Oranjestad, St. Eustatius

Where is Oranjestad, and is it the one on Aruba?

There are two Caribbean towns called Oranjestad, both named after the Dutch House of Orange. The one in Silver & Sails is on St. Eustatius, a tiny island often called Statia, in the Leeward Islands just north-west of St. Kitts. The better-known Oranjestad, capital of Aruba, is a different place far to the south-west.

Statia’s Oranjestad has two parts. The Upper Town sits on top of a cliff around Fort Oranje. Below it, along the curve of Oranje Bay, lies the Lower Town, the strip of shore where merchants built their warehouses.

What was St. Eustatius like in 1715?

In the game’s years Statia was small and still recovering from war. Figures for 1715, used by the historian Victor Enthoven, give about 524 white colonists and 750 enslaved Africans, roughly 1,270 people in all. According to the Dutch historian Johannes Hartog, eleven sugar plantations had started working again after the Peace of Utrecht ended the latest European war in 1713. The island is dry, though, and farming never made it rich.

It was also weak. A Dutch commander found the defences in bad repair in 1701, and French raiders who captured the island in 1709 found no cannon that worked. Around 1712 or 1713 a French squadron under Jacques Cassard demanded money, and an old island history says the commander, Jan Doncker, paid it. In 1715 Doncker governed for the Dutch West India Company, the trading company that ran Dutch colonies in the Americas.

Statia already traded with its English and French neighbours, and Dutch merchants later said the island had welcomed foreign traders since the late 1600s. Much of that trade broke other empires’ laws. But the Lower Town only grew into a real trading centre towards the 1740s. The busy free port came later.

Why did St. Eustatius keep changing hands?

The French built a small earthwork on the island in 1629 but soon left, because there was too little fresh water. On 25 April 1636 settlers from Zeeland, working for the Dutch West India Company, took possession and built Fort Oranje on the same cliff-top site.

Surrounded by English and French islands, Statia was caught up in every European war. The English held it in 1665–66, the French in 1666–67, the English again for most of 1672–1681, the French in 1689–90 and the English from 1690 to 1696. The Dutch got it back under the Peace of Ryswick in 1697. Sources count more than twenty changes of control or enemy landings before 1816. Fort Oranje reached roughly its present shape in the early 1700s.

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

The first enslaved Africans were brought in the 1640s to work on tobacco plantations, and enslaved people outnumbered white colonists in every count from 1665 to 1779.

The island was also a place where captives were sold on. In the 1720s the Waterfort, or Fort Amsterdam, a small fort on the shore built in 1687, was turned into a slave depot. Africans brought across the Atlantic were landed there, held in a two-storey building that could hold around 400 to 450 people, and auctioned to planters and traders from other islands, often hundreds in a year. The depot was used until about 1740. Many enslaved people on Statia came from west-central Africa, around the Kingdom of Kongo. Like Curaçao, Statia was a transit island in the Dutch slave trade, which the West India Company controlled until 1738.

Slavery in the Dutch colonies ended on 1 July 1863. In recent years archaeologists have excavated burial grounds of enslaved Africans at sites called Godet and Golden Rock. Descendants protested that they had not been consulted, and the burial grounds are now recognised in UNESCO’s Routes of Enslaved Peoples programme.

When did St. Eustatius become the “Golden Rock”?

In 1756 the Dutch abolished import duties and made Statia a free port. Because the Dutch Republic stayed neutral in the wars between Britain and France, ships of every nation could meet there. After 1760 between about 1,800 and 2,700 ships arrived each year, reaching 3,551 in 1779. By the 1770s the Lower Town was a strip about 1.5 km long of warehouses, merchants’ houses, shops and taverns, where goods were sold at auction.

The nickname “Golden Rock” belongs to these boom years. Around 1780 the warehouses were so full that sugar and cotton were piled in the open air. The British politician Edmund Burke said its owners had made it “an emporium for all the world”. That was more than forty years after 1715.

What was the First Salute of 1776?

On 16 November 1776 the Andrew Doria, an American brigantine under Captain Isaiah Robinson, sailed into the bay to load gunpowder and military supplies. It fired a salute, and on the orders of Governor Johannes de Graaff the guns of Fort Oranje fired back. It is remembered as the first foreign salute to an American flag. British officials were furious. In 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt presented a plaque, which is still on the fort.

What happened when Admiral Rodney captured St. Eustatius in 1781?

Britain declared war on the Dutch Republic in December 1780, partly because Statia was supplying the American rebels. On 3 February 1781 a British fleet under Admiral George Rodney, with troops under General John Vaughan, arrived. De Graaff had only a tiny garrison and surrendered. The British kept the Dutch flag flying for a month to trap unsuspecting ships, and seized goods worth around £3 million.

Rodney treated the island’s Jewish merchants especially harshly, and some were deported at a day’s notice; Burke condemned this in Parliament. A French force retook the island in November 1781, and it returned to the Dutch in 1784. More wars after 1795 ended the boom, and through the 1800s the Lower Town crumbled. Its bricks were carried away, and today only ruins and a few restored buildings line the bay.