“How the colonies were actually governed; what the colonists did at work and play; how the mother

1THE DANISH WEST INDIES UNDERCOMPANY RULE(1671-1754)INTRODUCTION: GEOGRAPHICAL AND HISTORICALIf Belgium has been described, and not inaccurately, as “the cockpit of Europe,” the WestIndies may be regarded as “the cockpit” of sea power. The islands and mainland of the Caribbeanand Gulf regions have been among the prizes for which European states have contended inpractically every war of consequence that has been fought during the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies.Just why Spaniards, Frenchmen and Englishmen, Dutchmen and Danes, Swedes andBrandenburgers, and even Knights of Malta and Courlanders, should all at one time or another havedirected their energies to West Indian commerce and commercial exploitation is a question thatvery few, beyond a limited number of specialists, are able intelligently to answer. Theheterogeneous character of the West Indian political map of to-day has behind it an interestingstory, and one thoroughly worth studying, for those who wish to grasp understandingly the reasonsfor European interest in America before Spain lost her various American Colonies on the mainland.So far as the immediate effects upon Europe were concerned, the beating back of the Spanishfrontier in the Caribbean regions by Spain’s commercial rivals was far more important at the timethan the distant frontier struggles of Spaniards, Frenchmen, and Englishmen on the mainland ofAmerica.The present study is an attempt to separate from the tangled skein ...