. 178. 28 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Thonning’s note, May 16, 1845. 638 chapter fourteen plantation Frederiksgave. Schønheyder apparently wanted to know about the volume of English imports of cane sugar from the East Indies since 1840. A section on the costs of defensive works was to be moved into the section on the costs of colonization. The maps were to be bound into the report.29 At the end of May, Schønheyder wrote to Thonning30 that he intended to call Holten and Wedel to a meeting as soon as he received from Thonning the modifications in the report he had promised. (Schønheyder had apparently forgotten that Holten had withdrawn from the Guinea Commission the year before.)31 “To shorten the final conference in pleno, Wedel could perhaps be dealt with provisionally. But the most important is that you and I are agreed on what is to be suggested”. Schønheyder therefore hoped to hear from Thonning as soon as might be. Carstensen’s reports of the child sacrifice in Osu town had created something of a stir in the administration. On June 4, 1845, King Christian ordered the murders investigated by a special commission on the coast.32 The next day, Schønheyder wrote to Thonning:33

Our Guinea case has grown with some nova emergentia. In part, a fight has namely taken place beneath Fort Christiansborg between Aquapims and Ussues, which will doubtless be invoked as evidence against the respect mentioned in the opinion for the Danish Government’s resolution of disputes that emerge. Tucked into Schønheyder’s letter is Thonning’s extract of the Chamber of Customs’s report to the king on the matter, which in his view merely demonstrated that the Danish Government on the coast was in fact in complete control and that all parties involved acknowledged this.34

29 GK V, Udkast til betænkningen afsluttet 26. februar 1847, Diverse notater ang. forskellige udkast til betænkning (ca. 1846–47?), 1/4 46, Endvidere Observanda i Betænk., Thonning’s notes, “Bemærkninger ved Giennemlæsning af min udarbeidede Betænkning om Guinea efter at have Fredagen d. 23 Maj 1845 havt Conference desangaaende med Geheimraad Schønheider”. 30 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Schønheyder, Copenhagen, May 29, 1845, to Thonning. 31 Laid into GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, a draft of the first few paragraphs of a cover letter or introduction to the Commission’s report. 32 GJ 93/1845, royal resolution, June 4, 1845. 33 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Schønheyder, Copenhagen, June 5, 1845, to Thonning. 34 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Thonning, June 7, 1845, “Extract af G.T.K. alleru. Indb. 29 Maj 1845 om Uroligheder blandt Negerne i de danske Besiddelser i Guinea”. new african colonial impetus 639

Schønheyder was also concerned about reports in the Danish press (namely in “Berling’s Tidende”) the day before about recent negotiations between the French and the English: a new treaty was to include a clause reserving to the two powers the right to blockade the coasts and seize the towns of African leaders who failed to hinder the sale and embarkation of slaves. If Denmark also endorsed this clause, then it would scarcely be possible, as the Commission’s plan envisaged, for the Danish colony to rely on slaves purchased along the coast. “The Commission might at the least wish that its view of conditions be known before the Danish government expresses itself—which can be expected to happen soon—on this clause”. Finally, Schønheyder pointed out that the same newspaper had reported in May that the English Antislavery Society was pressing for “the abolition not only of the slave trade but of slavery itself”. All this, he closed, argued for the submission of the Commission’s report as soon as possible. Two days later, Thonning, apparently unperturbed, returned the Commission’s report to Schønheyder, “after due notice was taken of his remarks”.35 In a file among the Commission’s papers marked “Emancipation”, there is a sheaf of newspaper clippings from the Danish papers of the mid 1840s about the international debate over slavery and its abolition.36 In one unattributed article, it was reported that French voices had suggested that the right to seize African territory, claimed under the proposed treaty, contravened international law; some British parliament-members, on the other hand, incredulous that it was being argued that slave barracoons on the African coast might be protected by international legal norms, inquired what weight France had given to international law when it had imposed a protectorate on the peaceful people of Tahiti. Other British voices maintained stoutly that free markets and free labor would drive slavery out.37 “All parties were obliged to admit that that the slave trade is flourishing now as strongly as ever”. England’s measures to interdict the trade merely drove up the value of the drug: the Cuban authorities, for example, supported the ban, it was suggested, but mainly because they could earn huge sums in bribes from slavers.38 It was argued that British slave-trade policy

35 GK IV, Commissions Betænkning ang. Guinea saaledes som den 28/2 41 er giennem- seet til endelig Referat i Commissionen Th., Første Deel, containing a quantity of loose papers, Thonning’s note, mentioning the date June 7, 1845. 36 GK III, Emancipation. Most of the clippings appear to be from the Berlingske Politiske og Avertissements-Tidende. 37 GK III, Emancipation, a clipping without identifying annotation, but apparently dating to 1845. 38 GK III, Emancipation, a clipping, without identifying annotation, of a report on English parliamentary proceedings. 640 chapter fourteen ignored all other issues and domestic needs and should be abandoned; it was not only expensive and ineffective but in fact aggravated a bad situation. More than a quarter of the entire British navy was stationed on the African Coast, but proof that the policy was ineffective could readily be found in the materials of the Anti-Slavery Society and the works of the late Sir Fowell Buxton. “They all agree that the slave trade is being carried on to twice as high a degree as in the last century”. Two hundred thousand slaves a year were being sent across the Atlantic, compared to only one hundred thousand in the entire first decade of the nineteenth century, when British participation in the trade was still legal. The horrors of the barracoons and the middle passage were the direct result of the increased pressure on smugglers. The fullest possible exploitation of hold space was now essential, and the human cargoes were dying in much greater numbers than before.39 The Danish papers also carried reports on the French debate on new colonial laws: these would lead, indeed, to emancipation, it was argued, but only because of their unintended “consequences, the disorganization of the work, the destruction of the whites’ moral authority”. The British thrust for emancipation everywhere, it was suggested, was in fact intended to ruin the French colonies and increase Britain’s commercial and maritime might.40 Apologists for the slave colonies argued in the French chamber of peers that amelioration was proceeding apace, but on private account; they therefore supported the legal status quo. Others scoffed at the notion of amelioration in societies founded entirely on the institution of slavery and sarcastically referred the apologists for slavery to Humboldt’s work on Cuba, in which it was recounted that when Spanish missionaries had outlawed the eating of human flesh, the natives had pleaded for the imposition of a gradual and less disruptive ban.41 Thonning clipped another article, drawn from the Journal des Débats, on French legislation, applicable from Guadeloupe to the Island of Bourbon, which guaranteed slaves small pieces of land to cultivate as they saw fit, limited their working hours, and extended them the right to personal property (although not firearms or boats). “The slaves can inherit, make testaments, buy and sell”. The Danish paper quoted the French

39 GK III, Emancipation, a clipping from the Berlingske Politiske og Avertissements- Tidende dating to July, 1845. 40 GK III, Emancipation, a clipping marked 1845, on French debate on colonial law. 41 GK III, Emancipation, a clipping marked April, 1845, on “Slavespørgsmaalet”; Charles Dupin, presumably Baron Dupin, the statistician and minister of the marine, spoke against new laws regulating slavery, Count [Auguste Arthur] Beugnot for the abolitionists. new african colonial impetus 641 article: “This law will not satisfy the impatient, it is indeed no general and definitive emancipation law, but it is a decisive step forward”.42 According to a report in the capital’s leading newspaper, the Berlingske Politiske og Avertissements-Tidende, with the dateline London, March 20, 1845, a communication from President Tyler of the United States was introduced into the debate in the lower house of Parliament complaining that slaves rescued from blackbirders on the high seas were being transported to the West Indies under the denomination of apprentices. The British government responded that Tyler was misinformed, and that the slaves were in fact taken to Sierra Leone, where they were given the choice of returning to their homes or going to the West Indies; the apprenticeship system no longer existed.43 The provenance of some of the stories in the Danish press was marvelously convoluted. One of the Guinea Commission’s clippings from the Danish papers was a story that had been picked up through the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung from a report published in Washington that itself cited a story in the Port of Spain Gazette.44 A three-part translation45 of one of the Anti-slavery Society’s annual reports in Dansk Folkeblad, a widely read Copenhagen weekly,46 reported that great progress in the struggle against slavery was being made, and that victory was assured. As early as 1777, slavery had been abolished by the constitution of the state of Vermont, and other states had followed suit within a few years. Slavery had been abolished in Buenos Aires in 1816 and in five other Latin American countries in the 1820s. Great Britain had formally ended slavery in 1833 with the establishment of the apprenticeship system, which had itself been abandoned in 1838. In 1843, slavery was banned in India, Malacca, Singapore, and Penang. Denmark had been the first country to ban the slave trade, and its abolition of the trade had soon been matched by legislation in the United States, Great Britain, and Sweden, and thereafter in the Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal, Naples, Texas, and Russia, among others. Nevertheless, it was thought that eighty thousand slaves were sold within the United States every year, in scenes so

42 GK III, Emancipation, a clipping marked April, 1845, on “Colonialloven”. 43 GK III, Emancipation, a clipping from the Berlingske Politiske og Avertissements- Tidende, London, March 20, 1845, on parliamentary proceedings. 44 GK III, Emancipation, a clipping, without attribution or date on “Nordamerica, Slavehandelen”. 45 GK III, Emancipation, an undated clipping from Dansk Folkeblad, at least as late as 1846, entitled “Anti-Slaveri-Selskabets Beretning om Slavehandelen og Slaveriet”, Part 1. 46 Søllinge and Thomsen, Vol. 1, pp. 160–161. 642 chapter fourteen frightful “that the hardest heart must bleed at it”, and similar horrors occurred daily elsewhere.47 The victims were not only Africans: in the Kingdom of Bokkara two hundred thousand Persians were said to live in slavery. As the market for tropical plantation commodities expanded, so did the demand for slaves in Brazil and the Spanish colonies. The article quoted a report from the English slave-trade commissioners at Sierra Leone to the effect that ships were carrying slaves out of Bissau, Rio Pongas, Gallenas, Sherbro, and Ouidah. The commission had condemned thirteen slave ships in 1843, eleven of them Brazilian and one each Spanish and Portuguese. The following year twenty-seven ships were condemned, and in 1845, thirty-six. Twelve of these vessels had been condemned and sold three times each, and some as many as eight times. The commission thought that some of these vessels had actually been used as decoys to allow much larger cargoes to slip past the squadron to Brazil and Cuba. It was reported that twelve thousand slaves had been brought into Cuba in 1843 alone, and forty thousand into Brazil, where a third of the entire slave population had been imported since 1830. Only one ship in six got through, and their cargoes were therefore enormously valuable. At the same time, large numbers of East Asian “coolies”, almost all of them young men, were being carried to British colonies in Mauritius, Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad.48 Thonning clipped a story from the Berlingske Politiske og Avertissements- Tidende in which it was reported, in a story from London, that the Anti- slavery Society had prevailed on the Bey of Tunis to ban the slave trade and was now turning its attention to other Islamic states.49 A Mr. Richardson, the Society’s emissary to Morocco, had been informed by the governor of Mogador that the English proposals ran contrary to the Islamic religion, which, with the conversion of heathens in view, permitted traffic in slaves. Richardson’s errand was reported to be creating quite a stir in Morocco, and especially among the Moorish ladies, who favored abolition because it would free them of the hated competition with the black slave women that the rich Moroccans buy, and for whose sake they neglect their older and rightful wives. This information is brought to Richardson by the Jewish women, for naturally a stranger can in no way make the acquaintance

47 GK III, Emancipation, an undated clipping from Dansk Folkeblad, at least as late as 1846, entitled “Anti-Slaveri-Selskabets Beretning om Slavehandelen og Slaveriet”, Part 2. 48 GK III, Emancipation, an undated clipping from Dansk Folkeblad, at least as late as 1846, entitled “Anti-Slaveri-Selskabets Beretning om Slavehandelen og Slaveriet”, Part 3. 49 GK III, Emancipation, a clipping from the Berlingske Politiske og Avertissements- Tidende, on “Marokko. Slavehandelen”. new african colonial impetus 643

of Mohammedan ladies. The young Moroccans of good family seem to be very depraved; it is among them the fashion to buy slave women, instead of marrying women of their class, which would require greater household expenditures. The consequence thereof is that the greatest part of the population gradually becomes mulattoes; indeed, as it appears, the kaiser himself is a quadroon. The slaves came across the desert from Timbuktu and cost only ten or twelve pounds sterling. The negroes of Timbuktu were themselves Muslims, and the slaves came all the way from the Niger. The Anti-slavery Society has had printed an Arabic brochure, directed to the Mohammedans, against slavery and slave trade and is distributing it in thousands of copies in all countries on the Mediterranean, and the novelty of the matter is waking great notice among the Moors, so the publication is reaching a large public. Nevertheless, economic interests and enormous cultural inertia opposed themselves to all change in this part of the world. The article related that the Imam of Muscat, on the Arabian Peninsula, had “declared to the English consul that he was willing to forbid the trade on the condition that the English regime would assure him of a respectable pension when he was for that reason dethroned by his subjects”. The cause’s greatest hope was women, who “give the abolitionists a partisan in every house”. Another clipping from the Berlingske Politiske og Avertissements- Tidende50 carried a report that Sir Robert Peel had proposed legislation to exclude sugar produced with slave labor from the British market. While this would doubtless raise the price of sugar, he thought another penny or so a pound could be born by a nation that had spent twenty million pounds sterling in compensation to slave owners upon the abolition of slavery. The Berlingske Politiske og Avertissements-Tidende reproduced the entire text of Peel’s speech, including the parliament-members’ applause and cries of “Hear, hear!” and “Oh, oh, oh!” (Elsewhere on this clipping was an item picked up from the Swedish papers: Jenny Lind, the Swedish night- ingale, currently resident in Hamburg, was expected to make a tour of the great baths, ending up in Vienna. It was also reported that fifteen thousand guests had in a week visited Tivoli, Governor Carstensen’s brother’s amusement park in Copenhagen.) Late in June, 1845, Schønheyder informed Thonning that he had spoken with Wedel “to call his attention to the points in the Guinea case on which

50 GK III, Emancipation, a clipping from the Berlingske Politiske og Avertissements- Tidende, article on “Sukkertolden”. 644 chapter fourteen at an impending gathering of the Commission he will particularly have to express an opinion”.51 It appeared that there would now be no diffi culty regarding Thonning’s treatment of “the climate question” in the Commission’s report. On “the question of the character of the natives”, however, “V. held to the opinion he has expressed. I do not know whether, when he has read the opinion, he will possibly concur in your opinions”. Wedel remained convinced that the colony would be exposed to attacks both from Africans and from European powers and was likely to dispute Thonning’s assumptions regarding the price of the coffee to be exported from the colony: “He thought among other things that the ending of imports of new slaves will not hinder production in Brazil or on islands in the West Indies, since they are sufficiently supplied there for now and the future”. Schønheyder himself had a continuing concern in regard to [the fact] that nothing is listed in the calculation for expenditures for the acquisition of new negroes in the place of the emancipated or deceased…. After the elapse of fifteen years the original 100 work negroes [on each plantation] will be emancipated or dead, but even if it is assumed that the 50 negresses on the plantation have given children to the plantation, it cannot be taken that they at the time mentioned will amount to 100 able-bodied negroes. When the first 15 years run out, a purchase will thus not be able to be avoided…. “It is also maintained from the opponents’ side” (here Schønheyder appears to have been referring to the late Findt, as well as to Wedel) “that the production of coffee, sugar, and other such goods in America involves less cost than will be the case in Guinea, precisely because the acquisition of new negroes to replace those emancipated can be avoided”. Another week passed, and Schønheyder wrote to Thonning52 that he on Saturday at Court, relying on the assistance that you, highly honored friend! have given the Guinea Commission and most recently have promised me, dared to promise Chamber Director Bluhme that [the Chamber of Customs] would get the Commission’s opinion within 14 days or at the longest 3 weeks from said Saturday, 28 June. I do not omit hereby to confess this, praying and hoping that you will do your part so that my promise may be fulfilled.

51 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Schønheyder, Copenhagen, June 26, 1845, to Thonning. 52 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Schønheyder, Copenhagen, July 4, 1845, to Thonning. new african colonial impetus 645

The first step, as you know, is that Vedel must get the draft—if your pains- takingly composed work can so be designated. A couple of weeks later Schønheyder returned to Thonning, with his thanks, a summary of the colony’s projected income after cultivation had begun,53 and a week after that Thonning sent Schønheyder a list of the attachments to be laid with the Commission’s opinion and conveyed to Wedel:54 there were the royal order forming the commission, in the original; “Isert’s treaty with Akvapim Dec. 1788”; “Capt. Isert’s official report to … Schimmelmann and Brandt dated Jan 16, 1789”; extracts of the Chamber of Customs’s letter of 1837 to the Department for Foreign Affairs regarding Mørck’s and Maclean’s dispute over Akuapem; the current official budget for the establishments; the map of the whole of the Upper Guinea Coast published in Weimar in 1830; his own map; and Findt’s and Wedel’s remarks on an earlier draft of the report and Thonning’s responses thereto. Schønheyder sent word back the same day to say that he could not find the maps.55 He was sure he himself must have Thonning’s map, but the more general map he thought had at some point gone back to Thonning. He had also expected the attachments to include a number of other documents, including “Stephens’s and the Council’s official report to [the Chamber of Customs,] Jens Flindt’s report of March 19, 1791, and “Lind’s ditto. What is thus missing is certainly not needed urgently at the moment”. A few days later Schønheyder wrote to Thonning that he had sent Wedel the report on July 28, but had not yet heard back from him.56 Schønheyder hoped to have an opportunity to talk with Thonning once more before the Commission assembled for a final meeting. Some notes of Thonning’s indicate that such a meeting took place early in August,57 and it appears that Wedel was not in fact inclined to yield much ground on the question of the climate and soils. On August 14, Thonning sent Schønheyder one of

53 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Schønheyder, Copenhagen, July 21, 1845, to Thonning. 54 Laid into GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, a list of attachments provided Schønheyder by Thonning on July 26, 1845. 55 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Schønheyder, July 26, 1845, to Thonning. 56 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Schønheyder, Copenhagen, July 30, 1845, to Thonning. 57 GJS 226/1836, Thonning’s notes, referring to the date 9/8/45; see also GK II, Correspondence med Financerne ang. Colonial-Budget og Normal Regl., a list of items removed from the “designations” for Schønheyder in August, 1845 (Designation II, numbers 9 and 11, and Designation IV, letters B, F, H, K). 646 chapter fourteen the Commission’s Green Books of abstracts and a dozen more documents, including Flindt’s report of March, 1791, on Isert’s plantation, a letter from Governor Wrisberg in 1797 regarding the plantation he had started near Fort Christiansborg, one of Schiønning’s communications regarding his plantation in 1808, a letter from Governor Steffens and the Council on the coast urging the encouragement of plantations, and two letters from Governor Mørck and his administration in 1836. It was November before Wedel returned the draft of the Commission’s report to Schønheyder.58 He was not content with the way Thonning had presented his, Wedel’s, “dissenting remarks against attempting a colonization” but was sure, he said pointedly, that, “my earlier submitted [remarks], if they accompany the opinion, will sufficiently elucidate my views”. In addition I permit myself to attach some documents lent to me by the Colonial Office, which illuminate the local and climatic conditions and the experience obtained in later years with regard to the plantation enterprise in Guinea, and which depart significantly from the statements and results at which the Commission has arrived in [the opinion]. I must confess that it is unfortunate that I did not know earlier of this information communicated by the local officials; I must therefore leave to your Excellency and [Hr.] Thonning whether to take these documents into consideration, which will naturally have a significant weight in the judging of the Commission’s proposal. Schønheyder (whose hand had become noticeably unsteady by this time) sent this along to Thonning.59 Thonning’s notes indicate that Wedel was going back over old ground, on the basis of communications from Mørck and Carstensen, and once again making the argument that the climate and soils in the area in question, near Frederiksgave, were not suited to plantation agriculture.60 (Most of the other documents Wedel now brought to the Commission’s attention dealt with disputes over Akuapem between the Danish and English governments.) A week or so later,

58 GK IV, “Daterede Udarbejdelser af Commissionens Medlemmer Flindt & Thonning 1841”, Wedel, Copenhagen, November 13, 1845, to Schønheyder, with enclosures. 59 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Schønheyder, Copenhagen, November 15, 1845, to Thonning, and Thonning’s notes regarding a packet in the mail from Schønheyder. 60 GK V, Udkast til betænkningen afsluttet 26. februar 1847, Diverse notater ang. forskellige udkast til betænkning (ca. 1846–47?), 1/4 46, Endvidere Observanda i Betænk., a sheet of Thonning’s notes dated 24/11 45 and headed “Guinea ang. Gouv. Mørck og Gouv. Carstensen”, and another headed “NB i Anledning af W Indtegninger i Conceptet efter Mørck og Carstensen ang. Landet mellem Sakum fjo og Ningo til foden af Biergen [ie.] Landsk. A”. new african colonial impetus 647

Thonning went to call on Schønheyder, who asked him to incorporate Mørck’s and Carstensen’s statements in the Commission’s report.61 Schønheyder reminded Thonning of this matter in a note written on Christmas day. He begged Thonning’s pardon for discommoding him with these lines to assure myself that … you would attend to the necessary in connection with the statements of Mørck’s and Carstensen’s sent with Vedel’s last letter and that, when you had found what is to be answered to them, an assembly of the Commission might take place.62 One of the documents Wedel laid before the Commission at this juncture, according to Thonning’s notes, was a letter from Governor Carstensen about the plantation Frederiksgave, but this missive, Thonning noted, referred back to Mørck’s and his Government’s two reports early in 1836 on agricultural experiments at Frederiksgave, both of which were already among the Guinea Commission’s files of official documents relevant to the case. Thonning appears to have made no further mention of Carstensen’s letter, but the reports from Mørck he now re-examined with care. Regard ing Mørck’s description of the destructive effect of the harmattan in one of these letters, Thonning made a note that it “bore so obvious a stamp of exaggeration that it seems superfluous to enter into rebuttal”: the abundance of plants in the surrounding countryside itself argued compellingly to the contrary.63 In a large and messily annotated insertion in the Commission’s opinion, Thonning quotes at length from Mørck’s reports of February 12 and April 1, 1836, “which we permit ourselves to treat of rather thoroughly, for their result conflicts with earlier experience”.64 It was to be noted, Thonning said, that Mørck reported that he had set cotton seedlings out, a method not favored by the author of the “classic” work on the cultivation of cotton (and this was none other than Julius von Rohr), instead of sowing the seed directly in the ground. Many others employed this procedure, Thonning inserted in a margin, but it required transplantation into well prepared

61 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Thonning’s notes, referring to a visit to Schønheyder on November 19, 1845. 62 GK II, Qvæst. om Retspleien, Schønheyder, Copenhagen, December 25, 1845, to Thonning (tucked into a letter from Schønheyder, Copenhagen, August 31, 1846). 63 GK V, Udkast til betænkningen afsluttet 26. februar 1847, Diverse notater ang. forskellige udkast til betænkning (ca. 1846–47?), 1/4 46, Endvidere Observanda i Betænk., a sheet of Thonning’s notes dated November 24, 1845 and headed “Guinea ang. Gouv. Mørck og Gouv. Carstensen”. 64 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 123g, a-u, laid into a folded sheet of blue paper, on p. 123g, a. 648 chapter fourteen ground in the rainy season. This requirement “Mørck did not observe, for his planting out took place continuously from May until November, although he himself according to his report found the year 1835 to be altogether too dry”. Mørck had made no mention at all of preparing the soil beforehand, and Thonning suspected that this omission in the report accurately reflected the work on the ground.65 It was little wonder that the results reported were so poor. Johan Wrisberg’s experiments in 1797 in the garden at Frederiksberg, a much drier place, with poorer soil, “showed an opposite result”. The Government had also reported in 1836 that the ripe cotton was quickly infested with insects and ruined by their excrement. Thonning pointed out in a margin that, according to von Rohr, this was also a problem in the West Indies and elsewhere, and could only be addressed by harvesting as soon as the bolls opened.66 This was a matter of the proper technique, and not of the suitability of the soil or climate for cotton cultivation. Mørck had had nothing encouraging to report about the cultivation of coffee, either. Thonning pointed out that Schiønning, in this same setting, had had great success with his coffee and placed the blame for Mørck’s failure on a lack of attention to the project. It should have been possible in a properly managed operation to water the seedlings in nursery beds and pots, no matter how dry the season, he thought; certainly it seemed unlikely that coffee trees, which belong to a plant family that blooms and sets fruit heavily, should “in their natural climate” only produce, as Mørck had reported, forty viable seeds out of six or eight thousand planted. Thonning speculated that the beans used as seed had been dried in the sun with the rest of the crop.67 The harvest Mørck had reported came to an average of a quarter lod (the 32nd part of a pound) or about an eighth of an ounce of coffee per tree, Thonning calculated. This risible figure he contrasted with a report by the natural historian Baron von Langsdorff from Brazil that each tree produced at least four and as much as seven pounds a year. In Liberia, Thonning said, citing the authority of Buxton, no crop was surer, and the trees gave four pounds each; he found comparable figures elsewhere.68

65 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, p. 123g, b. 66 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, p. 123g, c. 67 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 123g, c-d, f-g. 68 See also GK V, Udkast til betænkningen afsluttet 26. februar 1847, Diverse notater ang. forskellige udkast til betænkning (ca. 1846–47?), 1/4 46, Endvidere Observanda i Betænk., notes dated November 24, 1845 and headed “Andres Anskuelser (nl end Mørchs og new african colonial impetus 649

Only a frightful natural catastrophe could account for such a harvest as Mørck had reported: all other vegetation in the region would also have been destroyed, but there was no indication that any such thing had occurred. There was no question that lack of supervision was to blame, Thonning said. In a margin, he quoted Findt’s own statement in 1828, when he had written, in the Commission of Investigation’s report, that the present coffee plantations at Bibiase quite lack negroes as supervisors, which we regard as the cause of the slow progress of the plantations there, for the plantation owners are merchants or officials who cannot themselves be present on their properties.69 Mørck had reported that he had planted two hundred sugar canes at Frederiksgave, and that, almost a year later, only three of them remained alive. This Thonning found remarkable, for the Africans grew sugar cane with ease. He had himself seen in the Africans’ fields canes the size of the Otaheite sugar cane produced on St. Croix in the best of years. Mørck had had no better luck with tobacco, and here Thonning merely referred his reader to the famous Orinoco tobacco grown at the same latitude in South America. Thonning’s personal knowledge of the place was deep and direct, his comparative research very wide-ranging and well marshaled, and he had no doubt of the validity of his arguments, but Wedel’s obdurate efforts to call the agricultural basis of the Commission’s colonial plan into question may have taken their toll on him. Among the Commission’s papers are two undated sheets of his notes, each with a large red question mark on its face.70 On one of these is a draft of a paragraph addressed to the king, suggesting that because of fundamental disagreements regarding the suitability of the climate and soils of the Danish territory on the coast for an agricultural colony, and in particular because of doubts expressed by governors Mørck and Carstensen, an investigation by “several experts who have traveled through similar, little or not at all cultivated countries in America” should be undertaken. On the other of these sheets of notes,

Carstensens) om Landet fra Sakumo til Ningo og Akvapim” and other sheets of notes tucked therein. 69 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 123g, g-h. 70 GK IV, undated notes, Thonning, in old binding of Thonning’s draft of the Commission’s report, March 29, 1844. The notes probably date to late 1845 or early 1846: see GK V, Udkast til betænkningen afsluttet 26. februar 1847, Diverse notater ang. forskellige udkast til betænkning. (ca. 1846–47?), 1/4 46. Endvider Observanda i Betænk., Thonning’s notes, headed/4 46 Hvad der endnu vil være at foretage i Betænkningen om Guinea. 650 chapter fourteen

Thonning recommends that this investigation on the ground be placed in the hands of a Professor Frederik Liebmann and two assistants of his choice, one a physician, the other a white person or Eurafrican “who has been in the country long enough to serve as an interpreter”, perhaps Lutterodt or Svanekjær, if they were not too old, or one of Henrik Richter’s sons. Liebmann, Jens Hornemann’s student—and his son-in-law—had returned from a long collecting expedition in Mexico, financed in part by the state, in 1843.71 He was given a position at the University of Copenhagen and later served as the director of the Botanic Garden, publishing a series of articles touching on plant geography. Thonning had it mind that Liebmann should undertake a year’s study, beginning in November. Thonning (who was a member of the board of directors of the Natural History Museum until he died)72 now constructed a little scientific idyll: the expedition should be well-equipped with barometers, thermometers, trigonometric instruments, signal rockets, “land-registration regulations”, and “natural historical apparati”. The Government on the coast was to be ordered to immediately put up temporary residences on Legon hill for Liebmann’s party, with accommodations for four or five Europeans and thirty or forty Africans. The house was to be of clay, with a thatched roof, large rooms, and glazed windows. There is an indication in Thonning’s notes that the rest of the Guinea Commission agreed that this proposition should be included in the Commission’s final opinion, but Liebmann never undertook any such investigation on the Guinea Coast.73 Governor Carstensen reported in August, 184574 and not for the first time,75 that slaves were being sold off the coast in the eastern part of the Danish territory. He wished to put a regular garrison in Fort Prindsenssteen to suppress this trade, but this was beyond the resources at his disposal. He begged once again that a Danish warship to be sent to show its teeth on the coast once a year. If these steps were not taken, he said,

71 “Liebmann, Frederik Michael”, Dansk biografisk lexikon, C.F. Bricka, ed. [at runeberg. org/dbl]; “Liebmann, Frederik Michael”, Dansk biografisk leksikon, 3rd ed. 72 Gosch, part 1, pp. 77–79, 320. 73 GK V, Udkast til betænkningen afsluttet 26. februar 1847, Diverse notater ang. forskellige udkast til betænkning. (ca. 1846–47?), 1/4 46. Endvider Observanda i Betænk., Thonning’s notes, headed/4 46 Hvad der endnu vil være at foretage i Betænkningen om Guinea. 74 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 149–151, Carstensen, Christiansborg, August 5, 1845 (GJ 165/1845). 75 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 141–143, Carstensen, Christiansborg, May 13, 1845 (GJ 135/1845). new african colonial impetus 651

the Government is and will remain an object of derision for the slave-trading negroes on the other side of the Volta and does not fulfill its obligations as the representative of a nation that with eagerness speaks out against the slave trade. When the Chamber of Customs received this rather strongly worded complaint, in October, it appears to have found itself in a delicate situation. It was scarcely a year since the Chamber, full of the sense of Denmark’s civilizing mission in Africa, which Carstensen, on his flying trip home, had managed to re-awaken, had advised the king that there could be no further talk of disposing of the establishments. There was, at the same time, no talk of concrete measures to expand the Government’s operations. Although the Chamber certainly did not care to be confronted so soon with the new expense of garrisoning Fort Prindsenssteen, the slave trade was an enormously sensitive international issue. The Chamber therefore thought best to convey Carstensen’s alarming report to the Department for Foreign Affairs.76 The Chamber, apparently permitting itself to hope that there had perhaps been some change in policy of which it was not yet aware, asked for the Department’s opinion before approaching the king for the funds needed to restore Fort Prindsenssteen to fighting condition. The Chamber also wrote to the Guinea Commission to ask it for the results of its long deliberations “as soon as possible, for in particular the question of what steps should be taken toward the suppression of the slave trade currently taking place will not bear any postponement”.77 The Department for Foreign Affairs quickly recommended that both Prindsenssteen and Kongenssteen on the Volta should be repaired and garrisoned.78 In the Department’s view, these steps “are regarded as absolutely necessary to secure the colony’s well-being and the motherland’s dignity”. With this opinion in hand, the Chamber of Customs turned to the Finance Deputation.79 Carstensen’s and the Department for Foreign

76 Guin. Kopibog, November 17, 1845, to the Department for Foreign Affairs (ad GJ 165/1845). 77 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Chamber of Customs, October 23, 1845, to the Guinea Commission; also Thonning’s notes of October 23, 1845, referring to the Chamber’s letter, which he had received from Schønheyder and immediately forwarded to Wedel. For all the urgency of the language, there is no written record that the Commission responded to this exhortation. 78 GJ 178/1845, Department for Foreign Affairs, November 26, 1845. 79 Guin. Kopibog, December 27, 1845, to the Finance Deputation (ad GJ 178/1845). It was perhaps in this connection that Mossin drafted the copy of Thonning’s map at RAKTS, Rtk. 337,28. 652 chapter fourteen

Affairs’s letters were attached to the Chamber’s missive, in which the Finance Deputation was advised that the proposed restoration of the forts would involve unbudgeted and in fact unknown expenditures. Carstensen had already been asked to provide an estimate of the costs, but this would not be received for some time and the Chamber wished to take the matter to the king forthwith. The Finance Deputation was not to be rushed. It was not before April, 1846,80 that it responded that it was dismayed, “at a time when so many demands are being made on the treasury for subsidies for extraordinary expenditures”, to learn from the Chamber of Customs that significant new annual expenditures on the Guinea Coast might be called for, particularly since the king had resolved in 1841 to dispose of the establishments and thus free the treasury of the expense of maintaining them, “just as the doubtful financial results to which the possession of the establishments on the Guinea Coast had led were emphasized by the Provincial Estates Assemblies”. The Finance Deputation had been informed by the Depart ment for Foreign Affairs, however, that efforts to dispose of the establishments had been fruitless, and the Deputation concluded that, taking into consideration the political circumstances, the potential value of the establishments, and Denmark’s standing with the Africans themselves, it “seems inadvisable to avoid the pecuniary sacrifice of which there is now talk”. The Chamber of Customs was therefore advised to proceed with a representation to the king. In May, 1846, King Christian authorized the expenditure of up to twelve thousand rigsdaler to renovate Fort Prindsenssteen, and, if need be, Fort Kongenssteen as well.81 The Chamber of Customs’s representation referred back to the budget legislation drafted by Peter Thonning in 1816, which had proceeded on the assumption that if all the forts except Christiansborg were closed, it would be less expensive to rebuild them when Denmark was again in a position to invest in the colonial potential of the establishments than to maintain all four of them in the meantime; Thonning’s policy in 1816 was now held to have been correct. Although there was no talk in this latest representation of colonies, but only of the nation’s honor, its international obligations, and of the eventual value of the enclave to some other power, Denmark’s African policy was clearly in a state of considerable flux, not to say disarray.

