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53 4 Shifting Loyalties St. Thomas and the Transit Trade in African Slaves On October 9, 1798, Zephaniah Kingsley stood before a magistrate at the Danish port of Charlotte Amalie on the island of St. Thomas to pledge loyalty to the king of Denmark. This was the second time in five years he had switched national allegiance. He had been a British citizen who resided in England and the British colonies of South Carolina and New Brunswick until December 1793, when he swore allegiance to the United States of America at Charleston, South Carolina. That action was the result of a calculated decision meant to enhance his success as a West Indies trader. By flying the flag of a neutral nation, he expected to gain a degree of protection from the hundreds of French and British privateers seizing commercial vessels during the wars spawned by the French Revolution. That the flag of a neutral nation did not guarantee immunity is a lesson he learned at Martinique in January 1794 when he lost a schooner to a British warship. The change to American nationality nevertheless increased his chances of avoiding additional confiscations. By 1798, however, with the United States and France engaged in an undeclared naval war and a renewed threat from French privateers, Kingsley sought protection under the flag of Denmark.1 Charlotte Amalie, the only town on St. Thomas, was recognized as a leading trade entrepôt in the West Indies by the time Kingsley became a “burgher” (Danish citizen). Acquired in 1672 by the Danish West India and Guinea Company, a joint-stock company with a royal charter and a trade monopoly, St. Thomas disappointed officials expecting immediate profits from sugar and tobacco plantations. The fertility of the arable land on the small island was quickly depleted by repeated planting of sugar and 54 | Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. and the Atlantic World tobacco, prompting the West India and Guinea Company to claim more land by annexing a smaller neighboring island, St. John. It was not until a larger island, St. Croix, was purchased in 1733 that sugar production in the West Indies became profitable for the Danes. Raw brown sugar processed at sugar works on the three Danish islands was shipped to Copenhagen for refining and sold at ports on the Baltic Sea.2 What St. Thomas lacked in agricultural potential, however, was more thancompensatedforbytheportofCharlotteAmalie,oneofthebestnatural harbors in the West Indies. The location served as a convenient first stop for ships sailing from Europe, as well as a welcome port of call for ships hoisting sails for return voyages. Merchants at Charlotte Amalie routed European products to markets at Caribbean and American colonies and combined cargoes of sugar, tobacco, cotton, and coffee from the West Indies for dispatch to Europe. It was as a transshipment center that St. Thomas prospered. Denmark revoked the monopoly charter of the Danish West India and Guinea Company in 1754 and made St. Thomas a royal colony and free port. Opening the port to ships of all nations attracted merchants from throughout Europe and the Americas. During the American Revolution and the Anglo-French wars, Charlotte Amalie became a significant commercial center. Managers of large commercial houses based in Europe and the United States established branch offices or hired agents there. The historianJuliusS .Scotthaswrittenthatfreeports“becamedestinationswhere seafaring folk from across the region could put their heads together free of mercantilist restrictions to make deals, swap stories, plant and harvest rumors, and gather news . . . throughout the greater Caribbean.”3 Dozens of European and American merchants and ship captains migrated to Charlotte Amalie in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Johan Peter Nissen arrived from Denmark in 1792 and marveled that “trade and navigation increased with every year,” keeping pace with population growth and construction of new homes and businesses. Nissen tallied “1,569 persons” who took “burgher’s briefs” between 1792 and 1801, including “Three hundred and twenty-four persons” who became burghers at Charlotte Amalie in 1799, the year after Kingsley took his oath. In a memoir of the forty-six years he lived at St. Thomas, Nissen recalled the harbor filled with “a great many small and large vessels, and the streets filled with Shifting Loyalties: St. Thomas and the Transit Trade in African Slaves | 55 Figure 3. The harbor at Charlotte Amalie, on St. Thomas Island, a West Indies colony of Denmark from 1666 until 1917, when it was purchased by the United States of America. Zephaniah Kingsley moved to Charlotte Amalie...

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