| The Kingdom of Denmark maintained
a colony in the Lesser Antilles for two and
a half centuries, until 1917, when the islands were sold to the
United States. The group is now known as the United States Virgin
Islands.
The Danish foothold was first
established on St. Thomas in the 1670s. It was a mixed and lawless
little society of Danes, Dutchmen, and Englishmen, based partly
on plantation cultivation of sugar and cotton but more especially
on commerce, which can be taken to have included more than just
a dash of piracy. The excellent harbor of St. Thomas quickly developed
into an important Antillean entrepôt. St. Thomas is rocky
and steep, and what land was available is thought to have been exhausted
within a few decades, and in 1717, the Danes occupied St. John,
the next island to the east.
In 1733, the Danes were able
to expand the scope of the colony, now under the administration
of the Danish West India and Guinea Company, by purchasing the island
of St. Croix from France. St. Croix, which lies forty miles or so
south of St. Thomas, had been evacuated by the French at the end
of the seventeenth century, and was occupied by a small number of
English squatters from the Leeward Islands, some of them planters
but most of them more or less itinerant lumbermen.
It is apparent from
the records of the deliberations for the purchase and
the planning for the settlement of St. Croix that the
extent and character of the island were, to a surprising
degree, unknown to the Danes. The Company administrators
in Copenhagen appear to have placed a great deal of faith
in a French Map
that had been published sixty years before,
in 1671. A number of estimates of the number of plantations
that could be carved out of St. Croix were in circulation
before the purchase, and some of these were presumably
based on this map. The old map represented a
major flaw in the Danes' plans,
because it exaggerates the area of the island by perhaps
as much as a hundred per cent, and, whereas in the case
of St. Thomas and St. John land had been granted outright
to settlers, it was intended to sell plantation lots on
St. Croix for fairly high prices. The expected proceeds
from land sales, estimates of the tax base and of customs
revenues on sugar exports-indeed, the whole scope of this
major national undertaking-were thus overestimated.
A hand-drawn copy of a map of
St. Croix, presumably this old French engraving, was sent
to St. Thomas in 1733 with the original orders for the
occupation of the island. There are at least three manuscript
copies of the French map in Danish archival collections,
including one intriguing
example known to have been fetched
home to Denmark from the Virgin Islands after the islands
were sold to the United States. This map is now pasted
down on card-stock, but it shows signs of having been
folded and refolded, and it is tempting to speculate that
it might have been carried about in a pocket in the early
days of the Danish reconnaissance and settlement of St.
Croix. The French names for coastal features have been
translated on this map into a strange mixture of Danish
and English. The map bears the date 1734 and the name
of Captain Friderich Moth, who had been assigned to govern
the new Danish establishment. It was years before attempts
to reconcile the reality on the ground with the old French
map were abandoned.
The Company administrators were
not completely naive, however, in their reliance on the old French
map. The original orders of 1733 called for the construction of
a new map of the island, and a military surveyor was sent out from
Denmark to undertake this task. The administrators expressed interest
in information about harbors and terrain, but most particularly
in the developing layout of plantation properties.
The financial arrangements for
the new venture on St. Croix had lasting implications not only for
the cartography but for the cultural landscape of the island. The
stockholders were forced to re-invest in the company or lose their
interest. In order to make this arrangement at least somewhat palatable,
the stockholders were promised sugar plantation lots on the as yet
unexplored island, and it was decreed that these lots should all
be surveyed, in advance of conveyance and settlement, into three
hundred lots, each two thousand by three thousand feet. Such a practice
was unheard of in this region. Although it was not necessarily so
envisioned originally, this requirement was in the event translated
into a fairly regular grid of rectangular properties covering the
entire island, which is today strikingly expressed in the road network.
This survey system was thus in its origins quite a different proposition
from the grand and self-consciously rationalistic rectangular survey
system imposed upon most of the western part of the United States
beginning half a century later.
The stockholders in the Danish
West India and Guinea Company included some of the most
prominent figures in the society-the King himself, his
family, and many of his ministers. These investors provided
a core of confidence in the venture. Such a map as they
ordered made would be a very important advertisement for
the new colonial enterprise, and the survey and mapping
of the stockholders' properties on St. Croix was assigned
a high priority. The survey was expected to take a few
months-the island is only twenty-three miles long and
four or five at the widest-but the work dragged on for
years. The main obstacles were not technical but administrative
and economic. Insufficient resources and personnel were
committed to the project. The first engineer sent out
to St. Croix lived long enough to make a rough map of
the harbor at Bassin,
later named Christiansted, and to draw up
plans for a fort, but he made no progress towards a map
of any substantial area of the island. In fact a series
of engineers were sent out in the first years, but none
of them lived long, and the early survey and mapping of
St. Croix were undertaken for the most part by untrained
colonial officials. There is also more than one mention
in the records of "compass slaves". The work
proceeded very slowly.
