Latest / The Atlantic Slave Trade: Empire Built on Human Suffering — Fexingo History / The Saltwater Middle Passage: Akan Captives on the Danish Coast
Transcript
- Lucas: So far in this series we've covered a lot of ground — the Bight of Biafra, the Bight of Benin, the Gambia region, even specific shipwrecks and mutinies. But there's one European power that we've barely touched, even though they ran a brutal slave-trading operation for nearly two centuries: the Danes. Luna: The Danes had a slave trade too? I thought it was mostly the Portuguese, British, French, and Dutch. Lucas: A lot of people do. But Denmark-Norway — because they were a unified kingdom until 1814 — was very much in the game. They established forts on the Gold Coast of present-day Ghana from the 1660s onward, and they controlled several islands in the Caribbean: St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix. The whole operation was run through a state-chartered monopoly, the Danish West India-Guinea Company, founded in 1671. Luna: So it was a government-backed enterprise, not just private traders. Lucas: Exactly. And the heart of their presence on the African coast was Christiansborg Castle in what is now Osu, a district of Accra. The Danes built it in the 1660s after seizing a Swedish fort. It's a massive whitewashed structure right on the coast, and it served as the headquarters for the Danish governor. Thousands of enslaved Africans, mostly from Akan-speaking groups like the Fante and Akwamu, were held in its dungeons before being shipped across the Atlantic. Lucas: The Danes didn't just trade with whoever was around — they formed alliances with local polities. For much of the late 1600s, they were allied with the Ga people around Accra, and later with the Akwamu, who were a powerful inland state. The Akwamu would raid neighboring communities and bring captives to the coast, where the Danes bought them with textiles, firearms, and liquor. Luna: What was the journey like on a Danish slave ship? Any different from the others? Lucas: In many ways it was the same horror — but the Danish ships were often smaller, which meant even tighter packing. One of the best-documented Danish voyages is that of the, which sailed from Christiansborg to St. Thomas in 1702. It carried about 350 captives. Of those, over 140 died during the crossing — a mortality rate above 40 percent. That's on the high end even by the brutal standards of the Middle Passage. Luna: Forty percent — that's staggering. What caused so many deaths? Lucas: Disease was the biggest killer — dysentery, smallpox, fevers. But also the psychological trauma, the violence from the crew, and sheer despair. The Danish governor at Christiansborg at the time, a man named Erik Lygaard, recorded in his journal that many captives tried to starve themselves or jump overboard. The crew responded with whippings and by forcing food into their mouths. Lucas: And once the survivors reached St. Thomas, they were sold at auction to planters on the Danish islands or re-exported to other Caribbean colonies. St. Thomas became a major slave market under the Danes, especially after they declared it a free port in the 1720s. Luna: You said there was a slave revolt on St. John? I think I've heard something about that. Lucas: Yes — the 1733 slave revolt on St. John, which is now part of the U.S. Virgin Islands. It was one of the earliest and most prolonged slave uprisings in the Caribbean. The rebels were mostly Akan warriors from the Gold Coast, many of them taken in wars involving the Akwamu. They had military experience and a sense of solidarity. Lucas: It started in November 1733. A group of slaves led by a man named — we don't know his African name, but the Danes called him 'King' or 'Captain' — managed to seize the fort at Coral Bay and took control of most of the island for several months. They held out until the Danes brought in French reinforcements from Martinique, who finally crushed the rebellion in May 1734. Luna: So these were people who had been warriors in Africa, and they carried that knowledge into the fight for freedom in the Caribbean. Lucas: Exactly. And it's a reminder that the enslaved were not passive victims. They resisted constantly — through revolts, through running away, through cultural retention. After the revolt, the Danes tightened their control, but the memory of that uprising stayed alive. Lucas: You know, this episode is a good moment to mention something that keeps this show going. We don't run ads — we rely entirely on listeners who appreciate what we do. If you've been following this series episode by episode, and if these conversations about the Atlantic slave trade have mattered to you, there's a way to support us directly. You can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, and it genuinely helps. Every little bit keeps the research and production ad-free. We're grateful for anyone who chips in. Lucas: So — back to the Danes. Even after Denmark abolished its slave trade in 1803 — a full four years before Britain — the legacy of those centuries of trafficking continued. The forts on the Gold Coast were eventually sold to the British in 1850. But Christiansborg Castle still stands today, and it's now the seat of the Ghanaian government. It's a deeply complex symbol: a place of unimaginable suffering that now houses the presidency. Luna: It's hard to walk through those dungeons and then imagine the rooms above where the Danish governors lived. Lucas: Absolutely. And that tension is part of what we try to explore in this series — not just the numbers and the ships, but the human reality on all sides. The Danes were a relatively small player in the overall slave trade — they transported maybe 100,000 people over two centuries — but their story is no less important. It shows how deeply the slave trade penetrated into every corner of European commerce and empire.