Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas

Where is Charlotte Amalie, and why was it called Taphus?

Charlotte Amalie is the main town of St. Thomas, one of the Virgin Islands, east of Puerto Rico. It sits on hillsides around a deep, sheltered harbour where ships could ride out most storms and be careened, tipped on their sides so their hulls could be scraped clean.

Danish settlers arrived for good in 1672, sent by the newly chartered Danish West India Company. They built Fort Christian, named after King Christian V and finished by 1680, and for years the fort held almost everything: the governor, the company’s stores and the church. When the governor allowed four houses west of the fort to sell drink, visiting traders mockingly called the settlement Tap Hus, the tap house or alehouse, and the name Taphus stuck to the harbour.

In 1691 the settlement was officially made a town and named Charlotte Amalie, after the wife of Christian V. So by the time Silver & Sails begins, that was its proper name, though the old nickname had not been forgotten.

What was St. Thomas like in 1715?

It was small. A count in 1688 found only 37 people living in the town itself, and by 1716 there were about 82 houses, most along one long street by the shore. Behind it, the hills were covered with sugar plantations. Sugar was the island’s main crop, with cotton and tobacco at times, and by the 1710s the best soil was already wearing out.

The island belonged to a company, not directly to the king. By 1680 it had joined its West Indies business to the African trade and become the Danish West India and Guinea Company. Ships from Copenhagen sailed out in autumn, spent the winter at St. Thomas and returned home in spring with full holds.

In 1715 the governor was Mikkel Crone, who served from 1710 until his death in 1716. His successor, Erik Bredal, took over the neighbouring island of St. John for Denmark in March 1718, which alarmed the British in the nearby Leeward Islands.

Did pirates really sell their plunder at St. Thomas?

Yes, but mostly before the game’s years. In the 1680s two brothers, Nicolaj and Adolph Esmit, governed St. Thomas, and they let pirates use the harbour as a refuge. Pirates sold their prizes openly in the town, and pirate trade went on there until about 1700. Around 1682 the French pirate Jean Hamlin brought his ship La Trompeuse in to sell his loot, and that night sailors from an English warship rowed in and burned it in the harbour. The historian Waldemar Westergaard wrote in 1917 that part of Captain Kidd’s loot ended up with traders on the island around 1699.

By 1715 things were more orderly. During the War of the Spanish Succession, St. Thomas stayed neutral, so privateers, private ships licensed by one side to attack the other, brought captured ships there to sell. Governor Crone made them prove who they were and had each prize approved before it could be sold. Smuggling never stopped, though. The island’s many small bays were impossible to police, and Crone himself was later found to have traded illegally with the Spanish governor of Puerto Rico.

Did Blackbeard and Black Sam Bellamy visit St. Thomas?

No record shows either man in the town, but both sailed close by. In late 1716 Black Sam Bellamy and his crew took several ships near the Virgin Islands. In December 1717 Blackbeard stopped the merchant sloop Margaret off a place called Crab Island. That was an old name for Vieques, between Puerto Rico and St. Thomas, though one account places it near Anguilla.

In 1718, after both Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet had accepted the King’s pardon in North Carolina, the governor there let each of them sail for St. Thomas or the Virgin Islands to seek a privateer’s commission. Neither seems to have made the trip.

The stone tower above the town now called Blackbeard’s Castle was built by the Danes around 1679 as a watchtower named Skytsborg, before Blackbeard went to sea. Nothing links him to it.

What part did St. Thomas play in the slave trade?

Enslaved Africans were brought to St. Thomas from 1673, and the company soon ran a slave market in the town. From 1685 a German company from Brandenburg also kept a slave-trading post and warehouse at the western edge of town. Enslaved people did the hard work on the sugar plantations and in the harbour.

Danish ships carried at least 85,650 Africans to the Danish islands between 1674 and 1806, and some estimates reach about 120,000. Most came from the Gold Coast, today’s Ghana, where Denmark kept forts.

Resistance was constant. In November 1733, after drought, a hurricane and a harsh new slave code, Akwamu people led by King Claes, King Juni and Kanta seized the island of St. John and held much of it for about six months, until French troops from Martinique helped the Danes end the revolt. Slavery in the Danish West Indies lasted until 3 July 1848.

Why did people escape from St. Thomas to Puerto Rico?

St. Thomas is small and its forests were cleared for plantations, so there were few places to hide for long. For many enslaved people, the best hope of freedom lay across the water. Puerto Rico, the Spanish island to the west, became the main refuge.

Spain had its own reasons for welcoming them. From 1664, and in later laws, Spanish officials in Puerto Rico offered freedom to people who escaped from the colonies of rival nations. It had not always been so: in the 1650s, some escapees had been enslaved again or sent back. Many who reached freedom settled at San Mateo de Cangrejos, close to San Juan, in what is now the Santurce district of the city.

When did Charlotte Amalie become a free port?

Later than the game’s years. In 1754 the King of Denmark bought out the company, and in 1764 St. Thomas was formally declared a free port, open to ships of all nations. Denmark’s neutrality in later European wars then made Charlotte Amalie one of the busiest trading towns in the Caribbean, with about 7,000 people by 1799, much like Dutch St. Eustatius.

In the twentieth century the town was briefly renamed St. Thomas, from 1921 until 1936, when its old name came back.