80 GJ 299/1846, the Finance Deputation, April 14, 1846. 81 GTK, Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner for 1845 og 1846, Forestilling, May 12, 1846, Resolution of May 13, 1846; GJ 312/1846. new african colonial impetus 653

In August, 1845, Governor Carstensen had made a tour of the Danish territory, with the main object of investigating the gold mines of Akyem. By Christmas, his report of his two-week expedition had arrived in Copenhagen and, with a sample of the ore Carstensen had obtained in Akyem, had been laid before King Christian, who was pleased to incorporate the sample in his mineral collection.82 Carstensen’s account to his tour of inspection was also brought to the attention of the Guinea Commission.83 Carstensen found the royal plantation Frederiksgave in a sorry state on account of that year’s drought: not a drop of rain had fallen since the 20th of May. This failure was attributed by the Africans to the sacrifice of the two children in Osu the year before, Carstensen reported. The plantation’s coffee harvest that year amounted to ten pounds of beans. He traveled on to Mampong, in Akuapem, where the way divided. To the east lay the road to Akuropon. In a northerly direction one descends by a steep mountain path to an extensive valley; in the latter the Aquapims, especially the Akropong negroes, have many plantations; on the other side of the valley the heights of the Akim country are seen. It is extremely difficult to give a reliable picture of the geognostic character of this land; the thick woods block every view, every observation; only a person on foot can form an impression of the rise and fall of the land, and this is restricted to a narrow radius. I believe, however, that I make no mis- take in the following: the Aquapim Mountains form a mountain chain that stretches uninterrupted, at considerable height, from the Sacummo River to the Volta. Thonning’s map mistakenly cuts this mountain chain into several mountains; it is correct, on the other hand, that the mountain Lathe, as well as the peculiar freestanding mountains Krobbo, Shay, Ussudoko, and Nojo are not connected to the Aquapim chain: Lathe Mountain is separated from Akropong by a deep valley, and the other mountains named rise from the plain like the works of human hands.84 Thonning’s initialed annotation marks this passage in the long abstract of Carstensen’s account of his journey among the Guinea Commission’s papers: “NB this is not Thonning’s error, but Captain Angelo’s, who copied

82 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 151–162, Carstensen, Christiansborg, September 19, 1845 (GJ 187/1846); GJ 6/1847, royal resolution, January 27, 1847; see also GJ 11/1847. 83 GK II, an archivist’s removal slip for GJS 226/1846, which was a duplicate of GJ 187/1846; GK III, Geografiske Noticer, Akim Reisen, a long abstract of Carstensen’s letter of September 19, 1845 [GJ 187/1846]. 84 Carstensens indberetninger, p. 153, (GJ 187/1846). 654 chapter fourteen

Thonning’s map incorrectly and formed the mountain chain into separate mountains; he drew the map still in the Col. Office in the same way. Th.”85 Carstensen visited the gold diggings in the vicinity of the town of Kibi, where the Akyem worked a thick gold-bearing clay layer six or ten feet beneath the surface. “This afternoon dug gold!”, he wrote in his diary.86 The underlying gold-bearing quartz was not worked. Carstensen was unable to obtain any estimate of the extent of production, but the gold trade on the coast, he thought, was evidence that it “is not insignificant”. This report on the gold of Akyem appears to have sent Peter Thonning back to the library. In search of accounts of recently developed gold works, Thonning found himself reading about the Ural Mountains, where production had been greatly increased within the past couple of decades,87 although, he learned, the Greeks had been aware in the sixth century b.c. that gold was mined on the eastern slopes of the Urals.88 He made a note that “the gold washing in Siberia provides a notable example of the speed with which this industry can expand”. He amused himself with transposing Russian measures into ounces and with elaborate calculations of the labor costs associated with extracting gold in Akyem: clearly it paid, even considering “all the work that is lost to searching in vain and all the gold that is lost through the imperfect method by which it is obtained”. He speculated on various means by which Denmark could involve itself in gold production in Akyem—“company partnership, lease- hold, cession”. Perhaps access to the fields could be obtained through a treaty similar to that which now prevailed between the Danish gov ernment and Akuapem. He wondered “whether this is now the time, or whether a greater influence and independence through a plantation enterprise should be awaited”.89 A discussion of Akyem gold, under the heading “Productions that could become of importance as state income”, was added to the Guinea Commission’s report.90

85 GK III, Geografiske Noticer, Akim Reisen, abstract of Carstensen, September 19, 1845 [GJ 187/1846]. Mossin, who had made Carstensen’s map, had presumably copied from Angelo’s copy of Thonning’s map, but Angelo’s name has not been found on any of the maps surviving in Copenhagen. 86 Carstensen, “Noter mit liv angaaende”, p. 117. 87 GK III, Geographiske Noticer, De guin. Etablissementers Geographie Vedkommende, diverse ang. Geographie, a clipping on the gold mines of the Urals from Den Vest-Siællandske Avis, No. 81, Friday, October 8, 1824. 88 GK III, Guldgravningen /6/46 [sic], Thonning’s notes from Archiv für Wissenschaftliche Kunde von Russland, Vol. 2, 1842, pp. 522 ff. 89 GK III, Guldgravning /6/46, a slip of Thonning’s notes. 90 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, pp. 14, 86. new african colonial impetus 655

Carstensen traveled from Akyem back to Akuropon and from there to Krobo, where he remarked on “a large wood of palm-oil trees” and described how the nuts were crushed in holes lined with stones. He went on to a place he called Krobbo River Town on the Volta. If the notion is ever realized of seeing tropical (colonial) products cultivated and brought into commerce by the negroes in Africa itself, then, for the Gold Coast, Aquapim’s mountain slope, from Akropong to the Volta River, must in truth be the place where the attempt must take place. A stock company provided with rich capital would find here fertile stretches of land and extensive grazing. Only a couple of miles south of Krobbo River Town the Volta becomes navigable (Governor Lind came this far with a Danish sloop), and the connection with the sea by steamship is a sure matter. In connection with the plantations trade will be carried on with the inhabitants of the country, and in a short time the greatest traffic of the Gold Coast will assemble at a place whose fortunate situation must make it the emporium of the Gold Coast. All this Thonning marked with a crayon in the Guinea Commission’s abstract of Carstensen’s letter, with a penciled note in the margin regarding an amendment to the Commission’s report.91 Carstensen went on: This is the fair side of the picture: for I can also see how sickness and death afflict the European officials; how standstill and disorder make themselves felt in the proceedings; I see the negroes’ unwillingness to work to enrich the white man; for of course they do not see that riches and well-being in time will also be … their part! I cannot state forcefully enough my conviction, a conviction shared by everyone who has resided for a longer time in negro countries: Africa will never supply tropical crops, produced by the sweat of its own sons’ faces, except in the presence of a peremptory force. Thonning marked this passage: “used p. 206”. When he inserted the passage in the Commission’s report, he added, “But the demands of a rising way of life will in time be such a peremptory force”.92 Carstensen traveled down the river by canoe to Ada,93 where he “left the Volta River with the wish that same might sometime in the future be regarded as the means of communication between interior and sea, as the artery of life and activity along its banks”. He remarked that “Thonning’s

91 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 159–160; GK III, Geografiske Noticer, Akim Reisen, a long abstract of Carstensen’s letter of September 19, 1845 [GJ 187/1846]. 92 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, p. 125a, marginal insertion. 93 Carstensens indberetninger, p. 160. 656 chapter fourteen

[map] I here found to be in general correct, as far as I was able to determine with the help of a compass”. Carstensen spent a night at what remained of Fort Kongenssteen: “Ruins in Guinea present a more sorrowful sight than anywhere; they alone tell us the history of the Europeans in this country: perhaps, unfortunately, they give us a warning of the future”. In March, 1846, Thonning made a note that he had sent Thomas Fowell Buxton’s Remedy to Schønheyder.94 Thonning’s notes on the book are preserved among the Guinea Commission’s archives.95 Africa, Buxton had written, was “encircled by an effectual barrier against the entrance of commerce, cultivation, and Christianity. That barrier is the Slave Trade”.96 On the authority of public documents, parliamentary testimony, and the works of African travelers, it appears that the principal and almost the only cause of war in the interior of Africa, is the desire to procure slaves for traffic; and that every species of violence, from the invasion of an army to that of robbery by a single individual, is had recourse to, for the attainment of this object.97 Buxton reckoned that “the Slave Trade annually dooms to the horrors of slavery” 170,000 Africans, in both the Christian and Islamic worlds, and another 500,000 a year to death;98 decades of treaties and laws, including those making slave-trading a capital offense, had had no effect. He had it from Governor Maclean at Cape Coast Castle that a member of the notori- ous slave trading family de Souza, of Ouidah, had declared that “ ‘all the slave treaties signed during the last 25 years have never caused him to export one slave fewer than he would have done otherwise’ ”.99 The profits were simply too great: “It is, I believe”, Buxton wrote, “an axiom at the Custom-house, that no illicit trade can be suppressed, where the profits exceed 30 per cent”. The profits of the slave trade he estimated to be

94 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Thonning’s note, March 24, 1846, on a missive from Schønheyder of March 21, 1846. 95 GK V, Udkast til betænkningen afsluttet 26. februar 1847, Diverse notater ang. forskellige udkast til betænkning (ca. 1846–47?), 1/4 46, Endvidere Observanda i Betænk., on two separate sheets of Thonning’s notes; in the same file (1/4 46, Endvider Observanda i Betænk.), an empty folder marked “Materialier, som endnu ikke ere afbenyttede”, on which is a note indicating that Thonning was reading and excerpting from Buxton on March 22, 46. 96 Buxton, p. 12. 97 Buxton, p. 74. 98 Buxton, p. 202. 99 Buxton, p. 225, in note. new african colonial impetus 657 five times that.100 Military solutions would always be of limited effect and permanence: Compulsion, so long as it lasts, may restrain the act, but it will not eradicate the motive. The African will not have ceased to desire, and vehemently to crave, the spirits, the ammunition, and the articles of finery and commerce which Europe alone can supply: and these he can obtain by the Slave Trade, and by the Slave Trade only, while he remains what he is. He quoted J.L. Burckhardt, who had traveled in Nubia and Arabia: “ ‘Europe, therefore … will have done little for the Blacks, if the abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade is not followed up by some wise and grand plan for the civilization of the continent’ ”.101 (The last dozen words are underlined in the copy of Buxton’s Remedy at the Royal Library in Copenhagen.) “Africa can never be delivered, till we have called forth the rich produc- tiveness of her soil”.102 As it stood, however, “The feathers received at Liverpool from Ireland reach an amount exceeding all the productions of central Africa”.103 Nevertheless, Buxton declared, “Central Africa possesses within itself everything from which commerce springs. No country in the world has nobler rivers, or more fertile soil; and it contains a population of fifty millions”.104 “Its natural productions and commercial resources are inexhaustible”, and here Buxton appended a “very imperfect list”: domestic animals, grains, fruits, roots, timber, nuts, dyes, dyewoods, gums, drugs, minerals, and fish, besides “[s]ugar cane, coffee, cotton, indigo, tobacco, India rubber, beeswax, ostrich feathers and skins, ivory, &c.”105 In the common delta of three rivers, the Seeong Boo, the Kitiam and the Gallinas, that debouched into the Atlantic “fifty miles to the leeward” of Sierra Leone, there could be grown “rice enough for the supply of the whole West Indies. At present it produces nothing but the finest description of slaves”.106 From Cape St. Paul to Cameroons, and from thence to Cape Lopez, extends the richest country that imagination can conceive. Within this space from forty to fifty rivers of all sizes discharge their waters into the ocean, forming vast flats of alluvial soil, to the extent of 180,000 square miles.107

100 Buxton, p. 221. 101 Buxton, p. 278–279, 66. 102 Buxton, p. 279. 103 Buxton, p. 304. 104 Buxton, p. 307. 105 Buxton, pp. 310–311, note. 106 Buxton, p. 316. 107 Buxton, p. 317. 658 chapter fourteen

Buxton quoted Denis de Montfort, “A Frenchman of science”, who had published his opinion in the Philosophical Magazine that There exists no country in the world so susceptible of general cultivation as Africa…. The plants of India, Europe, America, and Australia will flourish there in perpetual spring, and the animals of all climates can be easily naturalized.108 “It is almost impossible”, Buxton went on, “to turn to any book of African travels, without meeting some incidental observations on the fertility of the soil”.109 “[S]uch are the discoveries of the last ten years”, he wrote, “that we may now lay aside the impressions of an impenetrable continent, and of interminable wastes of sand, which have accompanied us from our childhood”.110 It would not suffice to place factories on the coast to export native productions, Buxton argued, but if cultivation organized for export could be introduced, commerce between Great Britain and Africa could be vastly increased, under the fostering and protective care of the British government. The grounds on which this supposition rests are the number and situation of its navigable rivers; its rich alluvial deltas, and extensive and fertile plains; its immense forests; its wide range of natural productions; its swarming, active, and enterprising population; its contiguity to Europe, and the demand of its people for the manufacture of this country…. It is probable that in commencing an extensive intercourse with Africa, there will be at first a considerable outlay of money without an immediate return; but from whatever source this may be obtained, it should be considered as a gift to Africa. It will ultimately be repaid a thousand-fold.111 He went on: new and boundless markets would be opened to our manufactures; a continent teeming with inexhaustible fertility would yield her riches to our traders; not merely a nation, but hundreds of nations, would be awakened from the lethargy of centuries…. No parallel can be drawn, no comparison can be instituted, between Africa enslaved, and Africa free and unfettered.112 As Thonning read, it was not the magnificently outraged and visionary passages that he made note of (although many of the passages quoted

108 Buxton, pp. 327–328. 109 Buxton, p. 328. 110 Buxton, p. 344. 111 Buxton, p. 337, 340–341. 112 Buxton, p. 420–421. new african colonial impetus 659 here are marked in pencil in the exemplar of the book at the Royal Library, perhaps by Thonning), but mainly matters of factual detail. He had his own rhetoric well in hand, and what he extracted from Buxton was but- tressing for the arguments he was making in the Guinea Commission’s report.113 Schønheyder took some alarm in the spring of 1846 at reports of “disturbances in Guinea” that had come to his ears and that he had passed on to Thonning; Schønheyder was relieved to learn upon making inquiries of Bluhme, the director of the Chamber of Customs, that nothing new was afoot.114 The Chamber had decided to publish an account of the child sacrifice in Osu in 1844 and the ensuing proceedings against the two men found most culpable, and it was this that Schønheyder had got wind of. “Might our Commission’s case now soon be relegated to matters finally decided”, he wrote to Thonning. The Chamber’s article was published in the official Collegial-Tidende and picked up by the Berlingske Avertissements-Tidende.115 The Guinea enclave was suddenly on everyone’s doorstep: all Copenhagen knew, the article asserted, that a barbarous child murder had been committed by two men from Akuapem, which lay to the north of Fort Christiansborg on the Guinea Coast and “acknowledges being under Danish suzerainty”. Civil strife there had led to suffering among the inhabitants, and the road to the fort for peaceful traders from countries north of Aquapim became unsafe. To remedy this could only be regarded as desirable, and as the natives acknowledge the European governors’ right to decide mutual conflicts, Governor Carstensen had attempted to mediate in the dispute. The article described the riotous and bloody scenes that ensued at some length.

113 GK V, Udkast til betænkningen afsluttet 26. februar 1847, Diverse notater ang. forskellige udkast til betænkning (ca. 1846–47?), 1/4 46, Endvidere Observanda i Betænk., Thonning’s notes on Buxton’s discussion, on p. 332, of the suitability of cotton; Daniel F. McCall, in his introduction to Nørregård’s Danish settlements in West Africa, pp. xi–xxix, on p. xxvi, states that the “plantations on which the Danes attempted to practice a somewhat extensive tropical agriculture, and the philosophy behind these efforts, anticipate the arguments [in Buxton’s book] by several decades”. (Buxton is not otherwise mentioned in Nørregård’s book.) 114 GKII, Qvæst. om Retspleien, Schønheyder, Copenhagen, April 10, 1846, to Thonning. 115 GTK, Varia vedk. Guinea, draft of account of the murders and the judicial upshot (a number of Cartsensen’s original reports, recorded in the Guinea journal but missing from the journal files, are filed here); Ny Collegial-Tidende for Danmark, 1841–48, No. 27, June 27, 1846, pp. 492–495; GK III, Emancipation, clipping, “Om de hjemførte Forbryder fra vore Besiddelser paa Kysten af Guinea”, Berlingske Avertissements-Tidende, June 27, 1846. 660 chapter fourteen

The Chamber of Customs, when the affair had come to its notice, had drafted a representation stressing “the pressing necessity that had presented itself as a result of the particular state of the country of taking measures that could make a proper impression on the negroes”. This was laid before His Majesty and his Privy Council, and it was decided that Captain Lieutenant Krenchel, the master of the navy brig Ørnen, which was then making ready for the West Indies, was to call first at Christiansborg to preside over a special commission seated to hear the case of the child murders and sentence the main instigators and perpetrator or perpetrators of this outrage to such punishment as general law, taking proper regard for the customs of the country and the nature of the delinquents’ religion and education, might dictate. The merchants Henrik Richter and Georg Lutterodt were appointed to this commission to supply the local expertise necessary for the due execution of this last royal requirement. It was also communicated to the governor that it was the king’s wish that a sentence of capital punishment was not to be carried out. The result of the hearings was that the two murderers were deported first to the Danish West Indies and thence to Denmark, where they were incarcerated at the Citadel of Copenhagen.116 A couple of Thonning’s lists among the Guinea Commission’s papers recapitulate “the latest changes in March and April 1846 in the opin’n.”117 Among much else, material had been added on the need to shift cultivated plots every second or third year; the budget had been revised to reflect expenditures for the restoration of Fort Prindsenssteen; Meredith’s book was cited regarding the Africans’ “industriousness”, Monrad’s on the subjects of poison and the Africans’ character traits; the text was revised, as Wedel had wished, to discuss Mørck’s and Carstensen’s assessments of the potential of colonial plantings; and a section on state revenues derived from distilling was added or revised. A long paragraph was inserted on the lack of rain in Peru, to rebut Mørck’s argument that the climate in the

116 Nørregård, Danish settlements, p. 330; see Otto B. Wroblewski, “Livjæger i 1848–1849”, Museum. Tidsskrift for Historie og Geografie, 1895, No. 2, pp. 200–222, on p. 211. 117 GK IV, tucked into 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, a list: NB Optegnelse af de seneste Forandringer i Marts og April 1846 i Betænk.; GK V, Udkast til betænkningen afsluttet 26. februar 1847, Diverse notater ang. forskellige udkast til betænkning (ca. 1846–47?), 1/4 46, Endvidere Observanda i Betænk., Thonning’s notes: 1/4 46 Hvad der endnu vil være at foretage i Betænkningen om Guinea. Both lists refer to two separate paginations: Thonning was laboring mightily to keep track of his revisions. new african colonial impetus 661

Danish enclave in West Africa was far too dry to support plantation crops.118 As the passage ran in the Commission’s final report, It will… be found that the plant kingdom can even exist in the intertropical lands where almost no rain falls, f. ex. in the valleys and on the coasts of Peru…. On the Canary Islands the rain is not rarely absent for 1 to 2 years; in Egypt—Egypt, so famed for its fertility—the rain is so great a rarity that already in the time of Herodotus a rain storm there was recorded as a notable matter. Egypt has the floods of the Nile, to be sure, but how quickly is the soil not dried out, when the river has retreated, and the shortage of water must be sparingly replaced from dug impoundments. In Laguayra just a little rain falls in October and November, and in the nearby Cumana there falls scarcely 2 inches of rain in the nine months from December to September; Humboldt has given the average there at 7 1/2 inches annually…; it is not the quantity of rain, but actually the dew, which is an indispensable condition for plant life.119 Thonning’s list of changes to the Commission’s opinion also remarked that the British prohibition of slavery need not affect Danish plantations: the fifteen years of servitude to be exacted from the colony’s slaves were to be regarded as “years of apprenticeship”. He added a citation from Buxton to the effect that malaria was seldom troublesome at altitudes greater than four hundred feet above sea-level. He made a note that the introduction and the conclusion had been revised, and that a paragraph on blood feuds had been moved. Among the Guinea Commission’s archives is a note from Thonning to the Royal Library in May, 1846,120 asking permission to borrow the second volume of the fifth edition of Bryan Edwards’s history of the British West Indies;121 the notes he took on Edwards’s section on coffee cultivation are also preserved.122 Variations in the quality of the beans, he learned, clearly depended on soils, climate, and the processing of the crop. He noted that coffee was grown in very dry conditions and on mountain slopes in Arabia. Coffee of the finest aroma was produced on warm “gravelly mold, a sandy rich clay, or the dry red hills that are found on almost every West Indian island”. Plenty of rain was desirable, but the trees would not tolerate

118 GK IV, 202-page draft of the Commission’s “Allerunderdanigst Betænkning”, a four- page insert at p. 46. 119 GK, Betænkningen, pp. 92–95. 120 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Thonning, May 13, 1846, to the Royal Library. The note was doubtless returned to Thonning tucked in the book. 121 Bryan Edwards, The history, civil and commercial, of the British West Indies, 5th ed. (London: G. and W.B. Whittaker, [etc.], 1818–1819). 122 GK III, Kaffe Dyrkning. Palmeolie, Thonning’s notes on Edwards. 662 chapter fourteen standing water. Thonning took special note of the costs of coffee production. Edwards also discussed cocoa, ginger, sugar cane, orlean, aloe, and indigo. Cacao trees bore after five years, and then two crops a year could be taken, of twenty pounds (“Year or crop?”, Thonning wrote, using both Danish and English in the same short phrase), depending on soil and situation. Cocoa had been one of Jamaica’s main exports in the late seventeenth century, but there was no longer a single plantation on the island; it was still grown in Grenada and Dominica. Cotton could be grown in Jamaica at an annual advance of fourteen per cent over the capital investment but was not without its risks. Potatoes and corn were grown between the rows of cotton, Thonning noted. There was “much more that time does not permit me to write down, as the book must go back to the library. 17/7/46”.123 Thonning recommended Edwards’s book to Wedel in a letter in which he also sent along the “promised rough calculation, which has taken a longer time than I had imagined”.124 Regarding coffee, Thonning wrote, “I think I have been very conservative, perhaps altogether too conservative in my reckoning of the yield, but better that than to promise too much; the yield will nevertheless be able to give [the planter] a rich way of life, for the plantation itself will provide almost everything for the dining table, etc., so he actually only will need money for European articles and for his children’s education in Denmark”. Thonning had apparently been following the coffee trade since he had himself seen it growing on the coast. A passage among some abstracts from various published works in a sheet of his old notes among the Guinea Commission’s archives, is annotated “written 1804 but it is [not] known now by which author”,125 but most of the material in the Commission’s file on coffee cultivation appears to date to the 1840s. The cultivation of coffee fell outside Denmark’s colonial experience: it had never been grown in the Danish West Indies, and Thonning’s research carried him far afield in published accounts from around the world. Danish brokers’ quotes for coffee from Cuba and Brazil could be found in the Copenhagen papers, and he had available to him commodities prices from the Börsen-Halle: Hamburgische Abendzeitung für Handel, Schiffahrt, und Politik and market quotes sent in by the Danish consul in Havana.126

123 On intercropping, see Roberts, pp. 558, 579–583. 124 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Thonning, undated but signed and sealed draft on rough paper, to Wedel. 125 GK III, Kaffe Dyrkning. Palmeolie, Thonning’s notes. 126 GK III, Kaffe Dyrkning. Palmeolie, Thonning’s notes and miscellaneous clippings. new african colonial impetus 663

He found information about English sugar imports in the Extract of yerly journal of trade 1843 (as he made a note of it), which recorded huge growth in the trade from the East Indies; the figures, he wrote, “agree quite closely with those reported in” a source he called Statistics of the British Empire for 1842, compiled from official returns, “which last seems more authentic, as they do not make use of round numbers as much as is the case here”. The imports included a good amount of coffee from the Cape, he noted. An article clipped from one of the Danish papers and marked 1839 reported that rice, coffee, and sugar production were taking hold strongly on the Dutch East Indian island of Java. It was reported in 1841 that the coffee harvest there had begun in the first days of March and appeared most promising. It would take four months, since the beans did not ripen all at the same time, even on the same bush. Thonning marked one passage: “The coffee harvest is … a very popular time among Javanese children, because they then have an opportunity to earn money”.127 He was doubtless rather encouraged by an article in the Danish press, dating to 1840 or so, on coffee production in Ceylon: for a long time after the English had arrived in 1796, no one had ventured to establish plantations, “but in recent years”, the article said, “it has become so common”, that most of the colonial officials “have established coffee plantations. The outlay for a plantation is insignificant, the wages low, the market assured, and thus speculation in coffee-plantations has become an absolute rage”.128 The dead stillness of the dense woods has now yielded to the resounding strokes of the axe and the laborers’ busy activity: the woods, formerly of endless extent, are latterly broken up by coffee plantations; beneficent nature promises intelligence and diligence a rich remuneration. According to the most recent dispatches, 1841 would “mark an epoch in the agriculture of Ceylon”, for the cultivation of sugar would soon be mechanized. Ceylon, which had at one time imported sugar, would soon be exporting it and might soon be “a dangerous rival for Java”. The potential of palm-oil production was also thought to be very great: production of twenty-five thousand barrels a year was projected, “so this island could make the motherland independent of the import of Russian tallow”.

