Danish Slave Trade - a Loss-making Business?

af Kåre Lauring

In 1765 the Copenhagen merchant Frederik Henning Bargum and The Royal Chartered Danish Guinean Company received a charter for the Danish slave trade between the Danish forts on the Guinean coast and the Danish possessions in the Caribbean: St. Thomas, St. Jan and St. Croix, for a period of 30 years.

Up until then the Danish slave trade had not been a great success. The old Danish West Indian-Guinean Company had in fact pulled out of the slave trade after great financial losses, and in 1754 the Company was dissolved. But now with the new Guinean Company, as it was called, a new attempt was made. The new company took over the administration of the Danish forts on the Guinean coast, and five ships were purchased and put into service.

A voyage round the Guinean coast and onward via the West Indies back to Denmark normally took about 20 months, so immediately five ships does not sound like a lot. However, as well as supplying their own ships the plan was for the company to sell slaves to ships from other countries via their forts on the Guinean coast.

Thus in 1769 the company signed a contract with a French shipping company to supply 3,600 slaves over a period of 3 years to be divided between 10 ships. Indeed, the first French ships began to turn up off the Danish forts, but it soon became apparent that the Danish possessions were not capable of supplying the agreed number of slaves. Only 1,767 slaves out of the agreed 3,600 were delivered, divided between only 7 ships, before the contract was annulled.

Within a few years the Guinean Company got into difficulties in other areas too. The Frigate FREDENSBORG, the company’s largest ship, sank in December 1768 off the coast of Norway, several of the other ships were wrecked, one of them was subjected to a slave uprising, and as the accidents accumulated the unforeseen expenses rose.

A large part of the Guinean Company’s records are still kept at the Danish National Archives in Copenhagen. In this article the author attempts to answer the question of what went wrong for the company, based on the sources which have been preserved. The conclusion is that the administration and maintenance of the forts on the Guinean coast were much too expensive. Neither could the forts supply a sufficient number of slaves to the French shipping company, nor to the Danish mother company. It turns out that in the years 1767-77 the company delivered only about 21% of the slaves that were imported to the Danish West Indies.

Because so few slaves were actually delivered it also put a limit on the number of ships the company could put into service. On top of that, the ships that the company owned met with a large number of accidents.

All in all during the years 1767-77 the company came out with a combined deficit of about 425,000 rixdollars (about 85,000 pounds) on the slave trade. This meant that if the company was to have a profit of 10% a year, they would have to have a profit of at least 47.000 rixdollars (9,400 pounds) a year on the sugar trade. However, it would appear unlikely that the company could achieve that, since of the 84 ships that unloaded sugar in Copenhagen in the years 1767-69, only three came from the Guinean Company.

In April 1774 it became obvious to the director of the company, Henning Bargum, that they were heading for bankruptcy, so in all haste he left the country to escape his creditors. The company continued business for a few more years but in August 1777 it was all over. The company gave up and delivered the forts on the Guinean coast back to the state. The Danish slave trade was once again open for all Danish subjects to participate in.