The Company Directors
were surprised and annoyed by their inability to extract
informative maps from the island administrators. The official
correspondence is full of increasingly indignant demands
for reports of progress and of excuses, recriminations,
and delaying tactics from the colony. Maps were repeatedly
promised "with the next ship." It was in fact
fifteen years before a Danish map of the whole island
was produced. In the meantime, the Company had to be content
with a series of preliminary cadastral maps of various
quarters of the island. Because the grid survey system
was so easy to visualize and to draw, the earliest maps
were little more than arrangements
of rectangles. Most of those that have survived from
this first period are large-scale maps of the king's
and the Company's own
plantations.
Finally, in 1750, a
map of the whole island was completed
and forwarded to Copenhagen. This is quite an extraordinary
piece of work, especially by comparison with what had
gone before. It is a new map, the result of fresh survey
and compilation from the St. Croix land registers, and
thus has no relationship at all to the old French map.
The map is signed by Johan Cronenberg and by Johan Jaegersberg,
the former the surveyor for the islands and the latter
a no-account nobleman who assisted with the survey for
a short time. It is drawn at a scale of about one to thirty
thousand, which permits the depiction of a great deal
of detail. There is one glaring flaw in the map, namely
the very poorly rendered northwest coast. The error may
be attributed to the fact that Cronenberg was expelled
from St. Croix for a time for an adulterous affair, just
when the map was nearing completion. It is likely that
Jaegersberg, who took over the project but who lacked
Cronenberg's dedication and diligence, gave up on the
mapping of the very rough North Side mountains, drew in
an extremely rough approximation of the coastline, and
arranged for the map to be sent home to Copenhagen; he
died shortly thereafter. This one line can be taken as
evidence that the map was constructed form the inside
out, on the framework of the plantation grid; at that
time, no plantations had been taken up in the mountains
of the North Side, there were no lines of access, no available
traverses, no standard blocks to work with. The North
Side could not yet be mapped.
Aside from this failing on the
North Side, the Cronenberg map is really quite accurate
and amazingly informative. The topography, depicted with
the hachure marks typical of the period, is remarkably
well drawn. Roads and streams appear to be accurately
depicted, and there are a tremendous number of coastal
place names, for which there would otherwise be no contemporary
documentary evidence. But the map is most significant
for its depiction of the patterns of settlement and land
use on the island. It appears to show every major structure
in the rural areas of the island, including slave houses.
The map shows the
actual outlines of individual fields of
sugar cane and cotton, as well as pasture and provision
grounds. Here again, it appears that the mappers avoided
generalization and stylization; the variety in the patterns
of occupation is very convincing. The map absolutely exudes
integrity.
What reaction this extraordinarily
rich and vivid image of the island may have elicited has
proved impossible to reconstruct. We have the letter recording
the fact that the map was being sent to Copenhagen, but
no acknowledgment of its receipt appears. Here was a completely
new and marvelously detailed map of the island, such as
the Company directors had been stridently demanding for
fifteen years, which fundamentally affected their conception
of their colony, but no comment is recorded in the correspondence,
What then was the use and meaning of the map? We have
no idea of how this practically photographic image from
across the sea struck them. Were they encouraged by the
advance of cultivation? Did the depiction jibe with the
impressions they had been receiving from prose reports
and land registers? Were they perhaps dismayed by the
extent of the area still in woods and bush? There is no
indication. It may be that the administrators had grown
complacent. The progress of development was satisfactory,
and perhaps cartographic confirmation of this central
fact was after all superfluous. Furthermore, the map,
because of its very detailed rendering of the
harbor approaches and reefs, was probably quickly
classified as a military secret by the Danish admiralty,
as was common in Denmark at this period. It appears that
the map was then literally forgotten.