127 GK III, Kaffe Dyrkning. Palmeolie, clipping from an unidentified Danish newspaper. 128 GK III, Kaffe Dyrkning. Palmeolie, clipping from an unidentified Danish newspaper. 664 chapter fourteen

Thonning clipped an article on the great increase in coffee production in Haiti after the destruction of sugar and indigo plantations in the great uprising. No fruit could be harvested for the first three years, but then “a day’s plowland yields an annual income of 750 Pd. Sterl.” (“!” is inserted in ink.) There is another unidentified article drawing upon a report from the Russian consul general and chargé d’affaires to the Portuguese court at Rio de Janeiro in 1819, which held that “the country here resembles a paradise, and neither do people live so poorly here, with this fertile soil and its rich harvests, as many may think”. The place was not subject to infectious diseases or hurricanes (which last Thonning underlined), which in one night can destroy the planter’s hopes…. The coffee tree thrives better than in its motherland. One tree taken with another, they bear in the West Indian islands 1 pound per trunk, here at least 4 pounds. I have seen plantations where each tree delivered 7 Pd. of coffee, and single trees have even given 14 to 15 Pd. Another clipping reported on increased Danish imports of coffee in 1841, “both from the country of production (direct) and from European cities (indirect)”. Some of the increase could be attributed, the paper said, to reduced Sound tolls, but a significant quantity was also imported through Kiel. Of almost four million pounds imported, seven hundred thousand were re-exported. There was a report in a Danish paper from Colombia: “among the causes that hinder the progress of agriculture in Columbia is in particular the lack of connection between two different provinces and the extremely difficult communications”. Coffee cultivation had only been taken up in 1796. One of the advantages of coffee, especially in time of war, was that it could be stored for long periods, while such crops as cocoa could not be held for longer than ten or twelve months. Cocoa had been cultivated by the Indians before the European discovery of America and remained one of the most important exports; 66,000 hundredweight were exported every year from Guayaquil. Money was being made in coffee and cotton and other tropical agricultural products from one end of the earth to the other, it appeared to Thonning, and Denmark had at its disposal a significant territory exactly suited and ideally situated to take advantage of a growing market. He even made a note regarding the description of a coffee plantation in Guyana in a story by the popular French novelist Eugène Sue, which was serialized in translation in one of the Copenhagen papers in 1844.129

129 GK III, Kaffe Dyrkning. Palmeolie, a slip, tucked into Thonning’s extracts from John Ellis’s An historical account of coffee (London: E. and C. Dilly, 1774), referring to Sue’s story, new african colonial impetus 665

In a particularly colorful passage, one of the plantation’s freedmen is returning from the hunt through beautiful plantings of coffee, whose “brown bark disappeared almost completely beneath the evergreen foliage, which was as smooth and shiny as porcelain, … enameled, so to speak, with fruits of a lively red color that resembled cherries”, when his two hunting dogs, Manioc and Cassava, catch the scent of an Indian lurking in ambush behind a large hibiscus bush. The hunter’s bullet slays the Indian and the same time clips the main stem of the bush, and a bough laden with huge red flowers topples over the corpse. Thonning extracted from the account the facts that the coffee trees were planted ten feet apart in Guyana, that the plantations were heavily fortified against Indians and runaway slaves, and that harvests were taken in June and in November. Thonning’s notes from a mid-eighteenth-century Danish collection of travel accounts record that in Arabia the coffee trees were six to twelve feet tall, or as large as ten-year-old apple trees.130 The trees were raised from cuttings, not from seed; the fruit was shaken down onto cloths in May. The Arabs irrigated their trees. In a German natural history of the Mascarene Islands published in Weimar in 1805,131 Thonning read that coffee did well in mountainous or dissected terrain, often on steep slopes, in light and stony soil. Thonning noted that “the cultivation of coffee demands far fewer hands and expenditures than the cultivation of sugar; one only needs to lay out the planting, gather the fruit, [and] dry and pound them”. In this account the plants were grown from seed and planted among trees that cast light shade, such as mimosas. In a description of Havana in an encyclopedic work on some of the wonders of the world,132 Thonning found a description of “boundless rows

“Guyana i Aaret 1772”, serialized in Aftenbladet beginning in No. 161, July 1, 1844. The Danish title of the book, published the same year, was Hercules Tapper, eller Guyana i 1772 (Copenhagen: Udgivet og forlagt af Ludv. Jordan, 1844). 130 GK III, Kaffe Dyrkning. Palmeolie, Thonning’s notes from Vol. 14 of Almindelig Historie over Reiser til Lands og Vands; eller Samling af alle Reisebeskrivelser, som hidindtil ere udgivne i adskillige Sprog af alle Folk; Samendragen ved et Selskab lærde Mænd i det Engelske, og nu oversat paa Dansk (Copenhagen: trykt hos Thomas Borup, 1759 [1748–1762]). 131 GK III, Kaffe Dyrkning. Palmeolie, Thonning’s notes on M. Bory de Saint- Vincent’s Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte der Maskarenischen Inseln (Weimar: F.S. pr. Landes- Industrie-Comptoirs, 1805). 132 GK III, Kaffe Dyrkning. Palmeolie, Thonning’s notes from Vol. 8 of Joseph Meyer, Meyer’s Universum, eller, Billeder og Beskrivelser af det Seeværdigste og Mærkværdigste i Naturen og Kunsten paa den hele Jord (Copenhagen: Det bibliographiske Institut i Hildburghausen, Amsterdam og New-York: I Commission hos Bog- og Papirhandler C. Steen, 1835-[1845]). 666 chapter fourteen of coffee trees, which in maturity teem with their red berries”, on either side of a main road; they were kept cut low. “The young trees planted out from the nursery generally bear the first year thereafter; in the 10th they give the richest harvest; and in 20 they are cut down and new planted”. A large plantation might have two or three hundred thousand trees. Thonning appears to have been uncertain of the measures of land used in the account but calculated that the Cubans must have been harvesting at least two pounds of coffee per tree. The coffee did best on newly cleared woodland soils; in remoter hill districts tobacco dominated. Thonning also read Edward Bancroft,133 who in 1766 “traveled through what was then Dutch Guyana, which lies at the same latitude as Danish Guinea”, and reported that the coffee trees were kept pruned in a pyramidal shape with long lower branches, with five feet between trees. Each tree yielded a pound and a half of beans twice a year, and twenty-eight thousand trees were sufficient to pay the annual expenses of a plantation. Thonning then calculated that at sixteen hundred trees to the 40,000-foot St. Croix acre that he often used in his projections, eighteen acres (or rather twenty-four, allowing that a quarter of the trees might be diseased) would support the 28,800 trees needed to pay the expense of operating the plantation. The rest of a standard 225-acre plantation would easily yield “the planter his subsistence, payments on the debt of the plantation, taxation to the royal treasury, and to the creation of a fortune”. In this same place in the archives is a little sketch of a portion of a plantation; the accompanying notes allow room for a defensive tower with a ring wall and a thorn hedge 120 feet in radius, and for a road 48 feet wide down one side of the plantation, “planted with palms”. About six acres were allotted for the plantation’s main buildings and a garden, sixteen for the slaves’ dwellings and gardens, and 21 acres for provision crops. Thonning allowed another six acres for paths, ditches, ponds, and gardens; “Remaining 165 acres for the plantations plantings of coffee, [Elaeis, the oil palm], cotton, coconuts, cacao, Borassus [palms], … spice trees, etc. which will bring in cash”. He also jotted down his calculation that a laborer could dig a hole six inches deep in four or five minutes, or sixty holes in an eight-hour working day; this would be the hardest work except the harvest itself, which he

133 GK III, Kaffe Dyrkning. Palmeolie, Thonning’s notes on Edward Bancroft, An essay on the natural history of Guiana, in South America. Containing a description of many curious productions in the animal and vegetable systems of that country (London: T. Becket and P.A. De Hondt, 1769). new african colonial impetus 667 reckoned women and children could perform as well as the men. He wrote on another slip of paper that a four-hundred-acre sugar plantation in Suriname required three hundred slaves in all. “The same negroes plant for themselves their consumption of provisions. Furthermore, the crafts negroes are also reckoned among this number”. In another ink is added, “thus coffee plantations need far fewer people”. He made a note of a report that the largest plantation on the Île de France “yielded 120,000 # with 250 slaves young and old both sexes”.134 In the margin of his extracts from John Ellis’s history of coffee, which itself apparently drew upon the writings of John Fothergill and Patrick Browne, Thonning remarked that “in Africa at Meyer’s I often saw that the branches could not bear the fruit and were supported with scaffolds made for the purpose”.135 In June and July, 1846, Schønheyder more than once urged Thonning to complete his revisions to the Guinea Commission’s opinion.136 Thonning, Schønheyder, and Wedel met in August.137 Besides further discussion of what Schønheyder called “the climate question”, the conversation apparently touched on colonial law. Schønheyder asked Thonning in a letter after the meeting138 “in particular to be prepared to give your opinion at the next meeting in regard to the administration of justice in the colony”. As Schønheyder understood Thonning’s views, cases involving Africans were to be brought before “the respective tribes’ cabuceers and nobles”. Complaints about whites were to be heard before a colonial judge, and appeals from his rulings were to go to the governor, “who, after closer investigation if necessary, finally decides the case…. It is, however, rather a bold thing to leave to the governor alone and without appeal to judge over honor, life, and goods”, and Schønheyder hoped Thonning could arrive at some other provision. (It is not clear whether Schønheyder was most concerned to protect the proper course of justice on the coast or to limit the governor’s independence of established chains of juridical authority in Denmark.) An undated and unsigned bit of draft in Schønheyder’s hand139 records that it was his understanding that in Thonning’s and Wedel’s view, the Danes in Guinea were merely residents, who

134 GK III, Kaffe Dyrkning. Palmeolie, Thonning’s notes on a slip of paper (with notes on the back dated 11/8 46). 135 GK III, Kaffe Dyrkning. Palmeolie, Thonning’s extracts from Ellis’s An historical account of coffee. 136 GK II, Retspleje, Schønheyder, Copenhagen, June 25, July 16, July 22, 1846, to Thonning. 137 GK II, Retspleje, Schønheyder, Copenhagen, August 7, 1846, to Thonning. 138 GK II, Retspleje, Schønheyder, Copenhagen, August 31, 1846, to Thonning. 139 GK II, Retspleje, Schønheyder’s undated, unsigned draft, marked “2” in pencil. 668 chapter fourteen

are permitted to live and build there by the country’s sovereign masters (the natives) as long as the land has not previously been taken into use by the natives, whereas they presumably should not be entitled to make laws and establish courts there in the terrain thus taken into use. Schønheyder did not think that this reading agreed with the terms of Isert’s treaty: there was no question of the Danes’ claim to Fort Christiansborg, he said, and he presumed that they had no less right to lands taken up in Akuapem. “If I have properly grasped the intent of the draft, I dare not subscribe to this”. Thonning was pleased to argue that the term “sovereign masters” was inapt.140 Since the natives’ property and property rights are to be described here, the expression used for it should presumably be chosen in accordance with the natives’ concepts thereof; but the natives understand only property and property rights, but not the European concept that we call ‘sovereign’. This diplomatic expression is indeed so uncertain that the Europeans themselves scarcely understand it or have any generally accepted definition of it…. Even the latest events of the day show that the concept of sovereignty is uncertain, as the bey of Tunis is sovereign in French diplomacy but not in the English or the Austrian”. He recommended using the phrase “the country’s present owners”. Schønheyder’s suggestion that the Danes would not be entitled to make laws and establish courts, Thonning wrote, simply could not be derived from the Commission’s report, “which reads thus: ‘Danish law and justice, as far as same is applicable according to the special laws for the colony and according to local conditions, must be in force for all individuals under the jurisdiction of the colony’ ”. Schønheyder had complained that the Commission’s report did not clearly define the nature and extent of the colony. Thonning replied, What is to be reckoned [the extent] the colony must be judged from the context of the whole opinion, for the Commission was not charged with providing an absolute definition of this colony, as that is a matter in which two parties have an interest, viz. the Danish administration and the country’s original owners. If the Commission were to permit itself to provide a definition, it would as a matter of course be one-sided [and thus invalid], however much it might otherwise correspond to the real, factual relations that will further develop between the colony and the natives…. Besides, it is scarcely possible to predict when and to what degree Danish supremacy over the

140 GK II, Retspleje, Thonning, 15/12 46, marked “3” in pencil. new african colonial impetus 669

natives can turn into real legislative authority, and it will therefore be untimely now to take a position thereon. No effort should be made to change the constitutional “Status quo”, he said, “because we do not have the right to do so, … and so much the less so, as the current status has hitherto been satisfactory for both parties and has not entailed particular drawbacks”. He went on: This proposal is based on the conviction that no decision can be made that has the appearance of a law without its awakening the natives’ notice and mistrust, as if the colony wished to appropriate to itself a new authority in their affairs, and thus be extremely inadvisable at a time when the confidence of the natives is needed most of all. Thonning thought that a passage in the Commission’s report regarding the rights of foreigners in the colony might be relevant to the presentation of the larger constitutional question: “At the initiation of the plantations the claim must be asserted with regard to every foreigner, based on the Isert treaty of December, 1788, namely the royal territorial right according to which no European of any nation whatsoever may settle in this landscape except with the permission of the Danish government”. The granting of such permission “obligates obedience to the laws and the fulfilling of the conditions that might have been established for the citizens of the colony”. Besides Danish law, as modified to accommodate “local circumstances”, these terms would include provisions regarding the taxation of land, the treatment of slaves, the militia, and church and school administration. “The concept behind such a regulation should be given to the local administration for its opinion and suggestions”. In January, 1847, Schønheyder asked Thonning to arrange another meeting of the Commission.141 At the end of February, Thonning reported to Schønheyder that he had completed his revision of the Commission’s report and delivered it to Wedel, who had told him that he would be unable to turn to it for a few days.142 Four months later, in June, Thonning paid a call on Wedel to remind him of the matter. He found him at home, but the Commission’s opinion was at Wedel’s country house, to which he had taken it to peruse one day and had left behind.143

141 GK II, Retspleje, Schønheyder, Copenhagen, January 8, 1847, to Thonning. 142 GK II, Retspleje, Thonning, Copenhagen, February 28, 1847, to Schønheyder. 143 GK IV, Thonning’s note on a file marked 11/2/47; GK V, a heavily marked-up draft of the Commission’s report, marked on the last page 26/2 47 Th. 670 chapter fourteen

One of the last newspaper articles in the Guinea Commission’s files was dated September 4, 1847.144 “Yet again our king has demonstrated his true liberal sentiment with an important reform”: Christian VIII had in a series of royal rescripts on the 28th of July, 1847, provided that in twelve years the institution of slavery would cease to exist in the Danish West Indies. The king’s hand had been forced by the estates assemblies, which in 1846 had debated proposals to end slavery altogether. Governor Peter von Scholten of the Danish West Indies, who was at the time on leave in Denmark, had upon the Chamber of Customs’s inquiry submitted a proposal to gradually emancipate the slaves in the islands. King Christian now let it be known that It is Our royal will, with motives of justice and humanity, and developed out of regard for the well-being of Our West Indian colonies and the planters’ own interests, that the disposition over the unfree, which the owners for the present possess, shall end, but in such manner, that this transition, so that the wants of all concerned can be seen to and the necessary preparations for the transition made, shall come into effect 12 years after the date of this Our royal resolution, and in the meantime the existing conditions shall continue. It is in addition Our royal will that the children of unfree persons, who are born after the date of this Our royal resolution, shall be free from birth”. Governor von Scholten was ordered to seat a commission upon his return to the islands, whose charge would be to so arrange matters as to “secure the negroes’ subsistence, the plantations’ cultivation with free labor, and in general the colonies’ and populations’ needs” when all the slaves were emancipated. (The slaves of St. Croix took this affair into their own hands, however, and, in July, 1848, von Scholten, standing by his carriage, surrounded by rebellious slaves, declared, entirely on his own authority, that slavery was at an end.)145 This clipping is tucked into a sheet of Peter Thonning’s notes in the Guinea Commission’s archives.146 “This 12-year servitude of the current unfree negroes in the West Indies”, Thonning wrote, “happens to fall quite close to the 15-year servitude suggested for the purchased slave negroes in Guinea. In this regard there is hardly anything further to remark in the

144 GK III, Emancipation, a clipping headed “Slaveemancipationen”, under the rubric “Indenlandske Efterretninger”, Copenhagen, September 4, 1847, tucked into a sheet of Thonning’s notes. 145 Vibæk, pp. 291–293. 146 GK III, Emancipation, a sheet of Thonning’s notes, headed “Emancipation den vestindiske 12 aarige….” new african colonial impetus 671

Guinean opinion”. If the children of unfree laborers in the Guinea colony were to be born free, however, it will populate the colony with a comparatively excessively large youth in an unbound condition, who out of wantonness will easily put the colony into opposition or battle with the natives, and put the colony’s existence in danger…. The parents themselves could not grasp the thought that their children could be free and themselves unfree. The colonial plan depended on a clear and orderly transition from servitude to emancipation: since there could be no question of ending slavery in African society in the foreseeable future, the population of the Danish colony on the coast would always be a “mixture of free and unfree, which last continually enter the colony’s service to earn freedom”. The Guinea Commission’s plan does not preclude the children’s chance of emancipation, since it is allowed the parents to buy them free, and this can occur for a bagatelle at the youngest age; which price the industrious unfree will easily be able to obtain, when love for their children encourages them thereto. (Thonning was willing to suppose that in some cases the parents might realize that it would be more advantageous if their offspring remained “in the public education system and service until they are mature enough to enjoy their freedom”.) He pointed out that a West Indian slave freed twelve years hence has already served since his youth, and, if he is aging, he will not even experience his freedom; on the other hand, only 15 years of service in all is required of the Guin. unfree, of which the 3 last years for almost 3/7 of the time is at his own disposition, so he can prepare his living in the ensuing state of freedom. Less that 15 years servitude we dare not propose for various reasons, because, according to the plan for cultivation, the 7 [with ‘?’ in the margin] first years of work will go before a plantation can be brought in full operation, and the last 3 years are necessary to prepare a basic living for him who shall be emancipated; on the whole [he] works only 5/7 of the days for the first 12 years and 4/7 for the last 3 years, and the colony can scarcely be brought well into operation with less work; just as the unfree will need a long time to become comfortable with the language and all the necessary, ordered, and conventional conditions that a well organized colony will require.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE COLONIAL DÉNOUEMENT, DENMARK’S WITHDRAWAL FROM AFRICA, AND THE COLONIAL UPSHOT

Governor Carstensen again traveled home from the Guinea Coast in the summer of 1847.1 In August, it appears, King Christian quietly ordered him to open a “private correspondence” with Governor Winniett of the Gold Coast regarding transferring Denmark’s jurisdiction on the coast to England, but no trace of it seems to show up in the archival record until after Christian’s death early in 1848.2 In September, Carstensen submitted a proposal to reorganize and sim- plify of the government on the coast. The principal for the administration of Danish Guinea should thus for the future be: to protect, to encourage, to promote undertakings for the advancement of the country and its people, for the protection of commerce and civilization, for the expansion of agriculture and industry, for attaining exact knowledge of the character of the country and the needs of the people, its ways and customs, etc.3 A military station should be established in Akuapem. Trade should be opened to all, with the notable new exception of the Danish officers themselves, whose participation in commerce Carstensen regarded as “inappropriate for men who shall judge in cases concerning trade, who are to see to it that the trade stands open to all”: the officers should be paid in money, rather than, as hitherto, in trade goods. Carstensen also recommended, to cut costs, that “the king’s serfs” be freed and the forts’ work contracted out to free laborers. The annual expenditures Carstensen foresaw would be a few percent greater than the existing budget. This was sufficient to oblige the Chamber of Customs to consult the Finance Deputation,4 which responded that

1 Carstensens indberetninger, p. 296. 2 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 340–341, Carstensen, undated but written after Christian’s death on January 20, 1848 (GJ 457/1848). Nørregaard, in “Englands køb”, p. 407, suggests that the king may have acted in this matter without the knowledge of his foreign minister. See Metcalfe, Great Britain and Ghana, pp. 203–204. 3 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 300–309, Carstensen, Copenhagen, September 7, 1847 (GJ 240/1847). 4 GJ 240/1847, note sent to Finance Deputation, November 16, 1847. 674 chapter fifteen since the king had resolved that the establishments were not to be disposed of after all, the proposed increase in the African budget appeared justified.5 In November, Carstensen delivered himself of an extraordinary “Plan for ‘the suppression of the slave trade and the civilization of Africa’ ”. His intention, he said, was “to suggest the significance that the Danish Guinean possessions in time could possibly come to have”.6 I harbor the complete conviction [he wrote in a cover letter] that the African continent, everywhere where the negroes are indigenous, cannot be colonized except by negroes; since it now conflicts with the humane and liberal tenets among the civilized nations to base colonies on slave labor, we must give up the thought of founding independent negro colonies in Guinea, if setting such up could in any case be contemplated, considering that we would have to keep the negroes at work in their own country for our profit.7 He thought it unlikely that the establishments could ever be of much direct commercial importance to Denmark: “the tendency among the European states to extol the principles of free trade will, more than now, open the Guinea Coast for the trade of all nations”. The Guinea Coast would only become of economic significance when it could display civilized negro communities, analogous to the negro republic Liberia. In these communities a commerce and industry will develop that will have a most favorable effect on imports from Europe and on sales to the interior of Africa. Carstensen had been studying the idea that the introduction of civilization and agriculture in Africa might root out the evil of the slave trade.8 “The man who in our time has clearly done the most for Africa is the Englishman Buxton”, he said, but Buxton had written his book on the slave trade and its remedy “in England, without any local knowledge whatsoever of Africa and of Guinea: the cradle of the slave trade”. Buxton had lately died, and was thus spared the sorrow of seeing his efforts fruitless. It is assuredly now an accepted fact that the cruisers in West African waters cannot hinder the export of slaves….

5 GJ 291/1847, Finants Deputation, November 26, 1847. 6 Carstensens indberetninger, p. 315, Carstensen, Copenhagen, November 15, 1847 (ad GJ 290/1847), filed at GJS 658/1849. 7 George Nørregård, the editor of Carstensens indberetninger, inserted a negative linguistic marker on the word “anseet” (“considering”) in this passage, where the sense does not in fact seem to call for it. 8 Carstensens indberetninger, p. 317–333. the colonial dénouement 675

The Niger expedition was to have gained a footing for agriculture and civilization in Africa; the extremely sorrowful result of that undertaking is well known. The plan of trying to hinder the slave trade, by the force of weapons, and at the same time, by the force of example, trying to introduce agriculture and civilization, had to come to grief on the interests of the slave merchants, on the negroes’ egotistical imaginings, guided by barbarism and superstition. Buxton had hoped that an increase in the number of warships might have an effect: he had no idea, Carstensen thought, of the enormous extent of the coastline along which slaves were embarked for the Americas. To wish to awake a craving for the benefits of civilization and agriculture among the negroes in Africa is a fine thought, but it is not realized…. The Europeans’ influence does not reach far and achieves only a little against the negroes’ apathy and dislike of change. “I have given considerable thought to a plan for the suppression of slavery and the introduction of civilization in Africa”. Carstensen’s plan would conciliate local interests in Africa, … operate beneficially on West Indian and American colonial conditions (which indeed in their day called forth the slave trade), [and] found a civilization in Africa…. The European nations, especially those that have African possessions, should agree on organizing and introducing an extensive ‘Emigration system’ in Africa to America and the West Indies and, in connection therewith, and as a consequence hereof, an Immigration to Africa of West Indian negroes. Many Africans liberated from slave-ships were brought to Sierra Leone, he said, where, exhausted, disoriented, and demoralized, they found themselves taking ship as emigrants to the West Indies. Carstensen’s idea was to actually increase this westward flow. As he envisaged it, abolitionists would simply outbid the slave-traders on the African market (which, he pointed out, was as old as European knowledge of Africa extended back in history and could be expected to thrive on the trade to North Africa and the Middle East even if the traffic across the Atlantic was cut off) and transport these emancipated people from well-regulated stations along the coast, in large, well-equipped, and comfortable ships, to New World countries in which slavery had been abolished, where they would work “as free people among free people” to pay off the expense of this emigration. The negro can be bought free, instead of letting him be exposed to being led in slave-shackles from place to place, from market to market; he can be lead to freedom, the fruits of civilization and agriculture placed before his eyes instead of letting him remain in a country where the negroes’ lot for 676 chapter fifteen

centuries will remain bondage and wretchedness, dependence on the caprices of bloody tyrants and the horrors of the fetish superstition. In time there would arise in the West Indies and America a population of laborers “who in coffee and sugar plantations have learned to know the advantage that a tropical soil properly employed can yield”. In New World schools, these African emigrants would shed the barbaric superstitions they had brought with them. There will thus gradually be formed forces that, properly employed, could effect the rise of Africa by a back-migration to Africa, to which they will bring with them knowledge and concepts from which alone the independent coming forth and development of Africa can be expected. He regarded it as certain that tropical Africa could not be colonized by Europeans. Only Africans could live and work there: those lands as if by Providence are reserved for the black race of human beings exclusively, where they alone can stand the climatic conditions, where they thus will not have to subject themselves to the fate of peoples whose land the mighty European could use and therefore possessed himself of. Nevertheless, Africa could only be brought by external forces to form a link in the chain of civilized states that by agriculture and civilization, by commerce and industry contribute mutually to the well-being of society…. Action has to be taken from outside, with elements that powerfully intervene in the African domestic relations, unchanged for centuries, where slave trade, a thoroughgoing inertia, and dislike of progress have stereotyped themselves on the people’s character. As was begun upon in Liberia, negro colonies in Africa should be established of West Indian free negroes, negroes who are familiar with the effect of enterprise on the well-being of the human being, who regard this well- being from a higher stand-point, not, like the Africans, as the satisfaction of material-sensual needs…. It is now an accepted fact, which was previously put forth as a beautiful theory, that civilization in Africa can with the greatest effect be founded and make progress when its care is left to the civilized African. The free-negro colony Liberia provides the example; but what Liberia, and in part Sierra Leone, can effect on the extended West African coast, amounts to almost nothing. To civilize Africa with civilized negroes ought to be the goal that the friends of Africa set themselves; a series of colonies would, as it were, encircle the coast, and emigration from the West Indies and America to these establishments should be favored in every way. The rumor of these new, “well organized negro municipalities in Africa”, where life and freedom and property were secure, would soon reach the black populations of the West Indies: the colonial dénouement 677

the negro will learn on the other side of the Atlantic that he can step forth in Africa independent and effective, that there he has a wide field in which to bring to fruition the knowledge and abilities the influence of civilization gave him. He will know that in Africa he can present himself uninhibited by the concerns for the color difference that will never disappear outside Africa; he will know that in Africa he is master in his own home, that his abilities there can earn him a respectable position among his tribal fellows; his interests will be those of the new society. The system would also, naturally, supply the labor that the West Indies and the Dutch, French, and English colonies in the Guianas “still need, and now perhaps more than ever”. Indeed, Carstensen thought, the competition of this new free labor force would “force the emancipated negro [in the West Indies] to work or to emigrate to Africa, where he will be able to obtain a larger profit, craft for himself a more independent existence from the works of his hands”. Thus Africa and the West Indies could be brought into an “effective reciprocal action; the enslaved African will be released from domestic servitude; he will be carried to freedom and civilization in the West Indies; the West Indian negro will be encouraged to emigrate to Africa”, where independent enterprise would be opened to same in a country where the interests of the negroes are predominant, where the most free development of higher ideas among the negroes will not be regarded with anxiety and misgivings, but on the contrary will be greeted as sure heralds of an emancipation of the spiritual bondage that hindered the rise of Africa. If Denmark were to participate in such a system of African emigration and immigration back to Africa from the New World, Carstensen wrote, Accra and Keta and the Volta River area would be found particularly suitable for both. However, the Danish effort would be swallowed up in the scale of England’s colonial undertakings on both sides of the Atlantic. He concluded, therefore, that “Denmark in leaving Danish Guinea to England could reserve to itself the benefits of the arrangement without bearing the burden of it”.9 Carstensen was well aware, he wrote a couple of days later, that these ideas would be strenuously objected to by “the party that sees the suppression of the slave trade in the fact that the negro is not carried from Africa, but remains in Africa …. This party has held up for itself a principle that it will not deviate from, even if, in its consequences” (and here he was

9 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 316–317, Carstensen, Copenhagen, cover letter of November 15, 1847 (GJ 290/1847, filed at GJS 658/1849). 678 chapter fifteen referring to the smuggling of slave cargoes across the Atlantic), “it showed itself unambiguously ill-chosen”.10

I must hope that ‘an African emigration and immigration system’ will gradually win so many and so powerful spokesmen that the realization of the system becomes possible; but the upsetting of an existing system and the creation of a new are events that demand time, especially in a case where it is not a matter of an isolated measure on the part of a single state, but where the states of Europe in union shall decide and act. And now Carstensen all but resigned his position.

I cannot wish to spend more years of my life in a country where the spirit’s and the body’s strength go to meet their assured destruction, without having the conviction of thereby being of significant use and benefit; but should the ideas set forth by me win the approval of the Collegium, then I believe that a journey to Guinea and the West Indies would serve to illuminate several aspects of the plan, and I will with pleasure subject myself to the vicissitudes of such a journey. It would be most important to visit Sierra Leone and Liberia and, in the West Indies, Jamaica, to which many African “emigrants” had been carried from Sierra Leone. Carstensen’s African colonial career is rather unusual in the history of the Danes in West Africa, in that he had never visited the West Indies. His service in Africa had commenced after the introduction of steamships, which could steam directly down the African coast and back to Europe without ever crossing the Atlantic with the trade winds on the return trip, a pattern that had hitherto held for centuries: Carstensen, unlike Isert, Wrisberg, Thonning, and almost all of the others who had survived long enough to return to Europe from West Africa, had never seen the cruel New World of the slave plantation, life and work in which, although as free people, was to be so formative an experience for the African emigrants in his scheme.

I will regard a journey to Guinea [and the] West Indies not solely as a means to complete my experience of Guinea, but as a long-wished-for opportunity for me to learn about West Indian affairs and conditions. This plan I have drafted aims at a development of these affairs and conditions that will certainly have a beneficial effect on the rise of the West Indies; that country I have thus spoken for without knowing, I should get to know; both Africa

10 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 334–335, Carstensen, Copenhagen, November 17, 1847 (GJ 290/1847). the colonial dénouement 679

and the West Indies, which should work for and interact with one another, I should know from experience. Carstensen made a quick trip to London in the first week of January, 1848; from there he sent the Chamber of Customs a pamphlet by a William Stewart that indicated “that the question of emigration … is stirring itself”.11 Parliament was soon to open, and Carstensen had heard that the expense of the West African squadron was sure to be debated and that an ambitious emigration scheme was to be proposed. Carstensen urged his government to bring his own plan to the official attention of the appropriate ministries in England, Holland, and France. The conjuncture seemed extremely favorable: “I would not have mentioned my proposal”, he wrote, modestly, “had I not found here that notions related to mine had already taken shape”. For all his interest in this matter, the main thrust of Carstensen’s efforts was now in fact to dispose of the Danish establishments on the Guinea Coast. It may only be the almost febrile urgency of his language that leaves the impression that Carstensen was half mad, but, be that as it may, he seems to have been able to steer Denmark’s African colonial policy back and forth almost as his moods took him. Christian VIII died in January, 1848, and Carstensen quickly notified Bluhme of the deceased monarch’s instructions to him to enter into private discussions with Governor Winniett about the possibility of transferring the possessions to England. Carstensen’s proposed administrative reorganization of the Danish establishments was apparently already on the table: it was presented to King Frederik VII very soon after his ascent to the throne, and it appears that Carstensen’s emigration scheme was also discussed.12 At a meeting of the Privy Council of State on February 16, 1848, Heinrich Reventlow-Criminil, the foreign minister, informed the king that negotiations with the English government regarding a sale of the establishments had hitherto been fruitless, but that any effort to dispose of them to some other power would “encounter difficulties”. King Frederik is reported to have indicated his distaste for the idea of exporting negroes as free workers and, after the elapse of considerable time, bringing them back to Africa as colonists, for it will be difficult to prevent such a state of affairs from being used as cover for actual slave trading.

