1680 to 1807 · Caribbeanspan
Denmark ran its own slave trade out of a fort called Christiansborg
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The Danish West India Company, based in Copenhagen, was the main carrier of enslaved people to the Danish islands of St Thomas and St Croix. Most came from Christiansborg, the company's African headquarters on the Gold Coast, in what is now Accra. British and other foreign traders also supplied the islands, especially in wartime when Danish shipping could not get through. The share of voyages credited to Copenhagen in the surviving records looks low, and the reason is poor documentation from the early decades of Baltic slaving. That caveat runs across the whole subject. Every figure in the history of the Atlantic traffic is a floor, assembled from customs books, insurance papers and port registers that were incomplete when they were written and have been lost unevenly since. Denmark banned the trade in 1803, ahead of every other European state, and its planters spent the intervening years buying as many people as they could get.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.