When Sugar Was King
Denmark was a latecomer in the race for colonies in the New World. Columbus’s voyages to the Caribbean gave Spain a monopoly in the region for over a century. But after the English planted a colony in the Lesser Antilles in 1624, the French, Dutch and eventually Danes joined in the scramble for empire. Seeking islands on which to cultivate sugar as well as an outlet for trade, the Danish West India & Guinea Company (a group of nobles and merchants chartered by the Crown) took possession of St. Thomas in 1672 and its neighbor St. John in 1717. Because neither island was well suited to agriculture, the company in 1733 purchased St. Croix—a larger, flatter and more fertile island 40 miles south—from France. Colonization of St. Croix began the next year, after troops put down a slave revolt on St. John.
For their first settlement the Danes chose a good harbor on the northeast coast, the site of an earlier French Village named Bassin. Their leader Frederick Moth was a man of vision. He planned a new town—named Christiansted in honor of reigning King Christian VI—and had the island surveyed into plantations of 150 acres, priced to attract new settlers. The best land came under cultivation and dozens of sugar factories began operating. Population approached 10,000, nearly 9,000 of them slaves imported from West Africa to work in the fields.
Even with this growth St. Croix’s economy did not flourish. The planters chaffed under the DWI&G Company’s restrictive trading practices. This monopoly so burdened planters with regulations that they persuaded the king to take over the island in 1755. Crown administration coincided with the beginning of a long period of growth for the sugar cane industry. St. Croix became the capital of the “Danish Islands in America” as they were then called, and royal governors took up residence at Christiansted.
For the next century and a half, the town’s fortunes were tied to St. Croix’s sugar industry. Between 1760 and 1820 the economy boomed. Population rose dramatically, in part because free trade policies and neutrality attracted settlers from other islands—hence the prevalence of British culture on this Danish island with a French name—and exports of sugar and rum soared. Capital was available, sugar prices were high, labor cheap. Many planters, merchants and traders reaped great profits, as reflected in the fine architecture of town and country.
This golden age was eclipsed within a few decades by the rise of the beet sugar industry in Europe and North America. A drop in the price of cane sugar, increasing debt, drought, hurricanes and the rising cost of labor after slavery was abolished in 1848 all contributed to economic decline. As the 1800’s wore on, St. Croix became little more than a marginal sugar producer. The era of fabulous wealth was a thing of the past.
When the United States purchased the Danish West Indies in 1917, it was for the islands’ strategic harbors, not their agriculture. The lovely town of Christiansted is now a link to the old ways of life here, with all its elegance, complexity, and contradiction.
National Park Service
U.S. Department of the Interior