11 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 338–339, Carstensen, London, January 6, 1848 (GJ 393/1848). 12 Statsrådets forhandlinger, 1848–1863, Harald Jørgensen, ed. (Copenhagen: Rigsarkivet, I Kommission hos Ejnar Munksgards Forlag, 1954–1976), Vol. 1, p. 54; GJ 291/1847. 680 chapter fifteen

Carstensen’s administrative reorganization was adopted, however, and the establishments’ annual budget was increased.13 Peter Thonning clipped an article on the economic decline of the British West Indian islands from a newspaper in January, 1848;14 by the end of the month, he was dead.15 On February 1, Nicoline Thonning, his widow, forwarded two bundles of documents regarding Denmark’s possessions on the Guinea Coast and a map to the Guinea Commission. She attached three receipts for her late husband’s expenditures for the making of fair copies of the Commission’s report in 1844 and in August, 1847, and for the drawing of the map; for these sums, as her husband’s uncontested heir, she asked to be compensated.16 Mrs. Thonning may have cleared her husband’s desk off a little too briskly: some of his private papers and personal correspondence, which he himself might have removed from these files had he lived long enough, were as a result permanently incorporated in the Guinea Commission’s official archives. It is just as well: this highly accomplished and centrally placed African colonialist’s file of private papers at the Rigsarkiv otherwise consists in its entirety of a photocopy of a draft of a two-page résumé he submitted to the government in 1809.17 The Danish government entered a period of extraordinary upheaval upon Frederik VII’s ascension to the throne; within a year and a half, the absolute monarchy had been abolished, and Denmark had transformed itself into a constitutional monarchy. In the course of this, the central administration was overhauled. The Chamber of Customs was subsumed in a new Ministry of Trade and soon thereafter in the Ministry of Finance; colonial affairs were administered through a Colonial Office by a new Central Directorate for the Colonies.18

13 GJ 401/1848, royal resolution, February 16, 1848. 14 GK II, clipping marked 1848, January, item under the rubric “Udenlandske Efterretninger”, tucked into an old book binding, the spine of which bears the title “Collegium uber die vornems Mathem. Vissens”. 15 “Yet another man of distinction has been lost: [Peter Thonning] has lately departed this life in his 73rd year”: Berlingske Politiske og Avertissements-Tidende, 1848, No. 27, February 1. 16 ad GJ(S) 459/1848, Nicoline Thonning, February 1, 1848, to the Guinea Commission, with three receipts, forwarded to the Chamber of Customs by Wedel, on behalf of the Guinea Commission, April 7, 1848. 17 Privatarkiv No. 2060, Thonning, Peter. Inquiries of the Thonning family in 1995 turned up none of his papers: I am grateful to various of Thonning’s descendants for their kind responses to my inquiries, and to Erik Gøbel for his part in setting this correspondence in motion. 18 Gøbel, Guide to sources, pp. 51–53. the colonial dénouement 681

At some point in the midst of this turmoil, but at any rate by the first of April, 1848, Carstensen had reported that Governor Winniett of the Gold Coast had with some enthusiasm received his communications regarding the sale of Denmark’s African possessions to England and had brought the idea to his own government; Carstensen was optimistic that the English government might soon be persuaded to take over the establishments.19 Early in April, the Ministry of Trade, having six weeks before obtained the king’s approval of Carstensen’s measures consolidating the Danish administration on the coast, now obtained a new royal resolution that it is to be sought to transfer the Guinean establishments in the most advantageous way to England, but in such a way that, as far as possible, the condition will be sought that Danish ships, with regard to the emigration of free workers to the West Indies, will in the future have the same access as English ships: Carstensen’s emigration scheme was still current. King Frederik ordered the Ministry of Trade to initiate a correspondence with the Department for Foreign Affairs regarding a sale of the possessions.20 In April, Severin Wedel, on the Guinea Commission’s behalf, forwarded Nicoline Thonning’s request for settlement of her late husband’s official expenditures to the Ministry of Trade;21 in May, Garlieb, who had held on at the colonial office, notified the Guinea Commission that the widow Thonning’s claim had been made good and took the occasion, with regard to possible imminent negotiations regarding the Danish Guin. establishments, to request that the Commission’s opinion discussed [in Mrs. Thonning’s application], together with documents belonging thereto, might be provided the Coll.22 Toward the end of June, Wedel submitted the Guinea Commission’s final opinion to the government, signing his cover letter for himself and for Schønheyder, who was by now presumably quite enfeebled.23 It was a bureaucratic exercise: the report was an entirely dead letter by this time. Wedel nevertheless filled his cover letter with subtle misrepresentation and misplaced condescension towards the imperial ambitions of an older

19 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 340–341, Carstensen, undated but written after Christian VIII’s death on January 20, 1848 (GJ 457/1848). 20 GJ 458/1848, royal resolution, April 3, 1848. 21 GJ 459/1848, Wedel, April 7, 1848. 22 GK I, Kommissionens Korrespondance 1833–1848, Garlieb, May 23, 1848; Guin. Kopibog, Garlieb, May 23, 1848; GJ 469/1848, the Finance Deputation, May 5, 1848. 23 GJ (S) 536/1848, Wedel, signing also for Schønheyder, June 27, 1848. 682 chapter fifteen generation of Danish state servants; the politics of retrenchment and cost- cutting that he so favored were once again in the ascendant. Wedel had assuredly opposed himself to the colonial project from the beginning, but it appears also that, never having appreciated the depth and breadth of Peter Thonning’s expertise (Wedel had been ten years old when Thonning had returned from the coast) and certainly not having accepted his intellectual authority, Wedel had never properly understood the more widely experienced man’s work for the Commission. The Commission much regretted Thonning’s death just as it was com- pleting its work, Wedel wrote, for Thonning had “taken over the duties of secretary and undertaken to edit the Commission’s final most humble report”. In such phrases—which, to be sure, may merely reflect his clumsi- ness with a pen—Wedel misstates the degree to which the Commission’s agenda, its careful colonial rhetoric, and essentially all of its conclusions, not to mention the administrative groundwork that had allowed the formation of the Commission in the first place—indeed the entire thrust of Danish African colonial policy for four decades—were Thonning’s work. Wedel took no trouble to conceal his own ignorance of African affairs in his efforts to emphasize the divisions within the Commission: The scope and the importance of this task, as well as the lack of expertise on intertropical conditions in general and in particular of knowledge of the peculiar character of the regions and races under Danish influence in Guinea, have made it especially difficult for the greatest number of the Commission’s members to come to so clear an understanding of the matter that they could feel able to base thereon a conscientious statement of opinion and submit a well justified proposal. “To be sure”, he went on blithely, “the Commission included in its midst two men, namely Captain Findt and [Peter] Thonning”—even the order in which the names are mentioned is something of a misrepresentation— who from personal residence in Danish Guinea were in possession of local knowledge … regarding the country, but since the latter’s residence lies about a half century back in time and the former’s knowledge was only based on a very short time at Christiansborg, … the Commission’s other members found themselves so much the more obliged, through printed writings and other ways, to put themselves in possession of the lacking information on the nature of the country, the character of the negro tribes, and the likelihood that a colonization would succeed, [regarding] which not only the gentlemen mentioned were of mutually differing views but also significantly diverged from the judgments that several of the more recently functioning governors have submitted regarding same in their official reports. the colonial dénouement 683

The Commission had lost Findt, Holten, and Hambro, so its report really consisted mainly of Thonning’s language, “to which we find ourselves occasioned to append the following further remarks”. ‘Occasioned’, indeed, and who or what was now to stop him? Alone now, Wedel amused himself driving nails into the coffin of the Guinea Commission’s long undertaking. The central questions, he said, were whether Guinea and in particular the portion falling under Danish influence is suited to colonial cultivation with regard to both the soil and the climatic conditions and as to the character of the natives and the other characteristics of the country? On this matter we must regret that we have not succeeded in arriving at sufficient certainty, since several authors represent the local conditions on the Guinea Coast in general as less well suited to colonial plantations while others give a more favorable judgment of same. Findt’s, Mørck’s, and Carstensen’s statements advise against such plantations, whereas the now deceased [Thonning], with much assurance, has asserted and sought to document the opposite. We have relied on the assertion he advanced in the hope that, through the investigations that we petition might be undertaken by experts on the spot before a colonization plan is finally decided upon, it will be found well justified. (Here Wedel was apparently referring to the proposed expedition of Frederik Liebmann.) The reservations expressed in the opinion regarding giving up the “secure footholds and other rights at present possessed in Guinea”, Wedel wished to add, arose from the view that these possessions without further postponement should be made profitable for the state, which can only be expected to be achieved through colonization at an extensive scale. Should it be found inadvisable, for financial considerations, the judgment of which we have not thought we ought to venture into, to commence a large plantation colony in Guinea and to carry same out with energy and perseverance, or [if] the abovementioned local investigations should lead to an unfavorable result, then me must strongly advise against any longer maintaining the possessions, which in no regard provide any commercial or other benefit to the state but annually demand significant sacrifices both of money and of people. “In permitting ourselves to put forth this our view of the Guinea establishments’ possible worthlessness to the Danish state and advise their being given up” (and here Wedel’s use of the plural pronoun seems a particularly egregious arrogation of authority to himself, for there is no indication that 684 chapter fifteen this had been Schønheyder’s view, and the Guinea Commission’s opinion recommended no such thing), the reservations that present themselves against such a step, namely nation- alist sentiment and the treaty relations in which Denmark finds itself with England and France regarding cooperation in the suppression of the slave trade, have not escaped our notice. Wedel presumed that Denmark’s obligation to maintain a prize court at Christiansborg to hear cases against Danish slave traders would fall away if the African jurisdiction was abandoned. “The Danish state possesses only the fort Christiansborg” and a few other “secure footholds on the coast with the full right of ownership”, he said. “Denmark, by the Isert treaty of 1788, obtained a particular but nevertheless qualified right to take up extents of land in the Akvapim country” but “is not otherwise in possession of any other sovereignty over the lands and the tribes than is derived from and maintained by armed might and such influence as the Government succeeds in obtaining for itself among the natives”. On what, besides armed might and political influence, Wedel imagined sovereignty had based itself everywhere in the world all through history he did not here dilate upon. In any case, the only thing to consider in the case of a sale to another power, he said, was the actual value of the buildings “as well as the colonial plantations that have been established on the administration’s account”. This, however, he said, would be very difficult to establish. He was very much the accountant. In closing, Wedel yielded up most of the ground he had claimed. He stated that although there had in fact been disagreement about the report’s conclusion that the forts could not be maintained for less than what was currently budgeted, the Commission had agreed not to make any suggestions for reducing the costs of maintaining the forts, since the crown had recently decided to restore the forts and to actually increase the annual budget for the establishments and since the Commission, in addition, had occasion to assume that it was the [late] king’s will that a colonization was to be begun upon, for the execution of which the current official personnel would not be sufficient but might all the more make a significant increase necessary. The Guinea Commission’s investigation had been buffeted by the political vicissitudes of sixteen years, but it appears from Wedel’s highly oblique reference to some recondite thread of the late King Christian’s policy that he believed at this late stage there was indeed still a lingering political impetus behind the colonial dream Peter Thonning had harbored so the colonial dénouement 685 fondly for half a century, since the heady days when the great Count Schimmelmann had asked the young naturalist, newly returned from Africa, to draft just such a colonial plan as was now finally laid to rest. There is no indication in the Guinea Journal entry at this place that any official action whatsoever was taken in response to Wedel’s letter. The only clerical annotation is a reference back to 1836, when King Frederik had acknowledged the last of the commission’s quarterly reports and had asked that particular attention be paid to the potential for coffee production. The Guinea Commission’s report was never laid before the monarch, and it began gathering a thick layer of dust in the archives.24 The Danish government’s efforts to dispose advantageously of the Guinea possessions dragged on for some time.25 Early in 1849, the colonial office prepared a brief description of the possessions,26 which, it said, were cut through by several rivers, among which the navigable Rio Volta. They are well populated, have a fertile soil, and are rich in important products of various kinds and well suited to colonial plantations, as well as to the development of a lively commerce…. The country is sufficiently rich in natural advantages that, by an energetic and effective administration, it could in time rise to be a profitable colony. The difficulties to be overcome, however, are also great. The earth is still as good as uncultivated, and colonization with the help of the native negroes can probably not be accomplished for many years. The population is still sunk in ignorance and barbarism, and it has not hitherto been possible to eliminate the most significant hindrances to the expansion of culture and Christianity, slavery and the slave trade. The recent reorganization of the Government on the coast had had the goal of strengthening and increasing the Government’s influence on the negroes, … but to elevate the possessions into profitable colonies will assuredly demand the unremitting efforts of many years, which also, because of the well-known unhealthiness of the climate, will entail a great loss of human life, …. as well as large pecuniary sacrifices, larger, indeed, than Denmark can presumably feel itself called upon to make to attain such a distant and uncertain object.

24 The Commission’s opinion was dug out of the archives in the 1890s in response to a query from the English government regarding the territory that could be considered to have fallen under Danish jurisdiction before 1850 and was thereafter returned to its shelf, this time, it appears, for the best part of a century: Hopkins, “Peter Thonning’s map”, pp. 119–120. 25 See Nørregaard, “Englands køb”, pp. 406–410. 26 GTK, Varia vedkommende Guinea, Blandede ujournaliserede Sager vedk. Guinea, an undated document headed “De danske Besiddelser paa Kysten Guinea, initialed ‘G’ [presumably Garlieb]. 686 chapter fifteen

This language was boiled down even further and incorporated in a strong note to the Foreign Ministry27 recommending that an offer to sell the forts and Denmark’s territorial claims for the sum of £10,000 be sent to London, together with a threat to demolish the forts with explosives and simply abandon the place altogether if that price was not found acceptable. “For the information and use during the negotiations in London a map of the Danish possessions is enclosed” (and this was yet another copy, this time somewhat reduced in size, of Peter Thonning’s influential and serviceable map), as well as ground plans of forts Christiansborg and Prindsenssteen.28 Word of this offer was passed not only to the English government through normal diplomatic channels but also to England’s mercantile interests through the house of Hambro, the Danish government’s banking connection in London.29 By the end of 1849, England had agreed to purchase the forts,30 and Governor Carstensen was dispatched to the coast to execute the formalities. He and Governor Winniett of the British Gold Coast traveled down to Africa from London together.31 Winniett toured the Danish territory for two weeks, accompanied by Carstensen or, when the latter was indis- posed, by one of his subordinates, while flags were lowered and raised, guns were fired, and diplomatic assurances were exchanged with the African leaders.32 In a royal Open Letter addressed to “the inhabitants of the Guinean establishments”,33 King Frederik declared that We are firmly convinced that the queen of Great Britain and Ireland, no less than We, will attach great importance to maintaining law and justice on the coast as well as to spreading the benefaction of the Christian religion among its inhabitants. In this conviction We release you, hitherto Our subjects in Guinea, from your civic obligations to Us and Our successors on the Danish throne, and command You to from now on show the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland and Her successors, as your future leader, all due allegiance and devotion.

27 Guineisk kopibog, Sponneck, February 23, 1849, to Udenrigsministeriet. 28 GJ 679/1849, Mossin, the copyist, March 2, 1849, a bill for maps and drawings. 29 Nørregaard, “Englands køb”, p. 408. 30 Koloniernes Centralbestyrelse [Finansministeriet], Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, 1849–51, No. 23 c, royal resolution, December 17, 1849. 31 Carstensens indberetninger, pp. 374–375, Carstensen, London, December 28, 1849 (GJ 1/1850). 32 Nørregaard, “Englands køb”, p. 410, and C.C. Reindorf, pp. 321–322. 33 Koloniernes Centralbestyrelse [Finansministeriet], Indiske Forestillinger og Resolutioner, 1849–51, No. 23 a, Aabent Brev, 1849; the Open Letter was published in Departementstidende, No. 78, September 30, 1850, p. 1122. the colonial dénouement 687

Winniett’s account of this tour, addressed to Lord Earl Grey, Secretary of State for the Colonies, was published in the Parliamentary Papers for 1850.34 “To bring under your Lordship’s notice my daily route through the Danish territories”, he wrote, “I prepare my Despatch in the form of a journal”, running from March 6 to March 21, 1850. Winniett remarks on the topography, commercial commodities, agricultural practices, and many other matters, and the tone of the journal was expansively optimistic. He was unable on this occasion to visit the territory of the Akyem people, inland from the Akuapem, but he reported it to be a country of considerable extent, and great fertility of soil, occupied by one of the largest tribes of these regions. I can give no definite account of the extent of the Akim country: its position, your Lordship will find on the accompanying Map, furnished me by Governor Carstensen. This was presumably the copy of Thonning’s map Carstensen had obtained in 1844, and, in delivering Thonning’s map to Winniett, Carstensen had handed over an important colonial icon. Winniett observed, and doubtless he had it so from Carstensen, “that many of the distances of towns, &c., in it are incorrect, as they are not professed to have been taken with mathematical precision; but it is still valuable as an outline.” In fact, Winniett put himself directly on this map, marking his 300-mile itinerary on it in red ink. There is every reason to suppose that Winniett had before him this rich and complex image of the territory, which for almost a half century had been indispensable to Thonning’s colonial views, as he composed his closing paragraph to the Secretary of State for the Colonies: In conclusion, my Lord, allow me to remark, that for the extension of an influence, civilizing in its tendency, and consequently highly beneficial to the native tribes of these regions,—for creating here, on the spot, an extensive revenue for the accomplishment of still greater schemes for the more enlarged improvement of the natives,—and for the bringing out of the vast commercial resources of this rich and beautiful country,—and for effecting the destruction of the slave trade,—the measure just accomplished in and by this transfer, by which, in addition to the former wide range of British jurisdiction, not less perhaps than a hundred thousand natives, of various tribes and languages, in these regions, are brought under the immediate influence and control of Her Majesty’s Government, is one of the most important which could, in reference to this part of Africa, occupy the attention, and enjoy the support of the British nation.

34 A photocopy of the published report is filed in Udenrigsministeriet, Dossiersager Alm. Grønland–Handel, Sager Vedr. de danske Etablissementer på Kysten af Guinea 1848– 1850, Winniett, Cape Coast Castle, March 30, 1850, to Earl Grey. 688 chapter fifteen

This had been Peter Thonning’s vision more or less exactly. A “Map of the Danish Gold Coast, on the Coast of Guinea”, showing Winniett’s itinerary, was published in the Parliamentary Papers with his report: Thonning’s map had been incorporated in Great Britain’s imperial atlas, and the colonial view of this place that he had espoused so eloquently and for so long, was, by and large, found quite serviceable by British society for another century yet.35 It was the end of an era for Denmark, but the beginning of a long and formative period of colonial history in Africa for Great Britain and other European colonial powers, now including even such unlikely nations as Belgium and, in the end, Italy. The threads of history are long and tangled, and Peter Thonning could see no better than anyone into the future, but his dream of harvesting the crops of the Indies in the hills of Akuapem for sale in the great markets of the west came to pass within a few generations. It was not coffee, as he had supposed, but cocoa that became the great export crop of the southeastern Gold Coast, and its production was in the hands not of European planters, but of African smallholders.36 Current academic schemes of historical periodization hold that the colonial period of African history began with the nakedly imperialistic European territorial takeover towards the end of the nineteenth century, but many of the roots of that expansion are to be found much earlier, in the day of a young Peter Thonning, around the turn of the century. The transfer of plantation production to Africa from the West Indies to provide a local economic alternative to the slave trade and, indeed, to thus render

35 A map classified as No. 65340 (19) at the Map Library of the British Library, Die Dänische Goldküste auf Guinea (The Danish Gold Coast on the Coast of Guinea), shows Winniett’s route. No cartographer is credited, but the map marks “Places of a Mighty Fetish protector of Runaway Slaves” and “Deserted places formerly inhabited”, as on Thonning’s map, from which this map was presumably made. Mr. Armitage, of the British Library’s Map Library, very kindly made available a photocopy of the map. Item no. 83 in Africa, Vol. 3 of Maps and plans in the Public Record Office, P.A. Penfold, ed. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1982) is presumably a print of the same map; it is described as having been removed from a parliamentary paper on the Danish possessions on the coast of Africa dated March 30, 1850. 36 Cocoa was first introduced by the Basel Mission from Suriname at an agricultural experiment station in Akuapem in the 1850s; by 1911, the Gold Coast was the world’s leading producer. The receptivity of a new class of agriculturalists and traders to this new crop has been attributed convincingly to the influence of the teachings of the Mission: Hill, pp. 17, 168–169, 171–173; Kwamena-Poh, pp. 117–119, and Reynolds, Trade and economic change on the Gold Coast, pp. 177–178. See Fage, pp. 67–68, and Gareth Austin, “Mode of production or mode of cultivation: explaining the failure of European cocoa planters in competition with African farmers in colonial Ghana”, in Cocoa pioneer fronts since 1800: the role of smallholders, planters and merchants, William Gervase Clarence-Smith, ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 154–175, on p. 154. the colonial dénouement 689 the Atlantic slave trade superfluous, was quite central to the thinking of the international abolitionist movement. As it became clear that abolitionism truly threatened production in the West Indies, European governments began to give serious consideration to African alternatives: plantations in West Africa are mentioned in the Danish record as early as the 1760s, but it was the success and the prestige of abolitionism that brought such colonial notions to the attention of officials at the very top levels of the Danish administration. It was not colonialism itself, nor yet even the institution of slavery that was in question when the abolition of the slave trade began to threaten the established system of the tropical Atlantic, but rather the source and disposition of the labor force involved in the maintenance of European agricultural production in the tropics. It is clear that in this earlier, pre-colonial period (as it is commonly termed) of European interest in the agricultural potential of Africa, the historical example of the colonization of the West Indies—and of the New World more broadly and, indeed, of all the rest of the colonial world— dominated the thinking of Danish colonial administrators. This appears also to have been the case in other European capitals, as well as on the ground in the European establishments on the West African coast, where men obscure in the annals of history were instrumental in the transfer to West Africa not merely of the crops but of some of the experience and economic ambition of several generations in the plantation societies of the Americas. Some of these American crops had themselves originally been transplanted from the Old World to the New, but now they were being brought back across the Atlantic, laden with centuries of colonial baggage, to promising new territories—conceivably of huge extent—in tropical Africa. A minor power like Denmark, whose colonial ventures in the tropics had hitherto been limited to commercial enclaves in India and Africa and a handful of small islands in the Antilles, found itself able to contemplate rather substantial expansions of its national horizons. To a man of Peter Thonning’s long and intimate experience of colonial affairs, both at home and abroad—as a student of late-eighteenth century natural history, with all its economic concerns; as a senior customs official,37 closely concerned with the kingdom’s revenues; and as a colonial administrator—the obvious lesson of history, still fresh and lively and everywhere at hand, was that colonies were matters of enormous national

37 As even Hepper characterized him, on p. 11. 690 chapter fifteen interest. The great colonial narrative of the modern era was still unfolding rapidly all around the world. Most colonial doors were already closed to Denmark, however: if, as could easily be predicted, the raw sugar and the revenues of the Danish West Indies were to be lost within a generation or two, then where else but its African enclave could the country turn, if it were not to abandon tropical agricultural production altogether, with all its concomitant stimulus to the nation’s domestic industries and commerce? The plantation enterprise was inherently expansive, inevitably colonial. The climatic logic of the plantation drove European investment in the products of the Indies away from home and into warmer latitudes: sugar cane and cotton and coffee and tea—Linnaeus’s fond hopes notwithstanding—could not be grown in England or France or Denmark. Naturally, a new national colonial venture overseas into the unhealthy climates and unfamiliar social settings of the tropics would be more difficult and dangerous than steady technical development and growth within the nation’s own limited territorial confines. Peter Thonning found himself able—personally, intellectually, officially—to accept these risks, when they were balanced against the potential gains, and the king before whom he laid his colonial plans for four decades never discouraged him in this view. Thonning may have felt himself in quite a strong position as he took up the work of the Guinea Commission. He was well aware that the main threads of Atlantic colonial policy at the turn of the century had been controlled by another such commission, Count Schimmelmann’s Slave- trade Commission: indeed, he had seen his own first African reports to the Chamber of Customs, containing an ambitious colonial recommendation, referred immediately to the Slave-trade Commission. In the early 1830s, having been placed once again in charge of colonial affairs, and having managed to center the formulation of African colonial policy in a new commission under his own direct supervision, with a royal charge open to the possibility of a substantial new colonial undertaking, Thonning may have had reason to suppose that his African colonial ideas might at last actually be put into effect. His confidence was presumably shaken by the public recommendations of the estates assemblies later in the 1830s and by King Christian’s decree in 1840, in response to a representation—not, indeed, from the Chamber of Customs’s colonial office, but from the fiscal bureaucracy—that the African establishments were to be disposed of when opportunity offered. After his retirement from the colonial dénouement 691 government service at about that time, he could doubtless have allowed the matter to die, but he did not, and the result was an extraordinary analysis of his country’s colonial circumstances, focused on West Africa, which was the only feasible arena, in his view, for fresh national endeavors. The Commission’s final opinion is a remarkable record, but a very large body of knowledge and argument that had flowed from Thonning’s pen since 1800 was necessarily omitted from the report, which, for all its length, was only a summation of a much more extensive historical record: the report itself merely epitomizes this consummate Atlantic colonialist’s life’s work, reading, and thought. For decades, and with increasing authority, Thonning had articulated for the Danish crown a vision of a well- ordered and productive new Danish garden in the tropics, placing it like a small colonial jewel in a sophisticated historical and geographical setting, on the subject of which, it is quite safe to say, no one in Denmark was better informed than he. And what was this colonial world in which he strove to retain a place for his country? From Thonning’s economic perspective, it was a world of plants—exotic plants—of foreign agricultural commodities and long- distance trade. It was an era of improvement, of agricultural experiment, innovation, and expansion. It was a world of Linnaean plant-hunting, of scientific observation of the uses to which plants were put around the globe and of everything that affected their growth and cultivation. It was a time of state-organized transfers of seeds and live plants between hemispheres: of spice plants from the Far East and breadfruit from the Pacific to the Antilles and, in the centuries before that, of wheat itself and many other Eurasian fruits and domestic animals to the New World. Some of the great import commodities of that day were plant products: tea, coffee, sugar, cotton, vegetable dyes. The enlightened, intellectually expansive Atlantic was also still a world of slaves, an international economic order in which an amazing, barbarous traffic in agricultural laborers appears to have dominated many aspects of colonial life, although it was of course the crops worked by the slaves that drove the whole evil system. The moral ground shifted rather drastically under Thonning’s feet in the course of his career as a colonial policy-maker. Indeed, western civilization remade itself in his lifetime, although Thonning had been dead a decade before slavery was finally abolished in the United States. (Yet another generation passed before emancipation at last reached Brazil.) 692 chapter fifteen

When Thonning had returned to Copenhagen from Africa in 1803, at the ripe age of 28, he had made the triangular circuit of the colonial Atlantic. He had with a sharp scientific eye observed and, to a degree, had lived the life of the expatriate agriculturalist. He had become a citizen of the colonial tropics—not a planter, to be sure, but a student of tropical plants; not an Atlantic creole, but a metropolitan man of science, well- but not richly bred and educated, a sensible, articulate reporter, a public servant in the field of colonial commerce. He had seen roughly tended plantings of coffee and cotton in West Africa and elegantly sophisticated plantations of sugar cane in the West Indies. Nothing is known of his months in the West Indies, but he had assuredly rubbed between his hands the soils of both tropical Africa and of the Americas in the company of men very directly concerned with their agricultural potential and shortcomings, and had felt the wind, the rain, and the sun in his face in both places and noted and compared—and understood, from the perspective of a scientist—the effects of the climate on the natural vegetation and crops in both hemispheres. The connections that Jens Flindt and Christian Jansen and Johan Wrisberg began to draw for Thonning between the New World, that unthinkably vast and vital colonial extension of Europe, and the Danish enclave on the African Coast were not at all tenuous threads: they were electric. When Thonning arrived in the Antilles and saw with his own eyes what a colony could be, the impact on him was without question very great, for he was no tourist in the West Indies, but, by that time, a highly competent judge of the colonial substance and implications of what he saw all around him. He found himself in an exceedingly wealthy colonial society in the tropics, in a beautiful and exotic place, a bizarre and brutal slave society, in which the African element vastly outweighed the European, but where Danish was spoken in parlors and offices, Danish law prevailed, and young Danish women, born in the place, promenaded in the latest European gowns in formal gardens planted with fantastically ornamental tropical species, with prospects over endless cane-fields to the sea. He may have felt that he had sailed from the rough society of a half- dozen old slave traders and indifferent part-time farmers into a model for the future of Danish colonialism. These views of the Atlantic and of West Africa’s new place in it he carried home with him to Denmark and, in time, into the central colonial administration. Thonning was no colonial visionary, but an unusually well-informed observer of the colonial world, a diligent, thoughtful, and effective public servant, acting in the intellectual climate of his times and in what he took to be the interest of his country. Nothing in the massive the colonial dénouement 693 amounts of information about the colonial world that came across his desk in the course of several decades appears to have shaken his conviction that a profitable but humane Danish colony could be planted in West Africa to take over the economic functions of the Danish West Indies as they withered away in the face of the winds of abolition.

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Note: ‘ø’ or ‘ö’ are alphabetized as ‘oe’; ‘æ’ as ‘ae’, and ‘å’ as ‘aa’. (This is contrary to Danish practice, which places these characters at the end of the alphabet.)

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Weiland, C. F, Senegambien Sudan und Ober-Guinea. Weimar: Im Verlage des Geograph: Instituts, 1830. West, Hans, Bidrag til Beskrivelse over Ste Croix med en kort Udsigt over St. Thomas, St. Jean, Tortola, Spanishtown og Crabeneiland. Copenhagen: trykt hos Friderik Wilhelm Thiele, 1793. Wilks, Ivor, Akwamu 1640–1750, a study of the rise and fall of a West African Empire (Trondheim: Department of History, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 2001 [1958]). Wilks, Ivor, Asante in the nineteenth century: the structure and evolution of a political order. London: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Wilks, Ivor, “On mentally mapping Greater Asante: a study of time and motion”, Journal of African History, Vol. 33, 1992, pp. 175–190. Winsnes, Selena, “Voices from the past: remarks on the translating and editing of published Danish sources for West Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries”, History in Africa, Vol. 14, 1987, pp. 275–285. Wood, Denis, “The fine line between mapping and mapmaking”, Cartographica, Vol. 30, No. 4, 1993, pp. 50–60. Wright, John Kirtland, Human geography in nature: fourteen papers, 1925–1965. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1966. The writings of Thomas Jefferson, A.A. Lipscomb and A.E. Bergh, eds. Washington: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1903–1904, Vol. 13, pp. 310–311. Wroblewski, Otto B., “Livjæger i 1848–1849”, Museum. Tidsskrift for Historie og Geografie, 1895, No. 2, pp. 200–222, on p. 211. Yarak, Larry W., Asante and the Dutch 1744–1873. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Jens Yde, “Etnografisk Samlings taletrommer”, Fra Nationalmueseets arbejdsmark, 1945, pp. 18–24. INDEX

Aarestrup (merchant) 311, 321, 484 Adansonia digitata 185n131 Abadee 114, 115, 138 Admiralty 273n10, 362, 364, Abildgaard, P. C. 51–52, 451 469, 504–07 Abokebi 484 Æthiopean Sea (or Ocean) 154–55, 285 Abolition (or Abolitionism; African Association (or Association for Abolitionists) 7, 50, 336, 640n41, Promoting the Discovery of the Interior 642–43, 657, 675, 689, 693 Parts of Africa) 22n15, 55, 71 Danish 65, 96, 220, 223n15, 275, 295, 296, Africa 337, 443n, 530, 556, 561, 587, 600, 641 African Company. See Company of English 59, 63, 64, 419, 466, 639 Merchants trading to Africa Abotaki (or Abotakyi) 116 African Institution 324 Abrahamson, Joseph N. B. 326 African lilies 88 Absolute monarchy 3, 89, 272, 389, 453, African Pilot 135, 156 510, 680 African Slave Trade and its Remedy 615, Aburi 114–15, 167, 175, 197, 535 656, 657, 674 Academy of Sciences and Letters, Royal Afterlife 193 Danish 51, 134, 171, 210, 372, 471–72, 636 Afzelius, Adam 65, 109n55, 144n173 Acclimatization 36, 160, 167–69, 305, 348, Agave. See Agraffi 365, 367, 392, 409, 423, 436, 442, 537, 550, Agotime (or Akotim) 12, 151, 198, 247, 552, 558, 559, 567, 583, 592, 600, 606 310, 536 of animals 390, 447 Agraffi (or Agrafi; Agave) 102, 154n13, 176 of crops 335, 336 Agricultural implements 178n83, 191, 199, Accra (or Accara; Acra; Akra; Akkra) 1, 20, 324, 594, 607 56, 71, 86, 100–01, 112, 113, 138n150, 151, 152, Agricultural Society 51, 385 157, 232, 252–54, 256, 280, 312, 322, 333, Agu 177 387, 404, 409, 416, 419, 423, 425, 428, Ahnholm, Johan 107, 120, 139, 444–45, 461, 468, 474, 490, 493, 529, 534, 142, 145, 234 538, 552, 554, 557, 561, 562, 566, 572, 577, Ahrenstorff, Helmuth 399, 412, 421 613, 677 Akim. See Akyem forts at 40, 139, 198, 408, 418, 437, 480 Aklappa, creek 361 language 79, 132, 354, 394, 605 Akoroso 361 people 12, 89, 115, 189, 259, 265, 424, 437, Akotim. See Agotime 469, 566, 569 Akropong. See Akuropon River 150, 322 Akuapem (or Akvapim; Aquapim; See also Gã Aqvapim) 43, 45, 56, 58, 131, 157, 257, Accretion 176, 196n161 287, 437, 475, 501, 506, 512–14, 563, 688 Acre, St. Croix (unit of measure) 368–69, agriculture in 101, 203, 236, 266, 390, 596–97, 666 474, 688n36 Ada 102, 118, 124, 145, 153, 189, 196, 198, 240, armed conflicts involving 230, 264–265, 245–47, 266, 348, 605, 655 400, 501 people 102, 226, 235, 237, 246, 280 Carstensen on 612, 619–621, 633, 653, town 245, 360, 509 673 Ada Island 102, 146, 152, 280 Christensen on 378, 386–87, 394, 399, Ada Songo (or Songaw Lagoon) 176, 196 410, 423–24, 425, 427, 478 Adaklu 136, 177 council’s reports to the Guinea Adangme (or Adampi) 12, 102, 131, 151, 182, Commission on 483, 486, 488 190, 194–96, 198, 202, 508, 605 Flindt on 43, 48, 126, 281–82, 284 Adanson, Michel 184 geographical situation 172, 175 712 index

in Guinea Commission’s final Alexander (East Indiaman) 375, 377–79, opinion 534, 535, 591, 597, 607 387, 388, 396, 405 Isert’s colony in 24, 36–38, 70, 84, 143, and coasting trade 381, 382 200, 222, 270, 522 Algeria 579 Jamaicans settled in 620, 621 Alheden (heath) 499 jurisdiction in 306, 539–40, 632n, Allées 87, 260, 331, 483 646, 668 Allgemeine Zeitung 528, 641 Meyer on 45, 144, 215n2, 216, 241 Allies 13, 102, 353, 392, 461 Mørck’s disputes with Governor of Akwamu, 194 Maclean regarding 500, 502, 503, 562, Allophylus spicatus 183 645 Almonds 402 Monrad on 331–34 Alternanthera pungens 186 people of 12–13, 40, 41, 78, 475, 503, 514, Altona 38, 291 580, 616 Amanopasso (or Ammannopasso) 116, 200 plans for colonization in 278, 295, 313, 215n2 397, 514 Amaranthus 179 plantations in 71–72, 145, 146, 217, 242, Amelioration 21, 64, 221, 543, 548, 640 251, 261, 267, 333, 375, 396, 515 America (or Americas) 65, 68, 70, 71, 85, population of 508–09 104, 325, 339, 381, 389n46, 445, 577, proposed seat of colonial government 580, 692 in 400, 420, 447, 490, 523 agricultural production in 2, 7, 325, 549, streams in 150, 498 556, 557, 570, 644, 664 Thonning’s early descriptions of 22, 136, botany of 54 172, 175, 188, 197, 203 colonial history of 56, 66 Thonning’s journey in 114–115, 138 colonial precedents of 35, 129, 316, 317, Thonning’s official statements on 271, 325, 380, 384, 415, 492, 497, 534, 277, 315, 445 536–37, 548, 550–51, 649, 675, 689 transportation to and from 277, emigration to 675–76 278, 475 plant introductions from 122, 190, 206, Akuropon (or Akropong) 653, 621, 634, 263, 658 653, 655 plantations in 33, 81, 568, 587 Andreas Riis in 501, 620 provisions from 25, 74, 289, 343, 345–47 Thonning in 116, 135 political events in 32, 104, 157 Akvapim. See Akuapem slavery in 641 Akwamu (or Akvambo; Akvambu; slave trade to 1, 48, 49, 81, 126, 381, Aquambo; Aqvambo) 12, 15, 246, 279, 431, 675 280, 282, 283, 310, 360, 361, 366, 416, 501, trade to Africa 366, 387, 401–02, 485, 508–09, 564 517, 528, 588 Thonning’s descriptions 151, 194, American Society for Colonizing the Free 197, 198 People of Color of the United States (or Akyem (or Akim) 23, 101, 138n149, 151, 175, American Colonization Society, 415–16, 456, 500, 501, 504, 509, 515, 554, Colonial Society) 294–96, 380, 495 562, 612, 613, 687 American Indians 340 Carstensen on 653–55 Ammanno 116 gold in 176, 198–99, 653–54 Amu (or Augna), river or inlet 153, 167, 196, people 12, 13, 185, 189, 259, 397, 412, 469, 280, 537 502, 503 Amulets 184, 185, 193, 576, 604 political status 290, 502, 503, 539, 613, Analgesics 183 616, 632n10 Anchors 154, 158, 404, 439, 488 population 509 Anchorages 38, 139, 156, 157–58, 207, 280, Thonning’s descriptions 13, 176, 188, 281, 405, 444, 461, 534, 629 198, 199 Ancobra 276, 285, 287 Albatross 528 Andaman Sea 532 Albert (Prince Consort) 557 Andropogon 174, 186 index 713

Angelo (cartographer) 319, 653, 654n85 population of 340 Angels 191, 576, 604 relations with coastal polities 13n31, 103, Anjambo 136 194, 199, 259, 264, 310, 539 Anlo (or Augna) 12, 89, 102, 151, 157, 178, Andreas Riis in 501 188, 194, 196, 198, 235, 280, 290, 310, 469, Thonning on 112, 185, 188, 205, 290, 310, 503, 508–09, 536, 593, 605 577, 579 Annals Maritimes 374 trade of 101, 404 Annatto (or Orlean) 538 wars 313, 361, 366, 579 Anomabu, Fort 256, 414, 468, 480, “yoke” of 502–03 Antelopes 114, 119, 188, 303, 476 Asantema 115–16 Antilles 25, 55, 70, 272, 336, 347, 355, 373, Ascension Island 421 478, 620, 629, 689, 691, 692 Asiatic Company 372 plantations in 21 Assemblies, Estates. See Estates Assemblies Anti-Slavery Society 640, 641, 643 Assiante (or Assianthée). See Asante Ants 189, 349, 395, 475, 562, 563, 565, 625 Assiné 404, 412, 418 Apollo 264 Association for Promoting the Discovery of Appolonia 462 the Interior Parts of Africa. See African Apprentices 438, 477, 594, 641 Association Apprenticeship 451, 601, 661 Atiá 181 Aqu 136 Atiambo. See Obuobi Atiemo Aquambo. See Akwamu Atlantic passage 2 Aquapim (or Aqvapim). See Akuapem Atlantic World 7, 69 Arabia 657, 661, 665 Atokko (or Atocco, Atokaw) 119, 177, Arabian Peninsula 643 196, 574 Arabic language, culture 358, 389, 577, 643 Augna. See Anlo Archives 4, 10–12, 14, 15, 26, 27, 234, 256, Augna Songo (or Keta lagoon) 118, 131, 135, 284, 289n35, 306, 338, 360 153, 159, 176, 196, 198, 419, 537 Chamber of Customs’s 219–20, 465, 496, See also Lagoons 505, 516, 521, 533 Augsberg Confession 605 colonial 21, 440, 453, 463 Auguja, Point 151, 196 Company 31n50, 503, 523 Augustaborg 101, 200 Fort Christiansborg’s 335, 413, 619 Australia 635–36 Guinea Commission’s 21, 106, 171, Avenor (or Avinno) 12, 151, 196, 198, 203 447n34, 456, 546, 656, 661, 662, 666, Avicennia 177, 179 680, 685 Avocadoes 178 Natural History Society’s 51n8 Axim 28, 276, 405, 480 Slave-trade Commission’s 219 Azores 421 Schimmelmann’s 295 Asabi 361 Bacchus 169 Asante (or Ashante; Asianté; Assiante; Bahia 593 Assianthée) 23, 246, 285–86, 311, 338, Balanophoraceae 208 361, 339, 577, 586, Balck, Charlotte 489n141 armies, movements of 254–55, 266, Balck (or Balch), Christian 311, 321, 395–96, 284, 582 471, 484, 488, 526 Christensen on 389, 392, 394, 396, 404, skipper 396n63, 587 411, 412, 415–16 Balsam pear 183 effect of Battle of Dodowa on Danish Baltic and Guinea Company 23, 30, relations with 58, 356, 407, 412–14, 31n50, 44 426, 613 Baltic (area) 103, 359, 366, 529, 633 geographical situation of 151 Bamboo 515, 521, 593 king 290n36, 340, 440 Bananas 177, 225, 315, 335, 492, 586 language 151, 354, 394, 605 Bancroft, Edward 599, 666 military power of 12–13, 275, 278, 279, Bankruptcy, state 259 310, 340, 341, 487 Banks, Joseph 7, 22–23, 55, 70–71 714 index

Bannerman, James 612–13 Bimbiasch. See Bibease Baobab tree, 185, 261 Birdsong 337 Baphia nitida 179, 185n126 Bissau 642 Barbados 26n29, 344 Bitter orange 178 Barbary 163 Bixa orellana 538 Bardenfleth, Johan F. 213, 285–88 Bjørn, Andreas 30, 41, 77–78 Bargum, Henning 27, 29, 100–03 his “Beretning” 100–02 Barley 396 and colonial projects 35, 45, 46, 49, Barometer 382, 472n107, 650 77, 82 Barrels 70, 117, 148, 170, 247 on Frederiksnopel 41–43 for cornmeal 344–46, 364, 529, 536, gardens at forts Fredensborg and 624, 663 Kongenssteen 30 Basel Mission 385–86, 398, 501, 604, 620, and Meyer 43–44, 143 621, 630, 632, 688n36 and Julius von Rohr 57, 70 See also Mission Blacksmiths. See Smiths Bato 255, 256, 279, 284, 362 Bleeding 168 Bay leaves 103 Blighia sapida (Atiá) 181n97, 182 Bay of Bengal 272 Blücher, Frederik von 212 Bay of Biscay 105, 590 Bluhme, Kristian Albrekt 614, 631, 644, Beads 190, 193, 201, 308, 366, 402 659, 679 Beans 27, 72, 177, 315, 396, 473 Boa constrictors 188 Beasts of burden. See Draft animals Boatmen 101 Beef 406, 536, 538 Bokkara 642 Beer 106, 122–125, 148, 364, Bombardment 14 366, 402 See also Copenhagen See also Pytto Bombax pentandrum (Silk-cotton Bees 29, 125 tree) 175, 177, 179 Beeswax 29, 98, 141, 201, 293, 361, Bonavista 358 366, 657 Bonne, C.H. 262, 479 Beet sugar 103, 549 Bonny (river) 293, 528–29 Beets 103 Books (accounts) and Bookkeeping 27, 29, Bellona 264 111, 270, 292, 297, 306–07, 402, 426, 489, Benezet, Anthony 66 523, 540, 572, 659, 608 Benin 168, 176 Books 21, 52, 117n78–79, 170, 202n184, 301, Bight of 154, 528 303, 304, 324, 394n60, 656, 660–62 River 275 at auction 107 Benjamin (teacher) 370 in forts’ libraries 335, 375, 389, 506, Berg, Jens Jensen 31, 36, 280 635n19, 674 Berlingske Politiske og Avertissements- on colonial world 1, 54, 66, 256, 327, Tidende (or Berlingske 356–57, 372–75, 467–68, 479, 615, Tidende) 526n255, 639, 641–43, 659 637n24, 658 Beskrivelse af guineiske Planter (Thonning’s in private libraries 252, 358 African flora) 131, 209–12, 506 in schools 326, 370 Biafra (or Biafara), Bight (or coast) of 168, Borassus (palms) 666 176, 285, 344 Borger-Vennen 67–68 Bibease (or Bibiase) 218, 269, 270, 307, dal Borgo di Primo, Olintho 287–88, 291, 331–33, 354, 365, 367, 369, 370, 372, 395, 294, 302 409, 520, 562, 649 Bornholm 345 Rehling on 494 clock 573 road to 227, 331, 347, 366 Bosman, Willem 285 Schiønning’s plantation at 251–52, Boston 536, 573 253–54, 257, 261–65, 311 Botanical Garden (in Copenhagen) 54, Bikuben 394 130n123, 131, 150, 208, 209, 211, 212, 304, Bimbia 141–43, 146, 293 373, 472n107, 650 index 715

Botany 7, 70n12, 209, 213, 358 Bülow, Frants von 304–05, 314, 358n49 colonial 22, 50, 55, 65, 77, 384 Burckhardt, J. L. 657 of the Guinea Coast 55, 108, 111, 117, 131, Burgess, Ebenezer 295 135, 139, 149, 150, 171, 180, 200, 208–11, Buttoa 404 258, 415 Buxton, Thomas Fowell instruction in, at Natural History (abolitionist) 615, 640 Society 53–54, 99 and the Basel Mission 620 Botany Bay 352 Carstensen’s reading of 674–75 Bournonville, Antoine 416 Thonning’s reading of 648, 656–59, 661 Bowdich, Thomas Edward 22n12, 324–25, Byron, Lord 359 338, 341, 357, 389n47 Byrsocarpus coccineus 183–84 at Kumasi 340, 414 Boye, Adolph Engelbert Cabbages 72, 173, 257, 338 Bracht, Peter Enevold, Lieutenant 490, Caboceers (or Cabuceers) 37, 100, 116, 498, 499, 500 193–94, 255, 309–10, 667 Brandt, Christian 32n53, 33–35, 39–41, 43, Cacao (or Cocoa) 325, 374, 427, 438, 473, 44, 46, 49, 122n94, 217, 585, 645 587, 662, 664 Brandy 148, 412 introduction of 593, 688n36 Brazil 85, 144n173, 231, 285, 287–289, 294, suitability of climate for 25 302, 405, 419, 490, 587, 622, 624 Cactus Tuna. See Prickly-pear cactus coffee in 648, 662 Cadastral systems 127, 317, 319, 450 emancipation in 608, 691 Caesalpinia 116 plantations in 549, 568, 583, 600, 619 C. pulcherrima 186 planters from 550, 566, 569 Calabar (river) 293 slave trade to 287, 288n30, 423, 430, See also New Calabar 642, 644 Calabashes 178, 182, 193, 474 slavery in 557 Calculations (fiscal) 277, 308, 368, 569, Breadfruit 178, 691 585, 588, 591, 596–97, 599, 606–11, 644, Breakwaters. See Moles 662, 666 Bristol 64 Calevancus. See Chickpeas British East Indies. See East Indies Callao 490 British Guiana 599 Cameroon (or Cameroons; Brock, Niels 356, 421, 453, 612 Camerouns) 176, 470, 528, 657 and Akuapem plantations 354, 358, River 140, 293 375, 394 Campeche-bush 113 Christensen’s characterization of 383, Camphor 96, 98, 111 412, 413 Camwood 185, 426 interim governor 347, 435 Canary Islands (or Canaries) 1, 105, and Mørck 498 406, 661 reports to Guinea Commission 470, Canoes 111, 118, 152, 153, 179, 196, 207, 279, 483–89 359, 361, 362, 379, 438, 445, 481, 498, 515, Brock, Nicoline 633n14 548, 579, 633 Brock, Severine 612 carved on the Sacumo-fjo 151–52 Brokers (or Mediators) 15, 194 on the Ponny 101, 283, 499 Browne (also Brown), Patrick 23, 373, 667 through surf 155, 207, 346, 488, 534 Buenos Aires 641 Thonning’s description 155–56 Buffaloes 114, 188, 226, 476, 538, 559, 567 on the Volta 84, 102, 280–81, 360, 655 Building materials 368, 400, 460, 523, Cap Lahois 404 558, 607 Cape Coast Castle 253, 312, 324, 357, 405, at Bimbia 141 418, 429, 468, 500, 656 for Fort Kongenssteen 235 trade to Asante 412 near the Volta 36 Carstensen and Wilkins at 612 on Principe 293 Christensen at 382 Thonning on 189, 204, 315, 320, 445 Cape Formosa (or Formoso) 405, 528 716 index

Cape Lopez 657 in South America 536 Cape Mesurado 105, 379–80, 404, 491, 555 Thonning on 159, 163, 165, 186–87, 597 Cape Mount 379, 381, 403, 404, 429 See also Livestock Cape (or Cap) Palma (or Palmai; Cavalrymen 437, 439 Palmas) 154, 404, 615 Cayenne 70, 167, 225, 490, 497, 538, Cape St. Paul 108, 154, 156, 157, 196, 349, 563, 625 528, 657 Cement 189, 473, 594, 597 Cape (or Cap) Three Points (or Tres Puntas, Censuses 127, 508, 510 Trois Pointes) 46, 276, 404 Centipedes 475 Cape Verde Islands (or Cape Verdes) 164, Central Directorate for the 231, 379, 403, 406, 431 Colonies 680 horses, donkeys, mules, and goats Ceres 264 from 45, 147, 187, 205, 231, 358, 375, Ceylon 225, 600, 663 390, 438, 483 Chamber of Customs (and Commerce Capsicum baccatum 167 Collegium) Caracas 535, 563, 625 colonial jurisdiction 52, 69, 128, 230–31, Carolina 42, 63 272 Carolusborg 418 colonial office xi, 3, 20, 21, 57, 67, 89, 90, Carpenters (and Carpentry) 46, 47, 70, 100n17, 218, 265n50, 271–73, 284, 301, 73, 76, 101, 216, 245, 361, 438, 474, 550, 306, 317, 324, 345, 374–75, 382, 389, 565, 593 417, 422, 453, 454, 473, 487, 531, 532, Carr (or Carrs), J. 412 573, 606, 614, 633, 646, 680, 681, 685, Carstensen, Edward 611–12, 624, 633, 634, 690 673, 679–80 Guinea Journal xi–xii, 134n133, 207, 218, on Akuapem 653 254, 255, 348, 354, 362, 450, 500, 503, arrives on coast 612 504, 685 on Australia 635–36 See also Commerce Collegium and Basel Mission 630, 632 Champagne 117, 179, 410, 413, 612 at court in Copenhagen 631 Charcoal 178 disputes with British Gold Coast Chateaubriand, François-René de 634 government 612–14, 627 Cheese, Edam 381 on Jamaican settlers 620–21 Chemistry 7, 358, 374 journey to Akyem 653–55 Chenon, R. 463 marriage 612 Christensen’s characterization on plantations 618–20, 637–38, 647, 653, of 383, 398 660, 683 reports to Guinea Commission 470–76, and sacrifice of children 633, 659 483–89 and slave trade 650–51, 674–679 as scientist 472n107 visit to French African Chermes 98 establishments 629 Chesterfield, Earl of 414 and Winniett 679, 681, 686–87 Chickpeas (or Calevancus; Garavances) 178 Cartography 6n15, 455 Chickens 29, 115, 186, 192, 263, 473 Cassava (Iatropha manihot) 45, 173, Chili (Chile) 587 177, 196 Chinabark. See Cinchona Cassia 225 Chintzes 402 See also Cinnamon Chorography 437 Cassia occidentalis 182 Christensen, Balthazar 377–78, 395, Cats 186, 187 413, 513 Catholics (and Catholicism) 191, 289, 292, and agricultural experiments 377, 576, 604 articles and letters published in the Cattle 29, 63, 102, 125, 289, 416, 461, 473, Danish press 394, 399n71, 401–05, 484, 538, 559 408–11, 427–31, 478–81 in Anlo 196, 198, 420, 537, 593 journal 383, 385, 388, 393, 397 at Christiansborg 438, 567 index 717

draft of Guinea Commission’s opin- Christophersen, Hans 76, 122, 245 ion 515–19, 546 Cigars 402, 520–21 duties at Fort Christiansborg 388, 392, Cinchona (or Chinabark) 54, 182 393, 426 Cinnamon 88, 225, 492 on Fernando Po 430 See also Cassia and Green Books 463 Cinques Sous (or Cinquesous; Sinkesu, and Guinea Commission’s quarterly Sinkesue) 101, 139, 159, 166, 414 reports 465–66, 495–97, 515, 519 Circumcision 151, 191 and Hein 383, 399, 400, 405, 412, 413, Cisalpinea pulcherima. See Caesalpinia 420–21, 462 Cisterns 199n176, 200, 242, 308, 334, 487, illness 387, 392, 414, 421 523, 526, 594, 597 and languages 381, 393–94 Clapperton, Hugh 357, 467 and Lind 390 Clasen (clerk) 227, 228, 234, 236, 238, 239 and Mørck 497 Clay 87, 98, 152, 189, 192, 193, 229, 474 on plantations 391, 394, 396, 399, 400, for bricks 43, 204 409–11, 423, 427, 517 in building 42, 87, 115, 187, 190–91, 263, and Richter 386, 394, 412 368, 473, 475, 484, 547, 597, 650 report to Thonning 421–27 gold-bearing 176, 654 secretary to Guinea Commission 450, on sea-bottom 156 463, 496 in soil 22, 108, 113, 172, 175, 176, 195, 197, voyage to the coast 377–83 203, 238, 259, 492, 513, 661 Christensen, Laurids 377 white 183, 193 Christian religion (and Christianity) 339, Clexton (or Claxton), John 107, 180 341, 461, 486, 508, 555, 557, 561, 582, 591, Climate 5, 6, 187, 210, 243, 244, 293, 320–21, 601, 604, 609, 620, 656, 685, 686 341, 377, 379, 419, 428, 461, 475, 515, Christian Frederik (or Crown Prince 566–67, 596, 623, 635, 645, 649, 667, 692 Christian, Christian VIII) of at Accra 387, 389, 397, 409 Denmark 273n10, 416, 440, 638, 670, in Akuapem 22, 36, 84, 197, 203, 222, 673, 679 258, 264, 312, 424, 427, 522, 646 administrative reforms 451, 511, 541–43 effects on health 169, 204, 216, 221, 365, African colonial policy 3, 541, 545, 617, 388, 413, 438, 492–93, 559, 685 623, 630, 632, 652, 684, 690 at Eibo 243, 245 ascent to throne 540 influences on 161, 168, 446, 518 and Far East 3n10, 636–37 Thonning on 149, 159–68, 201–03, natural history collections 20, 274–75, 315–16, 343, 445, 535, 550, 644 212–14, 653 tropical 1–2, 35, 154, 171, 242, 339, 358, and science 636 477, 497, 513, 529, 587, 620, 690 Christiansborg (Fort) 20, 40, 42, 43, 70, 74, variations in 172, 202, 460, 485, 75, 78, 80, 82, 90–91, 113, 134, 135, 140, 157, 537–38, 661 232, 242, 276, 290, 307–08, 313, 335, 344, of Volta region 177, 196, 362, 367 438, 493, 500, 522–23, 592, 612, 626, 630, West African 43, 55–56, 62, 69, 79, 81, 638, 684, 686 259, 547, 549, 556, 562–63, 622, 637, and Akuapem plantations 72, 82, 85, 658, 661 143, 146, 217 Climate fever (or sickness) 167, 168–170, library at 356, 372, 375 338, 348, 365, 400, 416, 475, 514, 525, 579 life at 106, 337, 378, 393, 408–409, 567, See also Sickness 594, 633 Climatology 55, 195n158 ordered closed 82, 84, 86, 88, 89, 95 Clocks 103, 107, 573 roadstead at 346, 387, 439, 445, 461, 534 Cloves 402 situation and surroundings 22, 143, 409, Coal 636–37 437, 468, 482, 493, 494, 508, 561 Coccus 98 Thonning’s descriptions 107, 167, 199 Cochineal (or Cochenille) 40, 98n10, 336, Christiansborg 31 374, 384 Christianshavn 372 Cockroaches 189, 565 718 index

Cocoa. See Cacao Collier, George 325, 415 Coconuts 87, 178, 225, 238, 241, 245, 281, Colombia 664 494, 666 Colonial institute 219–223 Coffee 27, 28, 46, 56, 104, 147, 206, 285, 332, Colonial office. See Chamber of 335, 426, 438, 492, 494, 556, 575, 663, 688 Customs in Akuapem 45, 146, 266, 311, 313, 333, Colonial wares 11 354, 358, 375, 386, 390, 395–96, 410, Combs 402 420, 424, 427, 483–84, 489, 500, 520, Commerce Collegium 24, 55, 66, 103 525–27, 540, 562, 612, 653 and Chamber of Customs 19n2, 52, 272, in Arabia 661, 665 296, 324, 385, 417 in Brazil 549, 583, 619, 648, 664 and cotton 91 Bryan Edwards on 661–62 Commission of Investigation 353, as a commodity 34, 254, 339, 391, 619, 356–360, 364–365, 367, 370, 383, 580, 623, 624, 644 588, 649 in Cuba 666 on colonial agriculture 367 Danish imports of 664 on Wrisberg’s plan 365–69, 371, 442 at Eibo 145, 225, 227, 228, 236, 238, 243, Commission (or Committee) of March 22, 331, 367 1836 511, 530–32, 541 in the Guianas 128, 666–67 Commodities 104, 306, 403, 490, 662 in the Guinea Commission’s final African 81, 201, 687 opinion 538, 549, 550, 556, 592–93, agricultural 315, 454, 691 599–600 Levantine 103 introduction of 80, 88, 277 Nordic 401 Isert on 21, 25–26 transport and storage of 246 John Ellis on 667 tropical 1–2, 7, 10, 21, 557, 642 Meyer’s 129, 144, 203, 216, 217, 231, West Indian 59, 80 241–42, 267, 269–270 Company of Merchants Trading to Africa official Danish interest in 87, 90, 142, (or African Company) 312, 466 146, 240, 241, 276, 320–24, 343, 344, Compass declination 139 347, 369, 384, 447, 519 Condemnations 572 from Principe 144, 145, 225, 226, 230 See also Prize courts on Principe 292–293, 405, 430 Congo 556 Rømer on 1–2 Congress of Vienna 273, 430 from São Thomé 145 Congreve. See Rockets Schiønning’s 251–53, 257, 260, 262, 263, Constitutional monarchy 3, 680 265, 266, 334, 338, 586 Consumption (tuberculosis) 167, 227 Thonning on 173, 177, 203, 230, 625, Convicts 353, 368, 442, 552 662–67 Cook, James 7 in Volta region 31, 122, 128 Coolies 642 in Danish West Indies 448, 466 Coomassie. See Kumasi Cognac 388 Cooper, James Fenimore 380, 412 Colic 183 Coopers 101 Collecting 97, 302–03, 650 Copal 112 Collections 53n16, 372 Copenhagen 11–12, 53, 57, 91, 103, 110, 128, Hans West’s 54 129, 139, 148, 149, 214, 272, 301, 304, 330, the Natural History Museum’s 54, 331, 345, 355, 366, 416, 643 375n102, 471 bombardment of 106, 149, 247 the Natural History Society’s 55, 302 geographical situation 37 Prince Christian’s 20, 212–13, 653 news and opinion in 23, 49, 58, 59, 68, Schumacher’s 99 82, 120, 336, 339–40, 641, 659 Sehested’s and Tønder Lund’s 95 University of 54, 64, 301–02, 650 Thonning’s 19, 100, 106, 113, 118, 149, 208 Copper 25, 201 Collegial-Tidende 337, 659 -clad vessels 38, 154, 207, 216 Collett, John 345 engravings 373 index 719

Coral reefs 156 Cuvier, Baron von 357, 372, 374–75, 389n47 Coromandel Coast 54, 155, 275 Cuxhaven 611 Cotton 25, 28, 30, 40, 54–55, 58, 63, 72, 78, 80, 86, 142, 227, 253, 324, 335, 375, Dacubi (or Daccubie) 261–63, 333–34, 492, 521 409, 484 near Accra 143–44, 333, 390 Daendels, H. W. 285–86 at Axim 28 Dagen (newspaper) 478–81 in Akuapem 48, 72, 74, 75 Dahomey 80, 356 climatic requirements 112, 117, 173, 175, Daldorff, D. K. 54 202, 216, 235, 257 Dall, Lucas 529, 574 cloth 199, 381, 474 Dalzel, Archibald 356 cultural requirements 374, 472–73, Dams 278, 395, 551, 592 647–48 Danish-Africans 16, 306, 308, 309, 311, 313, Cürassao 112 326, 347, 348, 351, 353, 370, 371, 375, 437, at Eibo 145, 225, 227–28, 238, 243, 331, 442, 489, 555, 592, 598 360 See also Eurafricans at Frederiksberg 87–88, 90–91, 112, 130, Danish Asiatic Company 372 140, 147, 186, 231, 246, 347, 494 Danish language 370, 427, 436, 593 gins 45, 73, 80, 148n189, 227, 236, 240 Danish Mission Society 351, 385 introduction of 90 Danish National Archives. See Rigsarkivet Isert on 36, 37, 41 Danish West Indies 9, 31, 43, 69, 74, 148, Smyrna 103 216, 220n12, 221, 286, 289, 291, 302, 326, tests of 91, 179 354, 359, 365, 508, 594, 622 as trade commodity 25, 366, 384–85, abolition of slave trade to 34n59, 50, 59, 536–37, 549, 662, 664, 691 65n75, 109 in Volta region 45 botany in 55 from West Indies 122, 236 colonial administration of 3, 19, 86, 315 Council Harbor 239 colonial example of 3, 59, 126, 129, 223, Council of State 224, 416n113, 679 368–69, 371, 395–96, 426, 439, 442, Cowrie shells 12, 151, 192, 308, 322, 364, 402, 447, 477, 548, 566, 662, 692, 693 426, 479, 589 corn trade to 345–47, 354–55, 364–65, Crafts (and Craftsmen) 41, 104, 367, 370–71, 571, 589 373, 469 economic significance of 273, 338, 530, African 121, 126, 199, 236, 594, 667 531, 690, 693 called for in colonial proposals 38, emancipation in 568, 670 46–47, 348, 356, 370, 438, 442, 550, location of on Atlantic trade routes 678 558, 565, 592, 594, 601, 603, 607 planters of 59, 79, 219, 293 Isert’s colonial party of 34, 42, 43, 73, slave populations of 224 120, 215 slave trade to 74 from the West Indies 204 slavery in 3, 543, 620 Creoles 362 See also West Indies Crevecoeur, Fort 139, 157, 408, 418, 419, Dansk Folkeblad 641 444–45, 468, 480, 490, 561 Dansk Litteratur-Tidende 336 Crobbo. See Krobo Danske Eeg 490–91, 493 Crocodiles 102, 153, 188, 579 Danske Statstidende 356 Crohte-lie-lie 101 Dante Alighieri 612 Crown Prince Frederik. See Frederik VI Darwin, Charles 7 Crown Princess Island 239 Datura 180 Cuba 430, 470, 527, 639, 640, 642, De Candolle, Augustin 211 662, 666 De Souza (family of slave-traders) 656 Cumaná 661 Deeds (to property) 252, 261–62, 269, 393, Cumo (or cabuceer) 193 488–89 Curieux (brig) 336 Demerara (or Demerari) 104, 262, 563, 587 Currents 101, 139, 288, 405, 430 Denham, Dixon 357, 367, 467 720 index

Department for Foreign Affairs Draft animals (or Beasts of burden) 204, 201n182, 287–88, 291, 293–95, 531, 231, 390, 400, 438, 446, 559, 607 541, 652 “Draft of a historical and geographical Chamber of Customs’s exchanges description” (Thonning’s) 132, 133, 139, with 85, 253, 289–91, 502–04, 533, 150, 207 545, 562, 569, 614–18, 626–27, 632, Dropsy 167 645, 651, 652, 681 Drugs 657 Deserts 163, 164, 498, 499, 553, 643 Drums Dew 115, 161, 162, 165, 169, 197, 460, 661 Dubois, Mrs. Isaac 78 Dialects 151, 190, 605 Ducks 29, 115, 186, 188, 263 Dialium guineense 178 Dudua. See Dodawa Diaries (or Journals) 15, 52, 109n55, Dugongs. See Sea cows 144n173, 413, 263, 687 Dunkos. See Doncos Carstensen’s 611–12, 629, 631, 633, Dutch Accra 113, 151, 387, 474 636, 654 Dutch East Indies. See East Indies Christensen’s 377–83, 385–400, 412–16, Dyes (and Dyewoods) 28, 40, 63, 98, 112, 420–21 113, 131, 140, 179, 184, 185, 199, 201, Prince Christian’s 435 225, 227, 266, 293, 348, 369, 529, 588, Thonning’s 98, 100, 106–07, 114–19, 138, 657, 691 210 Dysentery 182, 183, 514, 612 Dichrostachys cinerea 186 Dyssel, Johan 385, 394 Dickens, Charles 378 Dioscorea sativa 173 East India Company 104, 636 Disease 39, 56, 79, 107, 168–69, 245, Danish 451 338, 664 East Indies 2, 12, 63, 81, 104, 154, 155, 157, See also Sickness; Illness 377, 436, 549, 560, 587, 608 Distilling 121–25, 128, 142, 146, 227, British 548, 638, 663 228, 238, 266, 267, 331, 396, 461, 485, Dutch 584, 587, 663 637, 660 Danish colonies and establishments Dixcove 405 in 3, 511, 530, 531, 555, 635, 636 Doctors 46, 113, 169–70, 216, 406, 411, plantations in 534, 557, 583, 610 567, 572 East Indiamen 375, 377, 426 Dodi 361 Ecklon, C. F. 372n89 Dodome 136 Eclogae americanae 54, 209 Dodowa (or Dudua) 117, 119, 200, 356, 411, Edict of March 16, 1792 60, 65, 67, 68, 539, 579 217–19, 224 See also Katamansu Edwards, Bryan 661–62 Dogs 186, 187, 309 Egypt 164, 167, 445, 553, 579, 661 Domestic animals 29, 31, 63, 113, 125, See also Nile 163–64, 186–87, 263, 292, 460, 473, 474, Ehretia corymbosa 184 475, 547, 551, 593, 594, 595, 595n70, 616, Eibo (or Ejbo) 146, 348 635, 657, 691 climate 243, 245 in Akuapem and Akyem 188, 197 Flindt’s plantation at 225–28, 234–238, European 38, 160, 315 266, 277, 331 on St. Croix 346 situation 145, 157, 228, 229, 235, 239, Dominica 662 245–46 Doncos (or Donkos; Dunkos; and soils and vegetation 229–30, 235–238, Donko-Land) 86, 361, 575 360 Donkeys 186, 315, 321, 438, 559, 563 Thonning on 229–30, 232, 234, 238, 243 from Cape Verde Islands 205, 358, 375, Elaeis guineensis 179, 666 390, 438 Elaeophorbia drupifera 181 from Jamaica 620 Elbe River 38, 291, 611 from Senegal 438, 439 Elmina (or St. George del Mina) 144, 158, Doubloons (and Piastres) 403, 589 186, 382, 405, 429, 468, 480 index 721

Elsinore 149, 272, 345 houses (or shrines) 614 Emancipation 104, 222, 639–641, 675–77 plants 182, 183 in the Americas 380, 423, 549, 556, 557, priests and priestesses 31, 115, 183, 204, 568, 569, 583, 691 255–56, 270 in the Danish West Indies 670 Fetishes 101, 103, 115–16, 138–139, 184, 187, in Thonning’s colonial plan 552, 553–55, 192–93, 283, 333, 337, 473, 486–87, 563, 557, 582, 584, 596, 599–601, 603, 644, 579, 688n35 671 sacrifices to 604 and West Indian production 531, 548, Fibers 28, 184, 193, 324, 474, 504–07 557–58, 608, 629 See also Cotton; Hemp; Pineapple Emigration 38, 634–35 Ficus (Ficus umbellata) 186n132 African 531, 675–679, 681 Field guns 501, 547 Emong. See Fibers Figs 71, 81 Encyclopædias 359, 372 Finance Collegium (or Finance Endive 183 Department; Finance Deputation; English language 620, 621 Ministry of finance) 24, 49, 212, 244, Engmann, Jeremias 489 267, 336, 338, 449–451, 530 Enumeratio plantarum 209, 211 and the Chamber of Customs 141, 237, Epispastics 182 541, 651–52, 673, 680 Equator (Equatorial regions and climate; and the Danish establishments 69, or Line) 26, 154, 382, 431, 470, 534, 625 541 Erasmus, Charlotte 489n141 and Flindt 75–76, 121, 123, 125, 127–28, Erythrina senegalensis 183 142, 145–46, 225–28, 230, 232, 234, 239, Essequibo 104 243–46, 266, 278 Estates Assemblies 510, 519, 525, 526, 541, and Meyer 143, 145, 215, 230, 231, 240–42, 545, 652, 670, 690 267–269 Ethnic groupings 138, 509 and Schiønning 251–253, 267 Ethnography 8, 102, 149, 150, 178n85, 181, Finances, state 449, 560–61, 568, 571, 210, 378, 533 584, 591 Eurafricans 16, 312, 395, 402, 410, 425, 428, Findt, Jens Peter 382, 383, 387, 442, 483, 436, 437, 438, 442, 469, 612, 650 490, 591 See also Danish-Africans and the Commission of Eurocentrism 15 Investigation 353n25, 354, 357, Eye inflammations 111, 164, 181 365–371 as governor 354–56, 358, 364–65, 370, Fabricius, J. C. 54 371 Fædrelandet 510–11 and the Guinea Commission 450, 452, Fagara zanthoxyloides 185n124 541, 570, 572–73, 588, 589, 591, 621–26, Falconbridge, Alexander 62 644–46, 649, 682–83 Family names, Danish 10 on Thonning’s draft of the Guinea Fante 151, 259, 418, 514, 554 Commission’s opinion 561–69, Feathers 185, 193, 381, 657 575–582, 584, 586 Felons 46, 348, 352 Firewood 29, 170, 178, 182, 185, 204, 260 Fences (and Fencing) 72, 87, 114, 260, 313, Fish 31, 84, 181, 190, 197, 198, 474, 538, 460, 473, 523, 593, 595, 597, 608 599, 657 Fernando Po (or Fernando del Po) 140, 620 dried (or smoked) 188 British colonization of 367, 415, 462, ocean 139, 159, 292, 616 467–70, 556 river 101, 102, 125, 152, 153, 226, 237, 245, Christensen on 421, 430 282, 360–362, 498 Fetish (or Fetishism) 180, 184, 192, 499, 555, salted 247, 365, 406 576, 591, 622, 676 Fishing (and Fisheries; Fishermen) 28, 156, ceremonies 185 166, 184, 195, 196, 201, 438, 444, 460, 472, days 368, 576–77 474, 548, 576 groves 157 Fitej 229, 237 722 index

Flamingoes 153 Fothergill, John 667 Flau (river) 152 Fotjuka. See Foedjoku See also Volta Fredensborg, Fort 26, 36, 59, 84, 89, 102, Flax 47, 184, 416, 504, 506 118, 157, 198, 200, 227, 255, 290, 409, 607 Fleischer, Christian 370 garden at 30 Flindt, Jens Nielsen 70, 82, 120–22, 125, Fredensborg (slave ship) 34 128–30, 142, 267, 297, 457, 465, 485, 517, Frederik VI, king of Denmark (or Crown 565, 585–87, 645–46, 692 Prince Frederik, acting in the name of at Frederichsnopel 40, 42–43, 72, 73 Christian VII) 53, 91, 213, 221, 243, and the Asante 254–55, 257, 284 301–02, 326–28, 356, 370, 383, 398, 435, his journey with Thonning 119, 128–29, 441, 451, 501, 508, 510, 135, 284 519, 540 his plantation at Eibo (and and the abolition of the slave trade 49, Togbloku) 121, 122, 124–28, 145–46, 60, 65, 223–24, 479 225–30, 233, 234–37, 238, 243–45, 266, administrative diligence 272 331, 360, 367 and coffee 448, 685 his plantation at Frederikssted 71, 72, colonial views and undertakings 3, 20, 74–76, 90, 117, 130, 200 32, 39, 80, 90, 120–21, 127, 142, 244, 271, as member of Council on the Coast 216, 277, 285n24, 286, 349–50, 353, 384, 268–70 436, 532, 568, 616 and Schimmelmann 46–48, 57, 58, 68, enthusiasm for military 304 72–75, 122–25, 239 and the Guinea Commission 4, 19, 447, his sister 70, 75, 76, 78, 121, 122, 124, 125, 449–450, 560, 685 227, 246 and Napoleonic War 247 on the Volta 239, 245–247, 255–56, 266, palace coup 24 277–84, 360, 456 and Principe 284–85, 293–94 and von Rohr 58, 68–70 and Ernst Schimmelmann 24, 32, 50 in the West Indies 57, 69 Frederik Ferdinand (prince) 212–13, 285 Flindt, Johanne 489n141 Frederik VII, king of Denmark 3, 679, 680, Flintlocks. See Guns 681, 686 Flora 174 Frederiksberg (or Friederichsberg) Thonning’s Guinea 149, 150n3, 171, 209, (plantation) 90–91, 180, 186, 290, 313, 375, 473n109 331, 344–47, 393, 494 Flora (cadet ship) 452n51 agriculture at 114, 130, 140, 143, 147, 202, Flora Danica 54 226–27, 247, 332, 648 Foedjoku (or Fotjuka) 362 allée to 260, 331 Fonden ad Usus Publicos 57n41, 58, buildings at 157, 199–200, 307 304, 372, 471 establishment by Wrisberg 113, 277 Footpaths 29, 131, 166, 174, 175, 186, 197, Frederiksberg (royal residence in 502, 535 Copenhagen) 91, 331 Forenede Brødre (or Two Brothers Frederiksgave (royal plantation) 420, 476, plantation) 394, 484 525, 586 Forsynet (plantation) 395, 484 agricultural experiments at 489, 500, Fortifications 38, 45, 205, 218, 240, 242, 515, 649 277–280, 283, 310, 316–17, 418, 440, 523, Carstensen on 612, 619, 624, 637–38, 547, 550, 597, 665 647, 653 Forts (as military positions) 408, 468, 561 government’s reports on 483, 488, Danish 1, 10, 14, 27, 29, 48, 59–60, 69, 77, 520–22, 527 80, 82, 85, 86, 89–91, 124, 140, 157, 201, map of 524–25 222, 232, 255, 266, 276, 277, 289, 296, proposed seat of government 476 307, 349, 409, 423, 480, 487, 493, 516, soil around 514, 619, 646 546, 588, 607, 629, 652 Frederik’s (or Friderich’s) Hospital 99, Dutch or English 40, 139, 253, 285, 367, 111, 169 391, 418, 613, 617, 618 Frederiksnagore 508, 530, 531 index 723

Frederiksnopel 36–37, 43, 48, 58, 469, at Frederiksberg 87, 113–14, 202, 226, 522, 539 260, 277, 313, 494, 648 abandonment 71–73, 200, 515 at Frederiksgave 500, 521 inventory 42 at Frederiksnopel 38, 42, 72, 116, 222 plantings 40 Meyer’s 202, 203, 242, 333 situation 36, 76–77 at Rosenborg (in Copenhagen) 304 See also Flindt; Isert Schiønning’s 263 Frederikssted (or Fridrichstæd, See also Botanical gardens Friederichstæd) (Flindt’s planta- Gardeners 538, 551, 558, 566, 593, 598 tion) 75, 90, 121, 126, 130, 139, 200, Garlieb, Peter Johann G. 542, 573, 614, 616, 290, 515 631, 681 Flindt’s reports 73, 75–76 Geography (and Geographers) 6–7, 51, 142, situation of 71, 74 326–27, 328n62, 358 Thonning on 117, 119, 135 of the Atlantic world 110 Woodard on 72–73 colonial 4, 9–10, 12, 15, 56, 206, 232, 272, Frederiksted (on St. Croix) 559 284, 455, 503 Free coloreds 371, 442, 466, 477, 567 of colonialism 1–15, 691 French Revolution 181, 358, 549 cultural 19, 454 Fridriksborg (fort) 418 of the Danish possessions 19, 20, 82, 98, Fruits 23, 84, 88n61, 113, 173, 228, 263, 331, 100, 131–34, 139, 149–71, 210, 258, 337, 334, 460, 483, 593, 657, 691 445, 454, 460, 471, 534, 558 African 26, 87, 101, 166, 177, 179, 334, economic 271 473, 551 historical 8 European 30 human 12 tropical 292, 315 physical 445, 516 West Indian 63, 144, 178, 538 political 322 Frydenlund (plantation) 44 plant 54, 55, 171–81, 209, 372, 650 Furniture 112, 162, 184, 256, 402 of West Africa 5, 7, 403, 556 Fute (or Pute) 118 world 6 Fyens Stiftstidende 479 Geology 7 Fynberg, Ole 76 George III 9n23, 224 Geosophy 6n13 Gã (or Gah) 12, 79, 131, 148n188, 151, 189–96, Ghana 1, 10–12, 14n34, 20 198, 202, 445, 508 Ghosts 180, 576 See also Accra Gibbon, Edward 358 Gabon 293, 629 Giede, Hans 305n19, 522, 525–27, 529 Galathea 636–37 Giessing, H. P. 637n24 Gallenas (or Gallinas) 642, 657 Gimavong 191–92 Gambia 23, 438, 588n60 Gin 381, 388, 406, 414, 421, 522, 529 Gambo River 615 Gins (cotton) 45, 46, 80, 148n189, 236 Game, wild 26, 63, 84, 102, 115, 163, 188, 190, Ginger 98, 201, 369, 662 237, 362, 460, 473, 474, 538 cultivation of 88, 144, 177, 216, 225, 538 Gandil, Edvard 470–71, 481, 482, 488, 490 Gneiss 156, 189, 197 Garavances. See Chickpeas Goats 29, 63, 115, 186, 473, 475, 597 Gardens (and Garden crops; Garden from Cape Verde Islands 375, 390 seeds) 78, 173, 190, 375, 596, 599, milk 186, 187 620, 666 races of 187 Bjørn’s 30 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 379 in the Danish West Indies 466n86, 692 Golconda 341 at Eibo 228, 235, 238 Gold 48, 65, 151, 189, 197, 322, 340, 396, 416 at Fort Christiansborg 308, 313, 390, 393, in Akyem 176, 198, 199, 397, 653, 654 396 dust 107, 293, 308 at Fort Kongenssteen 142, 146, 333 mining 198, 325, 654 near Fort Prindsenssteen 108, 332 panning 28–29 724 index

in Siberia 654 Grønberg 356, 495, 524, 525 trade in 29, 33, 35, 80, 88, 201, 246, Grundtvig (forts’ priest) 117 403–04, 406, 408, 426, 538, 589 Grundtvig, Nicolai 117 Gold Coast 10, 13, 15, 37, 101, 102, 156, 170, Guadeloupe 336, 640 256, 258–59, 281, 291, 295, 309–10, 321, Guavas 178, 263, 515 324, 346, 466, 467, 470, 553–54, 614, 618, Quayaquil 664 655, 673, 686, 688 Guinea Commission 13, 15, 360, 377, 378, Thonning’s definition 150–51 463, 478, 490, 511, 540–41, 543, 545, 591, Gonable. See Guulablé 615, 633, 651, 653, 656, 681, 690 Gonorrhea 182 appointment 4, 19, 20, 443, 447, 450 Goods 40, 84, 120, 140, 148, 155, 161, 207, archives 11, 14n34, 21, 24n25, 66, 106, 119, 220, 229, 361, 388–89, 413, 481, 492, 534, 134, 136, 149, 150, 171, 266, 314, 325, 535, 549, 569, 581, 604, 608 343–44, 419, 421, 448, 449, 456, 464, American 401, 644 491, 497, 500, 509, 528, 530, 536, 573, East Indian 2, 12 636, 639, 641, 655, 660–67, 670–71, 680 English 467, 469, 548 charge to 19, 449, 450–52, 454, 465, European 29, 81, 88, 104, 141, 199, 216, 530–31 412, 426, 599 debates within 561–72, 575–583, 583–91, inventory 34, 72, 147 609–11, 621–26, 643–650, 667–69, trade 25, 33, 38–39, 129, 260, 308, 387, 681–85 404, 406, 407, 438, 532, 572, 588–90, final opinion 234, 258–59, 516–19, 594, 624, 632, 673 533–41, 545, 546–561, 583, 591–609, Gorée 406, 629 626, 637–38, 639, 644–45, 654, 655, Gothenburg 103 659, 660–61, 669, 681, 691 Gout 185 Green Books 467, 646 Grain 31, 81, 98, 101, 122, 227, 420, 451, meetings 464–65, 546, 572–73, 638, 644, 590, 657 667, 669 cultivation 177, 475–76, 618 official reports to 452, 468–76, 481–89, European 338, 393 512, 521 harvest 166 quarterly reports to crown 443, 449, storage 75, 179 465, 476–77, 495–97, 510, 515–16, 519 trade 67, 102, 196, 201 research 10, 21, 24–25, 26, 32, 33, 37, 39, weevils in 476 75, 85, 112, 145, 146, 149, 219–21, 237, See also Maize; Millet 256, 278, 284, 288, 311, 454, 460–62, Grains of paradise 183, 538 465–67, 497, 512 Grand Bassam 404 Guinea Company 26, 27 Grand Sesters 404 Guinea Entrepreneurs 23, 33, 39–41, Grandees 255, 309, 310 44, 49, 57, 69, 503 Granite 156, 197, 474 Guinea fowl 29, 186 Grapes 63, 71, 88, 331, 521 Guinea worm 182, 475, 619, 202 Grasshoppers 445, 461, 476, 540 See also Ringworm Graticule 139 Gujana cotton 202 Great Britain 3, 686, 688 Gulf of Guinea 140, 144, 154, 293, abolition of slave trade 615 358, 620 emancipation of slaves 568, 641 Gums 31, 98, 369, 428, 506, 657 diplomatic negotiations with 569, 632 Gunable. See Guulablé industry and commerce 640, 658 Gunpowder 25, 38n77, 65, 201, 255, Great Ningo (hill) 176 276, 388, 401, 402, 406, 412, 526, 547, Greeks 654 607, 608 Greenland 69, 302, 511 Guns (or Flintlocks; Muskets; Rifles) 25, Greens 28, 78, 473 103, 148, 158n25, 188, 201, 283, 317, 364, Grenada 662 366, 403, 412, 413, 416, 447, 487, 594, Grey, Lord Earl 687 603, 686 Grids (land survey) 127, 317 forts’ 235, 276, 307, 333, 391, 418, 480 index 725

trade 148, 214, 388, 547 Hedges 174, 190, 235, 263, 317, 320, 332, 446, See also Field guns 547, 593, 666 Gunsmiths 101, 593 Heiberg, P. A. 221n214, 335n85 Guulablé (or Gonable; Gunable) 84, 157 Hein (a Brandenburger) 227 Guyana (or Guiana) 236, 357, 599, 642, Hein, Ludvig (of the Commission of 664–66, 677 Inquiry) 354, 358, 364, 366, 368, 370, 483 animosity towards Henrik Hager, Christian Frederik 74, 77n33, 78, Richter 420–21 80, 127 books ordered by 356–57 Hah-Tio 184 conflict with Christensen, 412, 413, Haiti 549, 664 420–21, 462–63 See also St. Domingue governor 383–385, 399–400, 415, 420, Hambro, Joseph 450–52, 545, 573, 683 421, 481, 521 Hambro, Carl 451, 612, 686 Hemp 47, 184, 504–06 Hamburg 38, 611, 643 Riga 103, 504, 507 Hamilton, Henry 228, 234 See also Fibers Hammocks (and Hammock bearers) 101, Hencke [Johan Phillip] 385, 386, 397–98 108, 114, 115, 118, 314, 394–95 Herald, Liberia 415 Handelstidende 103, 104, 324–25, 337, 373, Herbst (assistant) 138n149, 524, 526 374, 384, 385, 394, 401, 405–08, 527–28 Herds 461, 536, 593 Hanson (or Hansen), J. W. 613 Herodotus 661 Hansteen [Christopher] 357 Hibiscus 184, 190, 665 Harbors 104, 158, 381, 429, 445, 542 Hibiscus esculentus 180 Copenhagen 633 Hides 131, 98, 216, 266, 293, 361, 365, 366 Council 235, 239 Hindus 552, 604 at Fernando Po 430, 462 Hippopotami 153 lack of 207, 275, 559 Hofman (Bang), Niels 208 New Orleans 536 Holberg, Ludvig 379, 453 in Nicobar Islands 558 Holland (or the Netherlands) 187, 571, at Principe 158, 231, 293 589, 641, 679 unhealthfulness of 159, 170 Holm, Commandant 216, 268, 269, 292 at Sika 281 Holm (merchant) 471, 484, 501 Harmattan 167 Holten, Hans Severin (royal tutor) 212, coolness of 160, 163 213, 451 effect on vegetation, 162, 497, 514, Holten, Nicolai Abraham (of the Guinea 520, 647 Commission) 450–52, 569, 573, haze during 162, 164 638, 683 season 167, 393, 403, 475, 515 Home economics 125 winds 161–63, 166, 500, 540 Honey 29, 188, 189, 201, 361, 366 Harvests 122, 219, 229, 362 Honey Island 152 coffee 144, 253, 260, 265, 293, 367, 484, Honfleur 42 500, 520, 526, 527, 540, 562, 575, 586, Hope Smith, John 312 600, 612, 619, 649, 653, 663–66 Hornemann, Jens Wilken 53, 208, 209, corn 75, 240, 345, 346 304, 650 cotton 75, 80, 88, 144, 202, 227, 231, 648 advice on colonial literature 373–75 main (in July) 166, 178 reviews of botanical literature 171n66, provisions 473, 476 209–11 rice 63 Horses 186, 473, 475, 559, 563, 620 secondary 166, 178 from the Cape Verde Islands 205, 375 sugar 141, 346 at Fort Christiansborg 438 Hats 402, 474 in French Africa 428 Havana 527, 662, 665 Governor Lind’s recommendation Hawkeye (J. F. Cooper’s character) 412 regarding 437–440, 447, 448 Healing plants 258 lack of 315, 321 726 index

on Principe 292 varieties 117, 181 from Senegal 438 Indigo tinctoria 181n99 Hospital. See Frederiks Hospital Indigofera argentea 117 Houses 44, 72, 228, 263, 331–33, 360, 368, Indigoferæ 98 483, 484, 491, 525 Innes, William 468 construction 42, 87, 103, 115, 179, 189, 191, Inoculation 166 474, 475, 547, 565, 592, 597, 650 See also Vaccination ornamentation 191, 473–74 Insects 98n10, 165, 336, 365, 524 Housewares 402, 599 collections of 19, 95–96, 119, 131, 149, Huga 157 208, 302, 375n102, 471 Humboldt, Alexander von 7, 172n66, 357, in cotton 54, 235, 472–73, 648 372, 374–75, 389n47, 640, 661 and domestic animals 475 Hume (on the Volta) 283 driven out of homes by smoke 103 Humo (river) 151, 472, 498, 515 grass fires and 165 Hunting 101, 102, 187, 188, 197, 198, 199, 201, harmful 540 474, 665 in sugar cane 521 Hurricanes Inselbergs 152, 157, 176, 177, 536 absence of 26, 141, 158, 275, 293, 320, Instruction [of 1820] for the administration 445, 559, 664 of the royal establishments in (storms loosely so called) 165, 412, 590 Guinea 305–11, 400n77, 425, 454, 527, Hutchison, William 414 630 Hutton & Sons 574 Interpreters 109, 262, 277, 314, 382, 650 Hyaenas 186, 395, 473, 475 Inventories (property) 42, 354 Hydrocele 167 Inventory. See Goods Hydrographic survey. See Laurine Inventory slaves, forts’ 29, 72, 87, Mathilde; Lind 90, 101, 121, 126, 130, 140, 141, 217, Hyphaene 177 251, 269, 276, 291, 398, 437, Hyson tea 148 438, 561 Iron 204, 445 Iatropha Manihot. See Cassava in commerce 25, 148, 201, 401–02, 413, Idols 368, 576 526, 529 See also Fetish fittings 161, 260, 263, 475, 558, 597 Illness. See Sickness in soil 172, 189, 513 India (and Indians) 552, 559, 641 Swedish 366, 594 Danish possessions in 9, 19, 52, 54, 272, Irving, Washington 378 273, 296, 326, 349, 378, 490–92, 508, Isert, Paul Erdmann (colonist and forts’ 511, 529, 530–32, 555, 635, 636, 689 doctor) 21, 22, 30, 31, 55, 56, 77, 130, 209 rubber 506, 657 treaty with Atiambo (Obuobi trade 273 Atiemo) 36, 39, 41, 50, 58, 218, 270, See also East Indies. 281, 475, 500, 503, 534, 561, 565, 577, Indian Ocean 31n50, 308, 558 592, 645, 668–69, 684 Indigo 2, 26, 27, 38, 45, 46, 81, 88, 90, 216, and colony Frederiksnopel 23–24, 293, 315, 339, 347, 357, 362, 369, 373, 374, 32, 36–38, 40–43, 58, 71–72, 78, 84, 384, 424, 428, 492, 538, 587, 657, 662, 664 116–17, 126, 129, 140, 200, 204, 222, 281, experiments with 25, 98, 117, 131, 144, 330–31, 369, 424, 465, 494, 517, 522, 500, 521 585, 646 growing wild 28, 31, 108, 112, 113, 202, 410, documents examined by Guinea 513, 616 Commission 21, 24, 32 plants from Monrovia 495 and Ernst Kirstein 24–26, 49 in Principe 430 last letter 35–39, 39–40, 100 processing works, 112, 181, 206 letter to Banks 22–23 in Senegal 335 Reise nach Guinea 21, 23, 25, 26, 78, in Sierra Leone 63 100, 109, 113, 200, 327, 330, 397, 452, in Thonning’s orders 98 453–54, 467 index 727

relationship with Company Kiel 243–44, 664 officials 33–35, 39 Kiøge, Jens Adolf 33–34, 82, 235, 503 Schimmelmann’s instructions to 32–33, colonial ideas 30, 34–35, 50 215 Kipnasse, Johann 35, 40, 42, 43, 58 Thonning’s remarks on 21–22, 24 Kirstein, Ernst Philip 24–26, 32, Ishøy, Mortensen 234, 243, 244, 280 article in Minerva 60–62, 66–68, 453 Islam 555, 642, 656 Slave-trade Commission See also Mohammedans secretary 49, 65 Isle de Bourbon 262 See also Isert Isle (or Île) de France (or Mauritius) 103, Kitchen utensils 191, 402, 594 262, 552, 642 Kitiam (river) 657 Ivory (also Teeth; Tusks) 11, 29, 31, 33, 80, Kjærulf (officer) 298 88, 140, 201, 214, 246, 283, 293, 361, 366, Kjøbenhavnske lærde Efterretninger 382, 403–04, 406, 408, 426, 538, 657 55, 68 Knives 103, 178, 191, 366, 401, 403, 624 Jacobsen (merchant) 253 Københavnsposten 526n255 Jacquemontia ovalifolia 184 Kofoed (Miss) 378, 379 Jadosa (or Jadusa; Jodusa; Jadofa) 114, 119, Kong, Mountains of 285n28 145, 203, 241, 261, 269–70, 322, 323 Kongens Nytorv (in Copenhagen) 416 Jægerlyst (plantation) 45 Kongenssteen, Fort 43–45, 237, 245, 277, Jamaica 23, 64, 373, 381, 642, 662, 678 279, 287, 333, 348, 367, 369, 607, settlers from 620–21 651–52 Jansen, Christian 128, 143, 146, 202, 331–32 Asante army at 254–55 at Kongenssteen 142 construction of 30, 290, 523 and Thonning 119, 128–29, 692 control of the Volta and surrounding Jaundice 167, 180 country 84, 89, 124, 125, 265, 280, Java 534, 663 283, 325 Jefferson, Thomas 7, 9n23, 181 craftsmen at 236 Jodusa. See Jadosa description of 200 John VI (King of Portugal) 294 Flindt at 121, 123, 127, 130, 142, 146 Joiners (and Joinery) 256, 593 navigation to 145, 239, 359, 362 Joj-tjo 178 in ruins 360, 656 Jørgensen (miller) 355, 356 situation of 77, 102, 349 Journal des Débats 640 Thonning at 111, 118–119 Journal du Commerce 527 water supply 200 Just (Sergeant) 87 Koran 358 Jutland 327, 415, 499, 579n51 Kpone (or Ponni; Ponny) 38, 58, 72, 138, Juvenal 358 156, 200, 277, 509 proposed colonial depot 281–82 Katamansu, Battle of 539 See also Ponny (river) See also Dodowa Krenchel (naval officer) 382, 660 Kea, R. A. 13n33, 15 Krepe (or Krepeh) 12, 151, 196, 203 Keta (or Quitta; Qvitta) 1, 30, 78, 107–08, Flindt on 255, 280, 284 111, 112, 118, 131, 135, 151, 157, 176, 258, 280, language 605 309, 479, 677 slaves from 198 agriculture near 80, 108, 332 Krobo (or Krobbo; Crobbo) 36, 42, 194, fort at. See Prindsenssteen 255, 281, 474, 498, 503, 506, 508–09, lagoon. See Augna Songo 632n10, 655, 535 people of 194 Adangme people of 102 River 118 Asante attack on 284 slave trade at 479, 536 hills 175n73 soil at 108, 113 inselberg 176, 284, 653 Kettles 107, 381, 401 Isert’s treaty and 37 Kibi (in Akyem) 654 Mørck and 501, 502 728 index

palm-oil in 655 Thonning on 151, 167, 172, 176–77, 195, Krog, Lauritz 262 197, 198, 203, 233, 238, 309–10, 322, Kuku (hill) 331–32 445, 455, 460, 534–37 See also Frederiksberg Langsdorff, Baron 599, 648 Kumasi (or Coomassie) 340, 396, 400, 412, Lantanas 182 414, 501 Larteh. See Lahte Kwawu (or Kvahu, Qvahu) 12, 102, 151n6, Las Casas, Bartolomé 66, 379 198, 283 Lathe. See Lahte l’Heritier de Brutelle, Charles Louis Lather, Niels 30, 31, 45–46, 74, 124 de 117 Latitude 5, 6, 65, 135, 138, 151, 166, 175n73, 231, 233, 314, 382, 444, 497, 563, 625, 649, La Guaira (or Laguayra) 536, 563, 666, 690 625, 661 Laurine Mathilde 358–61, 365, 375, 382, Labadi 101, 114, 454, 473, 474, 501, 509, 524 564, 571, 589 Labarthe, Pierre 468 See also Lind Laborers 2, 42, 67, 73, 204, 215, 216, 251, Laxatives 182, 413 257, 260, 286, 314–16, 525, 549, 550, 575, Lead bars 402 586, 596, 598, 602, 606, 608, 663, 666, Leather 96, 185, 348, 375, 442, 474 676, 691 Leeward Coast 144 Chinese 552, 558 Leeward Islands 296 Hindu 552 Legitimate trade 129 hired 226, 255, 335, 461, 485, 492, Legon (hill) 172, 261, 332, 440, 472, 473, 482, 547, 673 483, 484, 512, 563, 565, 567, 595, 650 unfree 553, 554, 567, 584, 593, 594, 601, Meyer’s plantation at 241, 333, 423 607, 671 road over or around 331, 395, 474, Lagoons 48, 118, 131, 135, 152, 153, 176, 189, 489–90 210, 537 proposed seat of colonial govern- See also Ada Songo; Augna Songo ment 437, 447, 592 Lagos 118n81, 438 Lehmann (Fabriksdirecteur) 385 Lahte (or Larteh, Lathe) 116, 152, 167, 197, Lemons (and lemon trees) 27, 28, 72, 88, 535, 653 182, 183, 241, 263, 332, 366, 396 Lai 155–159, 176, 194–96, 277 Leopards (and Leopardskin) 103, 186, 187, Laloe (or Laloi) 47, 48, 152, 534 188, 201, 395, 461, 473, 475 See also Lagoons Liberia 105, 296, 468, 555, 567, 615, 621, Lamps 402 626, 648, 674, 676, 678 Lancaster, Joseph 326–27 Christensen on 427, 428 Lancastrian education system (or Herald 415 Monitorial or Mutual instruction) 326, Mørck’s visit 494–95 347, 370 Rehling on 491–93, 494 Land breeze 161 Libraries 55, 209, 349, 465, 654 Land survey (and surveyors) 7n19, 126–27, at Fort Christiansborg 356, 372–73, 389, 135, 138, 228, 264–65, 283, 294, 301–02, 392 305, 313, 314, 320n42, 460, 491, 524, 586, See also Royal Library 595, 596 Liebmann, Frederik 650, 683 Lander, Richard 467 Lime (for mortar) 29, 102, 156, 189, 204, Landholding 127, 369 279, 286, 315, 473, 529, 592 Landhuusholdningsselskabet 385 Lind, Henrik Gerhard 359, 370, 383–86, Landscape A (Thonning’s) 534 391, 397–99, 412, 450, 469, 470, 481, Landscape B (Thonning’s) 535 540, 645 Landscape C (Thonning’s) 536 and Akuapem plantations 375, 390–91, Landscape D (Thonning’s) 536–37 394, 395, 397, 399, 400, 410, Landscape E (Thonning’s) 537 488–89, 520 Landscapes 9, 10, 96, 114, 115, 127, 134, 171, Christensen’s characterization 383, 210, 213, 317, 361, 410, 493, 526 389–90, 393, 408 index 729

colonial proposals 397, 418–420, MacCarthy, Charles 466 435–43, 447–48 Mackerel 159 in Copenhagen 416, 420, 435, 462–63 MacLean, George 469, 562, 574, 618, 656 correspondence with and Carstensen 612, 613 Thonning 418–420 and Christensen 382, 413, 414 exploration of the Volta 359–362, 364, embassy to Kumasi 396 365, 366, 564–65, 632, 655 See also Mørck map of the Volta 138n149, 362–64, 456, Madden, R. 613 458–59, 478–79, 525n247 Madeira 104, 154, 345, 357, 359 obituary 478 port of call 403, 406 reports to the Guinea wine 413 Commission 454, 462 Madrid 85 Lind, Jenny 643 Mafee (on the Volta) 255–56, 279 Line. See Equator ‘Magister Bibendi’ 552 Linen (and Linens) 2, 28, 181, 402 See also Mørck Linnaeus, Carl 7, 52, 65n73, 98, 133, 172n66, Magnussen (assistant) 375, 383, 393, 189, 209, 690, 691 394, 412 Liqueurs 402 Mahogany 88, 256, 283, 349 Lithography 326 Maize 78, 292, 315, 334, 361, 366, 384, 385, Liverpool 64, 105, 657 428, 473, 474, 482, 512, 513, 540 ships 387, 401 brewing and distilling of 121, 122, 485 Livestock 45, 583 at Eibo 225, 331 See also Cattle at Frederikssted 75 Lobsters 159 grown by Africans 27–28, 177, 360, Lockjaw 167 483, 489 Locusts 189 mill to grind 571, 589 London 62, 64, 65, 419, 429, 452, 469, 502, storage 476 515, 528, 537, 545, 574, 617, 686 trade to West Indies 343–45, 354–55, cargoes to 408 370–71 Carstensen in 611–12, 679, 686 Malacca 641 Danish consul in 60n53, 466–67, Malaria 661 626–27 Malfi (or Malphi). See Mlefi Moe and Bjørn in 77–78 Malimba (River) 293 seeds from 416 Mallaga wine 179 ships 401 Malt 123, 190, 594 Long Mountains 285 Mamfe (or Mangfe) 116 Lost Paradise 381 Mampong (or Mangpong) 116, 653 See also Paradise Lost Manatees. See Sea cows Lowzow, Frederik 20n7, 273n6, 345n9, 416, Manchester 179, 385 614, 631 Manchineel (or Mancinelle) 181 and the Guinea Commission 448, 487, Mangrove 119, 153 540–41, 545 bark 324 administration of Chamber of woods 177, 196, 229 Customs 416–18, 532, 541–42 Manioc 492 Lumber 29, 73, 216, 256, 361, 364, Manufactures 184, 315, 325, 385, 474, 481, 426, 442 504, 531, 548, 581, 608, 658 Lunches 602 British 62, 467, 548 Lutterodt (or Lutterod), Georg 298, 309, Danish 25, 339, 438, 542 394–95, 420n120, 471, 590, 650, 660 European 2, 7, 96 and Christensen 386, 388 German 366 in battle with Krobo 501 Manuring 178, 313 plantation in Apuapem 386, 394, 484, Maps (and Mapping) 3n10, 6, 27, 69, 488, 500, 562, 622 82–84, 96, 127, 154n13, 156, 195n158, 209, Lye 184 283, 285, 301, 355, 490, 503–04 730 index

Gandil’s 481–83, 488, 490 disputes with Council 241, 267–70 Grønberg’s 524–25 introduction of plants by 80, 129, and the Guinea Commission 454, 144, 236 460–61, 464–65, 470–71, 495, 512, 533, plantation at Accra 90, 143, 202, 534, 611, 638, 645, 680 240, 242 Lind’s 279, 362–64, 478 plantation in Akuapem 144–46, 203, Oxholm’s 317, 319 236, 241, 253, 255, 259–60, 278, 321, Thonning’s 19, 38, 84, 110, 114, 132–39, 333, 375n103, 395, 409, 465 149, 151, 153, 176, 201, 229, 233, 258, 289, plantation at Togbloku, near 291, 326–29, 444, 455–60, 472, 498, Volta 43–45, 50, 74, 124, 143 633, 653–54, 656, 686–88 plantings at Legon 241, 333, 423 Wrisberg’s 292, 294, 349 Middens 360 Marble 43 Militias 425, 428–29, 461, 487–88 Marie-Galante 336 Lind on 436–37 Marriage Thonning on 446–48, 555, 577, 590, 594, Monogamous 33, 221, 436, 554, 602 597, 598, 600, 602, 603, 607, 669 Polygamous 192 Milk (cows’) 29, 186, 438 Mars 264 Mills (and Millers) 46, 91, 346, 356, 385, Martfeldt, Christian 67 451, 594 Martinique 447 See also Grønberg; Jørgensen; Sawmills; Mascarene Islands 665 Windmills Mason (captain) 144n173 Miller, Philip 373–74 Masons 46, 101, 216, 438, 474, 550, 566, 593 Millet 27, 74, 98, 177, 315, 343, 344 Massachusetts 104 Millettia irvinei 184 Materia medica 98, 210 Millipedes 565 Material culture 7 Mills, Samuel 295 Mats (woven) 103, 156, 179, 184, 191 Milton, John 258, 381 Matthews, J. R. 63n65, 64 Mineralogy 7, 54, 65, 213, 302, 304 Mattokue (tree) 245 Minerals 98, 189, 197, 415, 653, 657 Mauritius. See Isle de France Minerva Mead 125 on the slave trade and its abolition 60, Mediators. See Brokers 61, 65–68, 224, 232, 336 Medicinal plants 113, 178–82, 184, 208, 210, Kirstein’s essay in 60–61, 453 211, 214, 258, 473 on Sierra Leone 59, 61–64 Medicine 99, 216, 308, 358, 439, 567, Sneedorff’s articles in 64–65 579, 607 Mines 28–29, 47–48, 176, 198, 397, 548, African 180, 192, 338, 369 653–54 European 169, 211 Ministry of finance. See Finance Collegium Mejer (or Meier). See Meyer Mint 180, 183 Melia Angustifolia 186 Mirrors 366, 402 Melons 88, 257 Mission (Basel). See Basel Mission See also Watermelons Mission, Royal Danish African 33 Mentality (or Character) 167, 206, 255, 297, Mission Society (Danish). See Danish 340–41, 518, 567, 570, 575, 578, 580–82, Mission Society 622, 624, 644, 660, 676, 682–83 Missionaries 46, 291, 304–05, 351, 381, 404, Meredith, Henry 256–59, 430, 467, 660 604, 605, 614, 637n24, 640 Mesurado, Cape. See Cape Mesurado Basel 385–86, 397–98, 501, 535, 622, 632 Meteorological observations 471–2 Jamaican 620–621 Methodists 274 Moravian 26, 147, 216 Meyer (or Meier, Mejer), Peder 107, 110, Mist 161, 164, 165 124, 129, 133, 145, 224, 261, 262, 264, 266, Mitragyna inermis 112n69 517, 667 Mlefi (or Malfi, Malphi) 102, 153, 154n13, colonial proposals 215–17, 225, 226, 176, 239, 246 230–31 Flindt to 255, 256, 279–80 index 731

Isert to 36 Morocco 642 Lind to 361–62, 564 Mortality 171, 495, 518, 552, 579 Model plantations 219, 551, 566 among Africans 118 Moe, Hans 76–78, 80, 82 among Europeans 30, 107, 296, 409, Mogador 642 437, 489 Mohammedans (and Muslims) 643 on Fernando Po 430, 470 See also Islam in Guinea Commission’s report 623 Molbech, Christian 329–30, 336, 341, 410 among missionaries 604, 620 Moles (and Breakwaters) 157–58, 445, 461, on Principe 293 488, 534 among seamen 170, 428 Moltke, A. W. 530–31, 532 among West Indian slaves 221 Moltke, Adam Ludvig 378, 381, 389, among women 169 408, 416 Mortar 189, 597 Moltke, Frederik 121, 123, 220n12, 234 Mortars 191 Monitorial instruction. See Lancastrian Mosquitoes 169, 189, 475 education system Mosquito nets 475 Monkeys 226 Moth, Peter 477–78 Monrad, Hans Chr. 241 Mucuna sloanei 185 article in Nyt Aftenblad 340–41 Mühlenfels, Balthazar Frederik 302 Bidrag til en skildring af Guinea- Mulattoes 16, 30, 295, 297, 334, 381, 391, Kysten 327–35, 356, 452, 467 402, 425, 474, 486, 562, 566, 574, 605, 630, Christensen on 391, 395, 397, 409–10, 633n14, 643 478 See also Danish-Africans; Eurafricans reviews of 335–39 Mulatto account 148 support of Meyer 241–42 Mules 46, 438, 559, 563 Thonning’s reading of 344, 660 from the Cape Verde Islands 147, 205 See also Molbech from the West Indies 45, 620 Monrovia Muncaster, John Pennington 64 Christensen on 379–82, 404, 415 Mundt, Christopher 358, 360, 367, 369, 371 Mørck’s visit 490, 495 Muscat 643 Rehling’s visit 491–93, 555 Museum Commission 302, 303–04 Monsoon winds 166 Musical instruments, African 191 Montfort, Denis de 658 Musicians 439, 447 Moorings 158, 439, 461 Muskets. See Guns Morality 305, 339, 446, 551, 566, 602, 603 Muslin 112 Mørck (or Mørch), Frederik 490, 494, 508, Mussels 473 512, 527, 529, 540, 581, 646 Muteku 179 agricultural experiments 495, 500, Mutual instruction. See Lancastrian 504–07, 520–21, 647 education system Carstensen on 619 on colonial prospects 513–15, 521, 637, Naimbanna 63 660, 683 Najad 490 conflict with Krobo 501 Nåjo (or Nojo) (inselberg) 152, 157, 176, dispute with Maclean 500, 501–04, 645 282–83, 284, 536, 653 excursions on coast 500–01 Nankeens 91, 179 at Frederiksgave 500 Naples 641 Giede on 522, 525 Napoleon I (Bonaparte) 247 Guinea Commission’s inquiries Napoleonic Wars 20, 251, 273, 450 of 490, 497 Narrative of the Ashantee war letters to Christensen 497–500 (Ricketts’s) 468 naval career 490, 525 Nashville 537 propensity to drink 522 Natural history 7–8, 214, 357, 471, 648, 665 Thonning’s reading of 515, 647–49 institutions of 50–51, 53–54 Morning Post 65 and government 52 732 index

Isert and 22–23 Nully, Peter de 466 practical and economic aspects Nungo. See Ningo of 51–52 Nurseries 75, 144, 216, 217, 228, 251, 253, Thonning and 19–20, 55, 95, 97–100, 263, 420, 520, 547, 551, 566, 593, 595, 608, 111, 118, 130–33, 180, 189, 208, 212, 648, 666 213, 689 Nuts 87, 657 See also Collections; Natural History See also Coconuts Society Nye Prøve (plantation) 394, 395, 472, 484 Natural History Museum 54, 302, 372, Nyerup, Rasmus 336 375n102, 451, 471, 650 Nyeste Skilderie af Kjøbenhavn 340 Natural History Society, Danish 50, 95, 98, Nyt Aftenblad 336, 339, 340, 378 133, 171, 208, 301, 302 course of instruction of 53–55, 302 Oarsmen 592 and Danish colonies 52, 54–56, 86, 233 See also Paddlers founding of 51–53 Oats 103, 396 membership in 52–53 Obuobi Atiemo (or Atiambo) 36, 37, 39, Skrivter 53, 54–55, 208 41, 503 Naturalia 106, 208 Oeder, Georg Christian 67 Nature (book of) 214 Officinals 106 Nauclea africana 112 Ofjum (waterfall) 176 Nautical charts administration 134 Ohsten, Karl Fredrik 532 Needle-leaf trees (conifers) 315 Oil palms. See Palms Netherlands. See Holland Okra 177 Nets (fishing) 28, 184, 188, 474 Old coasters 109, 131, 367, 526 Neutral-flag shipping 531 Oldfieldia africana 428 New Calabar (river) 528 Olrick, Bendt 69, 71, 74, 76, 79–80, 140 New London 70, 125 Oncoba spinosa 185 New Orleans 478, 536–37 Onions 72 New South Wales 104, 357, 635n19 See also Shallots New York 74, 346, 359 Orange trees 72, 88, 144, 225, 241, 261, Nicobar Islands 3n10, 31n50, 325, 532, 558, 263, 366 636–37 Ordrup (corporal) 574 Niger 511, 555, 574, 643 Oriental time 119 exploration 467, 622, 675 See also Harmattan mouths 140, 556 Ørnen 660 Nigritia 163, 165 Orphans 217, 348, 351, 397, 442 Nile 42, 661 Ørsted, A. S. 59n51 See also Egypt Ørsted, H. C. 304, 357, 472n107 Ningo (or Nungo) 59, 101, 112, 157, 176, Osai Kona 114 200, 509, 513 Ostrich feathers 657 See also Fredensborg, Fort Osu (or Ussu; Ussue) 113, 151, 199, 240, 260, Nojo. See Nåjo 420, 484, 501, 509, 633, 638, 653, 659 Nomenclature (scientific) 117n78, 171, people of 194, 260, 283, 400, 412 210n209, 211 town 215 Nopal cactus 336 situation 157 Nordenskiold, Augustus 65 Osudoku (or Ussudeku; Ussudoko; Nørregaard (also Nørregård) 349, 447n34, Ussutekue) 176, 283, 284 577n48, 611, 673n2, 674n7 Otaheiti sugar cane. See Sugar cane Norsk Magazin for Naturvidenskaberne 357 Oudney, Walter 357, 467 Norway 54, 302, 621 Ouidah (or Whydah) 22, 228, 347, 528, 613, Denmark’s loss of 273, 285n24, 349, 642, 656 416n113 Overpopulation 634–35 Nova Scotia 62 Overseers 321, 365, 369, 371, 442, 486, 489, Nubia 102, 657 562, 597, 599 index 733

West Indian 438, 439, 447, 448n37, 566 Philadelphia 66, 104, 294, 380 Ovid 358 Philosophical Magazine 658 Oxen 186, 205, 563, 567, 594, 597 Physalis angulata 182 Oxholm, Peter Lotharius 317n40, 319 Piastres. See Doubloons Oysters 101, 102, 159, 498, 537 Pigeons 186 Oyster shells 204, 360, 473 Pigs (or Swine) 29, 186–188, 263, 476, 597 Paddles 155 Wild 114, 188, 226, 476 Paddlers 101, 155, 157, 548 Pineapples (and Fiber) 28, 178, 184, 193, See also Oarsmen 335, 473, 474, 504, 507, 521 Palavers 493, 614, 625 Pioneers, or the sources of the Susquehanna Palms (J. F. Cooper’s) 380 oil (or wine) 177, 179–80, 473, 475, 528, Pipes 201, 308, 402 538, 548, 558, 593, 596, 597, 599, 603, Pirates 403, 431, 635 616, 619, 666 Pisang 28, 115, 173, 483 Phoenix 177, 179 Plane tables (surveyors’) 524 Palm fiber 324, 474 Planks 29, 76, 155, 185, 245, 402, 445, Palm oil 179, 292, 538, 583, 600, 663 538, 594 culinary uses of 190 Plantation agriculture 3, 21, 49, 50, 57, 217, factories 468, 498 240, 265, 330, 375, 391, 445, 486, 490, 517, preparation of 655, 179n88 548, 554, 585, 615, 619, 646 soap 179, 184, 474, 528 Platillas, royal 148 trade 31, 88, 201, 293, 361, 366, 403, 426, Pløtz (officer) 412 501, 527–28, 588 Plumbago 180 Palm wine 167, 114, 179, 180, 292, 484, 616 Poison 333, 421, 487, 579, 660 distilled 227, 396 Poisonous plants and animals 181–183, 188, Papayas 178 475 Papers relating to the colony of Sierra Police 437, 554, 558, 601, 602 Leone 468 Polytechnic Institute 385 Paradise Lost 258 Pompo 263, 472 See also Lost Paradise Pongpong 176 Parasols 388, 402, 416 Ponny (or Ponni). See Kpone Paris 103, 211n214, 335, 373, 385 Ponny (river) 47, 48, 101, 119, 135, 498, Parker, William 183 281–82, 283, 284, 498 Parliament (Great Britian) 49, 59, 61, 64, Popo 333, 419, 480, 578 170, 224, 528, 639, 641, 643, 656, 679 Porgue Bank 156 papers or proceedings of 465, 466, 467, Pork 187, 406, 538 476, 533, 556, 687, 688 Portonovo (or Porto Nowo) 46, 80 Pawns 195, 215, 217, 483, 488n140, 552 Portugal 104, 187, 231, 284, 287–89, 419, Peace of Vienna 416n113 430, 641 Peas 78, 103, 257 Portuguese 1, 63, 225, 232, 255, 285 Peasantry 67, 115, 576 Congo 556 Pedersen, Peder 294 explorers 13, 153 Peel, Robert 643 government in Brazil 287, 293–94, 664 Pelicans 153 islands 30, 144, 147, 231 Penang 641 language 37, 43n90, 155, 164 Penzance 590 slave trade 430–31, 479, 642 Peppers 98, 177, 473 Postlethwayt, Malachy 104–05 Perrollet (botanist) 336 Potash 348, 365, 442 Persians 642 Poultry 63, 538 Perspiration 159, 162, 163, 393 Pradt, M. (Dominique Georges Frédéric) Peru 415, 660–61 de 468 Petrarch 358 Prætorius, Jeppe (merchant) 590 Pharmacy 358, 567 Pram, Christen 66 734 index prams 256, 279, 283 Quitto-bean. See Chickpeas Prampram 139, 283, 290, 322, 370, 444, 462, Qvahu. See Kwawu 468, 498, 558, 562 British claim to 419 Rabe (captain) 377, 379, 381, 382, 387, Prevailing winds. See Winds 405–08 Prickly-pear cactus 102, 190, 317, 473 Racism 15, 33 Prince’s (or Princess; Printzes) Island. See Rahbek, Knud 68n85, 336 Principe Rainy seasons 88, 113, 152, 164, 165–66, 195, Princesse Wilhelmine’s Island 360, 197, 199, 202, 205, 227, 267, 278, 313, 379, 364, 367 403, 406, 412, 414, 420, 472, 475, 483, 498, Principe (or Prince’s, Princess; or Printzes 500, 526, 535, 551, 573, 575, 648 Island) 158, 283, 324, 405, 407, 421, Raisins 402 431, 438, 619 Randers (Denmark) 416 Christensen on 424, 426, 430 Rask, Rasmus 394n60 Flindt to 225 Raw materials 62, 122, 125, 485, 558, 568 plant introductions from 144, 225, 226, Rawert, Ole 373, 374–75 230, 430 Raynal, Abbé 374, 375, 453, 467 Wrisberg’s map of 294 Réaumur, René 159 Wrisbergs (Johan and Philip) on 231– Reefs 156, 429 32, 284–85, 286–89, 291–94 Rehling, Johannes 491–94, 555 Prindsenssteen (Fort) 30, 80, 102, 108–09, Reiersen, Jens 278n21, 297, 298 118, 135, 136, 153, 154, 157, 177, 196, 200, Reinhardt, Johannes 54, 302–03, 372, 451 262, 290, 292, 296, 320, 347, 349–50, 360, Reise in die Æqvinoctialgegende 357, 374 409, 523, 578, 607, 630, 652, 660, 686 Reise nach Guinea 21n10, 78, 467 agriculture near 88, 108, 332 Reitzel, Carl Andreas (bookseller) 356n42 on closing 84, 86, 88–89, 265, 277 Relics 576, 604 slave trade from vicinity of 198, 423, Religion 6, 64, 216, 550, 576, 642 479, 650–51 African 103, 191–93, 197, 201, 368, 564, Prize courts 103, 583, 684 576, 604 Provincial Estates Assemblies. See Estates European 427, 437, 486, 555, 557, 561, Asemblies 582, 584, 591, 601, 604–05, 609, 620, Prunes 402 660, 686 Public lands of the United States 7n19, 127 Remidores 155 Puerto Cabello 536 See also Oarsmen; Paddlers Puerto Rico (or Porto Rico) 85, 447, 477, Report and minutes of evidence (on Sierra 537, 566 Leone and Fernando Po) 468 Purges 168 Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into Pute. See Fute the State of the Colony of Sierra Pythons 119 Leone 468 Pytto 106, 167 Republics 13, 40, 104, 126, 193, 281, 309, 310, See also Beer 539, 570, 674 Resins 98, 112, 185 Quarterly reports (Guinea Commission’s). Reventlow-Criminil, Heinrich 679 See Guinea Commission Revue encyclopédique 211, 335–36 Quartz 513, 654 Rheumatism 182 Quau 361 Rice 98, 216, 373, 410, 423, 473, 490, 657, Quau Rodjabæ 361 663 Quays 439 Carolina 63 Questions (Bargum’s) 27 in Liberia 428 Questions (Thonning’s) 20, 452, 454, Meyer’s experiments 45, 144 460–62, 468 on Principe 292, 293 responses from coast to 468–470, 470, in Sierra Leone 63 471–476, 481, 483–87, 487–89 Thonning on 177, 201, 315, 538 Quitta (or Qvitta). See Keta by the Volta 113, 203, 349, 362, 366, 367 index 735

Richardson (agent of the Anti-slavery Rosencrantz, Niels 285, 287–88, 294 Society) 642 Rosencrantz (ship) 590 Richelieu, Johan Christopher 343, 385, 590 Rosenstand-Goiske, Philip 67, 100n17, 271 colonial proposal advanced by 348, 349, Rossar (or Rosarre)-Plads (i. e., agricultural 351–52, 353, 442 clearing) 112, 334 and maize 343–45, 589 Royal Library 256, 637, 657, 659, 661–62 plantation purchased by 347, 354, 358, Rubber 506, 657 372, 395 Rum 38n77, 148, 202, 308, 334, 347, 381, Richter, Henrik 370–71, 382, 386, 390–92, 388, 401, 402, 405, 485, 526, 588, 637 396, 397, 400, 412, 413, 425, 438, 569, 572, Russia 641, 654, 663 582–83, 587, 650, 660 Russwurm, John Brown 381, 415 and Christensen 386, 388, 392, 394, 401, Ryberg, Niels 451 405, 414 Rye 396 at Dodowa 411 and Hein 420–21, 462 Sabers 402, 413, 414 household of 402 Saccharum 98 library of 394 Sacrifices 192–93, 604 and Mørck 498, 501 human 340, 556, 580, 633, 638, 653, plantation purchased by 375, 387, 396, 659–60 409, 484, 488, 526 Sacumo-fjo (or Sacumofyo; Sakumo-Fyo) and Thonning 256, 296, 400, 529, (river) 138n150, 175, 195, 322, 323, 454, 573–75 462, 472, 473, 490, 513, 524, 653 Richter, Johan 145, 236, 255, 256, 268, canoe-building on 152 277n20, 296–97, 486 as eastern boundary of Gold Ricketts, H. I. 468 Coast 150–51 Ridley, Joshua (Henrik Richter’s agent) 412 Mørck’s exploration of 497–98 Rifles. See Guns navigability of 152, 461, 498 Rigsarkivet (Danish National Archives) 4, Thonning’s descriptions of 150–52, 157, 134, 464, 680 172, 188 Riis, Andreas 501, 535, 620–21, 622, 624, as transportation artery to 632, 634 Akuapem 488, 534–35 Ringworm 182 as western boundary of proposed Rio de Janeiro 287, 599, 664 colony 274, 419–20, 423, 445, 469 Rio Pongas 642 Sacumo-nupa (river) 172, 176, 195, 323, 498 Rio Volta. See Volta Sailcloth 504 Roadsteads 159, 170, 172, 275, 445, 461, St. Andreas Bay 404 493, 559 St. Barthélemy 289, 296 Robinia 112, 179 St. Benito (river) 293 Rockets 14, 501, 650 St. Croix (Danish West Indies) 43, 69, 221, Rohr, Julius Benjamin von 54, 75, 81, 86, 232, 355, 477, 558, 559, 587, 670 127, 465, 517 acre 369, 596, 666 and Banks 70–71 botany on 54–55 botany 50, 52, 55 agricultural and colonial example of 56, cotton research 54, 55, 58, 202, 647, 648 79, 147, 202, 203, 317, 374, 442, 466, 518, expedition to West Africa 50, 56–58, 60, 560, 568, 596, 637, 649 68, 69–70, 71, 73–74, 97, 122, 125, 129, Flindt to 57–58, 69 264, 585 grid survey of 127, 317, 319 in North America 70 maize trade to 343, 346–47, 364–65 Rømer, Ludewig 1–2, 7, 26, 153–54n13, plantation experts from 42, 70, 72–73 340–41, 452–53 Saint Domingue (or St. Domingo) 28, 42, Rønne, Bone Falck 385, 397–98 220, 357, 549 Rope 184, 324, 504–507 See also Haiti Rosen, D. 637n24 St. George del Mina. See Elmina Rosenborg Castle (in Copenhagen) 304 St. Jago (Cape Verdes Islands) 147, 205 736 index

St. James (Fort) 139, 157, 408, 418, 419, and the Slave-trade Commission 49, 444–45, 468, 469, 480, 490, 612 219, 222–23, 690 St. John (Danish West Indies) 466 and Thonning 207, 208, 212, 247, 271, St. Julien 381 314, 351, 685 See also Wine Schiønning, Christian 89, 110, 120, 133, 216, Saint Louis (or Saint-Louis) 335, 336, 629 234, 236, 247, 256, 267, 268–70, 296, 472, St. Paul, Cape. See Cape St. Paul 551, 565 St. Paul River (Liberia) 296 coffee plantation 251–54, 257–58, St. Thomas (Danish West Indies) 56, 260–64, 265, 266, 311, 313, 338, 372, 346, 466 395, 409, 465, 517, 577, 586–87, St. (or São) Thomé (or Thomas) 254, 646, 648 293, 426 and colonization 264 Sakumo-Fyo. See Sacumo-fjo conflicts with the Africans 254–255, Salt 259–60, 264–65, 266, 278, 321, air 118, 161, 172, 206, 210, 438, 475 577–78, 586 fish 188, 247, 365, 406 and Meredith 256–58 flux 180 excursions with Thonning 108, 114–17, in lagoons 101, 152, 176, 189 135, 137–38 -making 101, 102, 196, 360 linguistic skills 132 marshes 229–30, 237 Schlegel, J. F. W. 453 pans 246 Schmidt-Phiseldek (also -Phiseldeck) 389, in soil 28, 113, 122, 143, 153, 163, 203 417 trade 195–98, 237, 246, 247, 360–62, 599 Scholten, Peter von 371, 417, 442, 466, water 120, 139, 153, 195, 237, 360, 456, 477, 670 474, 498 School for Scandal (Richard Salts, English 413, 416 Sheridan’s) 537 Saltpeter 98, 113 Schooners 239, 281, 381, 396n63, 402, Sandals 190 407, 536 Sandalwood 113 Schouw, J. F. 54 Sandstone 156, 189, 204 atlas of plant geography, 209, 372 Sannom, F. 472n107, 574 Grundtræk til en almindelig Sanseveria 184 Plantegeographie 171n66, 209 Sapodilla 263 Schumacher, C. F. 106, 111, 131, 212 Sass, Matthias Wilhelm 377–78 at Frederiks Hospital 99, 169 Sawmills 43, 76 lectures for Natural History Society 55 Scandinavia 12, 214, 426, 444 and Thonning’s Guinea flora 150n3, Schall (Mme.) 489n141 209–12, 473n109 Schiller, J. C. F. 379 Scumacher, Heinrich Christian 301–02, Schimmelmann, Ernst 45–46, 55, 320n42 78–79, 85, 217, 254n12, 264, 267, Science 51, 74, 124, 125, 131, 143, 174, 210, 212, 304, 366 371, 372, 451 and Bjørn 41–42, 43–44, 46, 49–50 and colonialism 658, 692 and a “colonial institute” 219–224 Enlightenment Countess 40 natural 19, 53, 86, 99, 212, 302, 357 and Flindt 42–43, 46–48, 57–58, plant 54, 55 71–74, 75, 121–25, 127–28, 228, western 211 233, 239 of war 289 and Frederik VI 24, 32 Scorpions 188, 475, 565 and Isert’s colony 23–24, 30, 32–34, Scrofula 182 35–39, 40, 58, 71, 585, 645 Scythians 577 to Kiøge 33–34, 39 Sea breeze 161, 162, 166, 172–174, 210, 238, and Meyer 44–45 346, 382 papers 32, 60n53, 295 Sea cows (or Dugongs; Manatees) 283, 303 and von Rohr 50, 55–57, 70, 129 Seamen 170, 273, 280, 283, 587 index 737

Seashells 156, 159 African remedies for 180, 182, 183, 191 Seasons 6, 101, 131, 139, 152, 153, 159, 160, See also Climate fever 162, 163–64, 165–66, 167, 172, 186, 195, 199, Sierra Leone 23, 63, 253, 275, 324, 346, 356, 202, 205, 227, 229, 242, 245, 259, 267, 275, 357, 414, 428, 468, 528, 552, 556, 626, 642, 278, 364, 379, 406, 414, 430, 472, 497, 535, 676, 678 559, 601, 648 admiralty court at 469, 583 agricultural 88, 313, 334, 346, 393, Christensen on 428 402–03 colonial project in 60, 71, 81, 104–105, effect on vegetation 107, 164, 166, 475, 120, 141, 205, 338 497, 526, 575 Danish Commission of Investigation See also Harmattan; Rainy seasons regarding 367 Seeds (or Seedlings) 38, 42, 80, 88, 90, 114, parliamentary proceedings and papers 117, 122, 131, 144, 146, 147, 160, 173, 177–79, on 467, 556 184, 186, 203, 222, 225, 236, 269, 313, 321, reports on in Minerva 59, 61–65, 324, 336, 338, 375, 389, 396, 416, 426, 430, 68, 336 473, 495, 520, 521, 538, 551, 635, 647, 648, slaves freed from slave-ships to 641, 675 665, 691 Sierra Leone Company 59, 60n53, 68, Seeong Boo (river) 657 223n15, Sehested, Ove 52, 55, 296, 297, 378 Substance of the Report of the Court of insect collection 302 Directors of 61–64 Sehested, J. R. 378, 529 Sika (or Sikka) 38, 281 Seminarians 582, 605, 606 See also Kpone Seneca 634 Silk (and silk-cotton) 28, 90, 402, 416 Senegal 23, 184, 356, 438, 439 Silk-cotton tree. See Bombax French colony in 335, 336, 346, 556, 615, Singapore 637, 641 629, 630 Sinkesu (or Sinkesue). See Cinques Sous Senegambia 162, 163, 556, 588 Sinkesu Bank 139, 156, 159, 188 Serampore 491, 636 Sirsa 180 Serfs 32, 194, 424, 461, 483, 487, 556, 577, Sjælland 37, 132n127, 283, 386 586, 673 Sjai. See Shai as euphemism for slaves 194, 594, 597 Skins 98, 201, 266, 303, 361, 657 Settlers 4, 26, 33, 44, 71, 72, 130, 222, 330, Slave Coast 150–51, 156, 172, 176, 186, 232 411, 436, 438, 445, 447, 487, 491, 492–93, Slave ships (or Blackbirders; Slavers) 170, 536, 537, 550, 551, 555, 558, 563, 565, 592, 287, 401, 423, 431, 480, 572, 631, 640, 642 594, 606, 620–21, 635 provisions for 201, 347, 536, 565 Settra Krou 404 slaves rescued from 469, 491, 556, Shai (or Shay; Sjai) 176, 255, 284, 509, 653 641, 675 Shallots 28, 177 Slave rebellions 220, 221, 549 Sharp, Granville 63 Slave trade 2, 3, 7, 25, 26, 31, 34, 44–49, 50, Shaving gear 402 59, 61, 62–64, 65–67, 68, 69, 76, 77, Shay. See Shai 80–82, 84, 85, 96, 129, 143, 166, 170, 195, Sheep 63, 115, 186, 187, 192, 473, 475, 597 200, 202, 204, 205, 217, 218, 222, 226, short-haired 29 232, 241, 271, 291, 309, 316, 325, 340, 372, Sherbro 642 381, 386, 403, 422, 423, 429, 430–31, 552, Sheridan, Richard 537 557, 608, 639, 640, 642, 643, 656–57, Shipping 104, 275, 293, 355, 366, 551, 559 688–89 Danish 223, 255, 339, 438, 449, 531, 549, within Africa 198, 199, 480–81, 555, 557, 560, 571, 582, 617, 624 552–53, 584 Shoes 216, 402, 406, 412, 474 to Brazil 287, 288n30, 423, 583 Shrimp 102 to Cuba 527, 639, 642 Siberia 654 to Egypt and Turkey 553 Sickness (or Illness) 51, 107, 118, 124, 140, suppression of 287, 397, 431, 462, 470, 159, 160, 164, 167, 192, 193, 196, 247, 388, 479–80, 528, 529, 557, 572, 574, 583, 407, 493, 495, 529, 579, 601, 619, 655 615, 639, 650–52, 656, 674–75, 677, 684 738 index

Slave-trade Commission 49, 145, 147, 226, Thonning on 113, 117, 119, 161, 172–73, 175, 231, 232, 284 177, 178, 186, 195, 197, 202–03, 230, 238, and African colonialism 50, 59, 80–82, 243, 315, 535, 537, 648 84–85, 218, 221–24 Sommer, Morten 212, 213 demographic projections 50, 219 Songaw Lagoon. See Ada Songo and the African forts 80, 84, 89, 91 Sound (Øresund) 417, 542 recommendations regarding abolition Soundings 139, 239, 280, 349, 364 of Denmark’s Atlantic slave South Pacific 577 trade 59–60, 62, 66, 67 South Sea Islands 23 and Thonning 109, 207, 219, 221, 222, Sovereignty 614, 668 230, 234, 690 African 480 Slavery 232, 340, 639–41, 642, Danish 352, 636, 684 643, 656 European 616, 631 in Africa 431, 539, 584, 671 Spain 66, 85, 470, 635, 641 in Brazil 692 Spaniards 71, 105, 430, 574 in the West Indies 3, 548, 620, 670 Species plantarum (Linnaeus’s) 117 in the Guinea Commission’s final Spells 579 opinion 554–55, 561, 582, 600, Spices 11, 63, 203, 339, 445, 473, 598, 609, 661 666, 691 in the New World 66, 431 Spiders 475 in the United States 380, 641 Spinning 78, 375–76 See also Abolition; Emancipation mills 385 Sloane, Hans 373 Spirits 184, 193 Sloops 72, 358, 375, 564, 589, 655 Spirits (ardent) 179, 190, 192, 226, 242, 266, See also Laurine Mathilde 379, 564, 591, 599, 625 Smallpox 166, 338 distilling of 121–124, 461, 485 Smeathman, Henry 20n5 preserving specimens with 95, 97, 303 Smith (or Schmidt), Ole Haaslund 111–12, trade 25, 65, 308, 364, 366, 400, 402, 404, 119, 130, 133, 139–40 407, 547, 608, 657 Smiths (and Smithing) 42, 46, 76, 101, 178, Spoilage 346, 590 199, 216, 313, 438, 474, 565–66, 593 Sponges 184 Snakes 102, 165, 303, 461, 475 Spring tides 154, 155, 162, 166 Sneedorff, Frederik 64–65, 336 Squadron, West African 642, 679 Snuff 402 Square sails 156 Snuffboxes 185 Statistics 100, 219, 453, 493, 508–09, Soap 549, 663 arsenic 303 Steam engines 355, 385, 451 manufacture 348, 365, 442 Steamships 537, 574, 611, 629, 655, 678 See also Palm oil soap Steel 401, 402 Society for the Suppression of the Slave Steffens, Henrik 54 Trade and the Civilization of Africa (or Steffens, Peter Svane 301, 320, 338, 343, African Civilization Society) 557, 615, 347, 408–09, 413, 478 620 and Fonden ad Usus Publicos 304 Soils 22, 31, 37, 77, 84, 120, 210, 222, and King Frederik VI 309, 311, 314 234, 235–36, 237, 242, 251, 282, 293, 367, and natural history 302–04 390, 395, 410, 483, 484, 514, 619, and plantations and and coloniza- 657–58, 676 tion 311, 312–14, 409–10, 465, 535, samples 27, 28, 237, 238, 244 586, 646 suitability for agriculture 30, 45, 56, 61, and the slave trade 309 62, 143, 144, 146, 216, 225, 228, 243, 252, Sterculia verticillata 184 257, 259, 264, 312, 331, 332, 334, 338, Stewart, William 679 358, 360, 424, 460, 472–73, 477, 492, Stockings 402 493–94, 498, 513, 521–22, 596, 618, String 179, 182–184 665–66, 692 Sue, Eugène 664 index 739

Sugar 1–3, 12, 21, 34, 46, 56, 70, 85, 142, 148, Swan, Samuel 254 224, 324, 347, 388, 445, 532, 536, 549, 557, Sweden 52, 296, 565, 641 638, 643, 644, 663, 691 Sweet peas 78 beets 103, 549, 598 Sweet potatoes 177, 492 works 204–05, 226, 346 Swine. See Pigs Sugar cane 25, 36, 42, 56, 79, 81, 88, 141, 142, Sysepalum dulcificum 179 144, 147, 178, 202, 217, 274, 315, 334, 339, 364, 374, 384, 493–94, 538, 583 Tableware 402 in Akuapem 146, 173, 203, 216, 410 Tahmi. See Sysepalum dulcificum at Eibo 225, 227, 228, 229–30, 237, Tailors 46, 474 238, 243 Tallow 402, 663 at Frederiksnopel 40, 42 Tamarinds 129, 144, 178, 332, 369, 423 insect pests in 521 Tamil (language) 572 Jansen’s experiments with 143 Tanning 216, 324, 365, 375, 442 at Keta 78, 108 Tar 263, 401, 402, 504, 594 at Kongenssteen 128, 142 Taylor, Francis 381, 404 in Liberia 492 Teak 428, 430 Mørck’s experiments with 500, 521, 649 Tebé (or Thebe) 108, 176 Otaheite (variety) 649 Teeth. See Ivory on Principe 292, 293 Tefle (or Tøffri) 135, 154n13 labor costs of 665, 667 Tema (or Temma) 101, 138, 156, 176, 195, 509 in Senegal 335 Temperament 168, 626 in Sierra Leone 59, 63 Temperature 114, 159–60, 162, 163, 238, 245, technical difficulty of 146, 206, 369, 373 308, 472n107, 475 on the Volta 113, 122, 143, 177, 349, 362, Ten Commandments 132 442, 616 Tenerife 403 in the West Indies 25, 43, 54, 59, 62, 126, Tennessee 537 221, 273, 293, 317, 346, 355, 357, 367, Termites 189, 204, 349, 461, 475, 476, 563, 374, 566, 596, 630, 662, 664, 676, 565, 625 690, 692 Territorial rights and claims 37n74, 200, at Winneba 203 276, 287, 291, 296, 306, 352, 409, 418–19, Sumatra 534, 600 423, 444–45, 455, 462, 469, 470, 487, 490, Surf 155, 159, 161, 430, 437, 612, 629 503, 530, 533, 556, 609 at mouth of Volta 153, 157, 359 secured by Isert’s treaty 36, 38, 41, 126, salt in air thrown up by 118, 161, 438 218, 222, 270, 424, 500, 503, 534, 577, transportation through 141, 155–56, 157, 584, 592, 595n79, 654, 667–68, 669, 163, 206–07, 346, 379, 488, 515, 534 684 Surgical Academy, Royal 86 See also Sovereignty Surgical instruments 594 Territories 2, 4, 5, 26, 27, 42, 56, 69, 130, 231, Suriname 205, 301, 536, 563, 587, 625, 273, 455, 613, 632, 635, 688, 690 688n36 of African polities 13, 37n74, 48, 138, 151, Jansen’s career in 128 202, 285, 322, 327, 444, 445, 469, 481, plantations in 205, 262, 667 509, 534, 535, 591, 639, 687 (see also Survey 7n19, 135, 138, 294, 317, 460, 491, 524, Landscapes) 595, 596 Danish colonial 3, 19, 32, 39, 82, 150, 151, and land administration 126–27 154, 176, 201, 233, 240, 244, 254, 256, Flindt on 126 278, 279, 283, 289, 301, 307, 313, 314, von Rohr and 127 353, 378, 384, 385, 408, 420, 436, Steffens and 301, 305, 313, 314, 320n42 444–45, 460, 462, 464, 470, 480, 502, of Volta 283 504, 524, 528, 531, 549, 558, 561–62, Svanekjær (or Svanekiær), Christian 298, 578, 581, 585, 592, 605, 616, 620, 623, 386, 471 627, 630, 632, 650, 653, 679, 686–87 plantation owned by 394 See also Territorial rights Svanekjær, Hans 484, 488, 590, 650 Teshi (or Tessing) 101, 200 740 index

Tessin (Danish factor) 578–79 Thonning, Matthias 262, 298, 343, 347 Tessing. See Teshi Thonning, Nicoline 680, 681 Texas 641 Thonningia sanguinea 185, 208 Textiles 29, 148, 201, 214, 387, 402 Thorn-apple. See Datura Thaarup, Frederik 67n81, 478n121, 480n127 Thunderstorms 158, 164, 165–66 African colonial administrative records See also Travats published by 27–30, 32, 34, 35–40, Tides 45, 118, 139, 152–155, 162, 166, 280, 100–03, 150n2, 215, 220n12, 223n15, 282, 444 330, 467 Tile-makers 593 statistical compilations by 453–54, 493 Timber 352, 462, 469, 657 Thatch 42, 87, 187, 191, 263, 368, 473, 650 in Akuapem 43 Thebe. See Tebé Flindt on 239, 245, 255 Thompson, George 621 Lind’s analysis of 359, 361, 365 Thomsen, Ove 378, 398, 399n71, 408 ships’ 348, 359, 361, 364, 428, 529, 589 Thonning, Peter in Sierra Leone 63 and the Guinea Commission. See Thonning on 179, 196, 204, 315, 445, Guinea Commission 538, 594 at the Chamber of Customs 19, 20, Timbuktu (or Tombuktu) 413, 643 345–46 Tivoli Gardens (in Copenhagen) 611, 643 in the Colonial Office 3–4, 20, 271–73, Tobacco 105, 190, 206, 308, 381, 401–02, 416, 417–18 466, 485, 529, 536, 547, 549, 566, 581, 587, colonial plan for Schimmelmann 207, 591, 666 208, 222, 233–34, 247 Brazil 173, 202, 214, 288, 308, 382, domestic arrangements on coast 148 480, 588 educational background 55, 98–99 cultivation in Africa 26, 38, 42, 45, 178, and Guinea flora. See Schumacher, C. F. 202, 203, 222, 315, 461, 473, 477, 490, and the Guinea Instruction 305–09, 454 500, 520, 538, 566, 583, 593, 596, 597, legislative representations and 630, 649, 657 writings 273–77, 305, 309–11, growing wild 42, 63, 513 442–447, 449 Orinoco 649 letter to Department for Foreign Tøffri. See Tefle Affairs 288–91 Togbloku (or Tubrekue) 43, 44, 59, 102, 124, and maize trade to the West Indies. See 143, 237 Maize Tojeng (or Todzie) 153, 167, 445, 472 and maps. See Maps Tolls 361, 664 and Mørck. See Mørck Tombuktu. See Timbuktu and natural history. See Collections; Tønder Lund, Niels 52, 54, 55 Natural history insect collection 95, 302 recruited for expedition to West and the Slave-trade Commission 50, Africa 19, 95–98, 99–100 207 reports on his African expedition 132– and Thonning 95, 97–98, 99–100, 131, 33, 149, 150–200, 201–07, 219, 223 133, 209 research for Guinea Commission. See Toothache 185 Guinea Commission Topp, William 612–13 résumé of 1809 99, 106, 133n131, 149, Tørsleff (pastor) 572, 573, 591 207–08, 234, 247 Towers (defensive) 313, 317, 320, 446, 461, as royal tutor 212–14 487, 523, 547, 565, 595, 597, 666 on Steffens’s colonial ideas 314–24 Trade, 31, 33–35, 61–62, 67, 71, 80, 81, 88, 95, travels on coast 107–09, 111, 112–13, 96, 98, 104, 112, 120, 129, 132–33, 140, 254, 114–117, 118–19, 128, 131, 135–37, 139, 285–86, 288, 291, 293, 325, 339, 346, 362, 282, 284 369, 385, 390, 391–92, 400, 401–408, 426, voyage down to Africa 7, 105–106 449, 555–56, 570, 573, 582, 588, in the West Indies 148, 692 590, 610, 614, 624, 632, 655, 658, 673, See also Findt; Wedel 674, 691 index 741

within Africa 13, 28, 65, 102, 123, 159, 188, African colonization from 294–95, 380, 195, 196, 198, 199, 201, 227, 237, 246, 428, 491–93 279, 283, 360–61, 380, 511, 548, 590 cotton exports from 385 East Indian 2, 104, 273, 378, 558, 635, 663 Upper Coast (of Guinea) 28, 254, 409, 412, state of 29, 254, 312, 361, 366, 412, 428, 427, 619 517, 573, 618, 630 Ural Mountains 654 West Indian 451 Usserød 91 See also Christensen; Goods; Maize; Ussu (or Ussue). See Osu Palm oil; Slave trade Ussudeku (also Ussudoko; Ussutekue). See Trade winds. See Winds Osudoku Tranquebar 54, 377, 379, 387, 493, 508, 531, 555, 572, 636 Vaccination 338 Transportation 29, 40, 120, 204, 206, 278 See also Inoculation from Europe 606 Vahl, Martin 50, 54, 55, 99, 131, 208, 209, 211 from Jamaica 620 Valencia (Venezuela) 536, 563, 625 Traps 188, 476 Valkyrien 398, 408, 411, 427, 430, 481 Travats 164 Van Diemen’s Land 352 Travel accounts 138, 150, 356, 665 Varnon’s Fort. See Vernon’s Fort Treaties 577, 578, 654 Veith, John Wilhelm, and Mme. Veith 377, with Asante, 1831 58, 407n88, 539 378, 388, 389, 398, 411, 412, 415, 421 in Gabon 629 Venereal sores 185 Isert’s, with Obuobi Atiemo. See Isert; Venus 169 Obuobi Atiemo Verandas 263, 483, 565 slave-trade 553, 583, 584, 639, 656, 684 Verbascum 182 Trentepohl, J. J. 371–72, 374, 375, 384, 387, Verbenaceae 181 392, 395, 410, 471, 520 Verisimilitude (cartographic) 364, 464, 524 Triangle, Atlantic 7 Vermifuges 183 Trigonometric bearings 460 Vernacular names 131, 181 Trinidad 552, 642 Vernacular remedies 132 Tripoli 553 Vernon’s (or Varnon’s) Fort 139, 290, Trismus. See Lockjaw 468, 562 Truelsen 262 Vesicatories 180 appraisal of Flindt’s plantation at Veterinary medicine 51, 439, 593 Eibo 236–37, 238 Vieques, island of 85 letter from, cited by Thonning 266 Vine-cotton 112 plantation in Akuapem 253, 255, Vinegar 148, 179 259–60, 268–270, 278 Vines 174, 260, 473, 506–07 Truelsen’s Island 360 grape- 71, 88, 331, 521 Tubrekue. See Togbloku Vipers 188 Tuckey, James 357 Virgin Islands (United States) 3 Tunis 642, 668 Vitex 185 Turkey 1, 553 Vjye-tjo (palm) 178 Turkeys 186, 263, 473 Volta (river) (or Rio Volta) 1, 30, 32, 35, 41, Turmeric 538 44, 71, 102, 117, 152, 175, 246, 295, 325, 349, Turtles 159, 293, 474 353, 363, 371, 409, 442, 457–59, 509 Tusks. See Ivory as boundary 150, 274, 420, 423, 605 Tuttu (or Tutu) 116 connection to Keta Lagoon 118, 153 Two Brothers (plantation). See Forenede defense of 84, 89, 102, 239, 265, 266, 277, Brødre 280, 651 Tyler (president) 641 estuary of 195, 237 Typhoons 559 Flindt on. See Flindt floods (and flood plain) 45, 84, 113, Unfree workers. See Laborers 118, 131, 139, 152, 153, 167, 177, 180, 196, United States 7n19, 70, 127, 317, 641, 691 198, 536 742 index

forests near 124, 157, 196, 225, 245, 255, on foreign competitors of a Danish 348, 365 colony in Africa 570, 587, 622–23, islands in 84, 82, 85, 86, 193, 360 624, 644 Lind’s exploration of. See Lind opposition to the African colonial Lind’s map of. See Lind project 569, 610, 626, 638, 644 marshlands 315, 559 responses to Thonning’s drafts of the navigability 31, 36, 84, 153, 207, 239, 246, Guinea Commission’s opinion 570– 275, 283, 291, 367, 655, 685 72, 623, 645, 646 plantations and plantings near 43, views on colonial law 667–68 44–45, 50, 74, 78, 82, 121–22, 143, 239, Weirs 188 333, 348, 536 Wendt, Carl 49 rapids and falls on 176, 283, 565 West, Hans 54, 220n12, 374n100 region 36, 40, 42, 43, 45, 84, 90, 97, 113, West Indies 9, 19, 23, 678–79 120, 160, 161, 187, 203, 246, 278–84, 423, amelioration of condition of slaves 456, 508, 537, 616, 677 in 64, 543 Thonning on 111, 118, 135–36, 229 economic and historical precedent of 3, tides in. See Tides 25, 48, 50, 56, 59–60, 62, 64, 79, 129, as trade artery 198, 232, 366–67, 516, 617 157, 203, 264, 286–87, 315–16, 317–319, unhealthful climate on 365, 494 338, 341, 368–69, 446, 519, 548, 568, See also Eibo 688–90, 692–93 Voltakrepeh 151 plantation expertise and agricultural Vong 191–92 stock from 45, 46, 57, 70, 86, 90, 128–29, 147, 204, 367, 371, 395–96, Wad, Gregers 54 439, 442, 447, 448, 477, 550–51, 566, Wadström, C. B. 65, 77–78, 104, 105, 620, 630 356, 467 plants from 88, 129, 186, 336, 426, 473 Waj (or Woe) 157 production of tropical commodities Wallenstein, Albrecht 579 in 2, 3, 25, 55, 224, 273, 274, 531, 549, Waltheria indica 182 629, 644, 689 Warehouses 70, 206, 214, 228, 245, 253, 263, slaves and free laborers from 126, 215, 308, 418, 523, 552, 572, 606 223, 620, 675–77 Warring, C. M. 381, 404 See also Danish West Indies Washington (D. C.) 381, 641 Wheat 258, 396, 691 Watermelons 178 Wheelwrights 47, 593 Wax. See Beeswax Whitbread, Samuel 64 Weapons 61, 191, 260, 400, 548, 579, White Siam (cotton) 112, 202 608, 675 Whydah. See Ouidah for militias 601, 603, 607 Wieland, C. M. 379 as trade goods 402, 413, 529, 621 Wilberforce, William 64 Wedel, Severin H. A. 573, 589–90, 591, 611, Wild game. See Game 625, 667, 669 Wild pigs (or Swine). See Pigs appointed to Guinea Commission 450 Wilkens, B. J. C. 611, 612 career 452, 542, 545 Wilks, Ivor 15, 138n147, 502n178 characterizations of the Africans 575, Williams, Eric 12n27 577, 581, 622, 624, 644 Williams (governor of Liberia) 381 on climate and soils 622, 643–44, 645, Wilson (consul) 466–67 646–47, 649, 661–62, 667 Windmills 204, 346, 355, 356, 358, 364, 370, on costs of the African establish- 483, 571, 589 ments 571, 572, 587, 588, 590–91, Winds 154, 155, 158, 161, 346, 364, 405, 444, 621–22, 624 445, 472n107 cover letter for Guinea Commission’s August 166 final opinion 681–85 periodic 161 on feasibility of African planta- prevailing 10, 70, 167, 205, 288 tions 585, 587, 626, 660 trade 144, 355, 559, 678 index 743

See also Harmattan; Land breeze; Sea on closing of forts 89, 265 breeze cultivation of coffee and cotton 80, 86, Wine 106, 148, 382, 402, 403, 406, 445, 558 87, 130, 147 See also Palm wine cutter to Principe 225 Wine-palms. See Palms fort views 140 Winneba 203 introductions of plants 88n61, 129, 178, Winniett, William 673, 679, 681, 686–88 180–81, 225, 226 Winsnes, Selena 16n39, 37n74, 611n113 as linguist 79 Winterbottom, Thomas 356 plantings at Frederiksberg 87–88, 90, Witches 576 143, 147, 200, 226–27, 231, 247, 277, Woe. See Waj 366, 648 Wolff, George 60n53 Principe proposal 231–32, 284–85, Wolves 186–188 286–89 See also Hyaenas reports on establishments 140 Woodard, Gilbert 70, 71, 72–73, 74, 120, 125 Wrisberg, Philip W. 143, 291–94, 296, 297, Wool (and woolens) 2, 28, 98, 187, 385, 298, 348–51, 352–53, 365–70, 371, 442, 414, 475 568, 574, 589 Workers. See Laborers Wright, John Kirtland 6n13 Working week 141, 368–69, 576–77, 601 Wulff, Wulff Joseph 574 Worm (Guinea). See Guinea Worm Wrisberg (or Wriesberg), Gerhard Yams 27, 28, 45, 115, 142, 173, 177, 334, 361, Friderich 279 474, 483, 492, 513 Wrisberg, Johan Peter 78–80, 85, 107, 121, harvest 166, 537 123, 146, 226, 236, 241, 260, 270, 277, 286, Yarak, Larry 13n29–30, 14n36, 290n36 413, 465, 586, 587, 590, 646, 692 Yellow fever 104, 159, 170, 338 Atlantic creole 79 and Bimbia proposal 140–42, Zonation (vegetational) 171 143, 146 Zoology 7, 53–54, 302–03, 372