By contrast, a map
made within a few more years by Jens Michelsen Beck, which
is inferior to the older map in almost all respects, was
engraved and published in Copenhagen in 1754. This
map is derived essentially from
Cronenberg's work. Beck, serving temporarily as surveyor,
presided over the sale of much of the land on the North
Side, which began to attract a market when other, more
accessible properties on the island had been sold. Four
working sketches preserved from
the 1750s give an idea of how the cadastral work proceeded.
Beck improved the outline of the north coast and added
an inset map of Christiansted and a design for the town
of Frederiksted, which did not yet exist.
Perhaps the main advantage of
Beck's map was that it was a clean and sharp line drawing.
There was no attempt to depict relief, and, unlike Cronenberg's
map, it did not depend on color for its meaning. It was
therefore suitable for engraving. Beck's map became and
remained for decades a standard reference map. A series
of hand-colored exemplars of the map depict the changing
patterns of land ownership, but nothing quite as ambitious
as the depiction of agricultural use shown on Cronenberg's
map has ever been attempted since.
Cronenberg's and Beck's maps
taken together seem to represent a cartographic plateau. For more
than thirty years, a German doctor and botanist named Julius von
Rohr was in charge of surveys on all three Danish West Indian islands.
His cartographic production was undistinguished; he made a few business-like
plantation maps in connection with major land
transfers and a few maps of defensive positions in the 1760s, in
the atmosphere of insecurity of the Seven Years War. He also made
a number of excellent watercolor landscapes.
The threat of an encompassing
war again stimulated concern about the defense of the Danish West
Indies during the American War of Independence. In the late 1770s,
the Danish colonial authorities sought advice on the fortifications
of the islands from a high ranking Danish general who was himself
responsible for the mapping of Norway, which was then part of the
Danish kingdom. General Huth recommended a young officer named Peter
Lotharius Oxholm, who was dispatched to the West Indies in 1778
with rather an ambitious commission.
He was to map and draw all the
fortifications in the islands, and their immediate surroundings.
He was to make recommendations for the improvement of the defensive
works, with estimates of the likely expense. He was to prepare new
topographic maps of the islands of St. Thomas and St. John. In the
case of St. Croix, he was to determine whether Beck's map required
revision or replacement. The orders made no mention at all of Cronenberg's
great map, which apparently was lost to the colonial bureaucracy
by this time.
Oxholm embarked on this assignment
with such energy as to almost immediately antagonize the local West
Indian authorities. Within days of his arrival on St. Croix he was
dispensing urgent advice about the government's disposition of valuable
building lots close to the fort. He surveyed the roadstead at the
West End of St. Croix and the area round the harbor at Christiansted
quite meticulously and reported that Beck's map of
the island was perfectly serviceable for a map of its kind. One's
impression is that the young engineer was dismayed by the difficulty
of survey in this difficult terrain and climate. He more than once
asked and was denied permission to forgo the mapping of St. Thomas
and St. John, but when the unforeseen expense of his mission mounted
up, he was called home, having mapped only St. John. His maps and
drawing-30 in all-met with approbation at court, and he was rewarded
with a handsome bonus. Having married into a prominent St. Croix
family, he returned to the islands and settled down as a sugar planter.
In 1789, the threat of war and
slave rebellion stimulated a great deal of military building in
the Danish West Indies. There is in the of the Queen of Denmark's
personal reference library a military map of St. Croix drawn by
an officer named Balthazar Muhlenfels in 1789.
The map focuses almost exclusively on defensive works and communications,
showing a net of roads on the island such as had never before been
depicted. What is surprising is that the map is obviously based
on Cronenberg's map, done forty years before. It is not known how
or where Muhlenfels obtained access to a copy of the old map, but
he fell into the trap of reproducing Cronenberg's seriously flawed
north coast. The following year, Muhlenfels, who was also for a
time in charge of the islands' cadastral records, drew a topographic
and cadastral map of St. Croix, on which he
drew the North coast properly. Although Muhlenfels's name comes
up prominently in letters of recommendation at this periods, no
mention of his maps have been found.
In 1794, working privately,
Peter Oxholm completed yet another large-scale
topographic and cadastral map of
St. Croix. He sent this map to the Royal Danish Academy
of Sciences and Letters, which was at this time entrusted
with the first organized topographic survey of Denmark,
hoping that the Academy would publish his map in its series.
The Academy declined to publish Oxholm's map on the grounds
that it was altogether too finely detailed and of excessively
large scale and thus too expensive to engrave. Five years
later, Oxholm published it at his own expense. The press
run is unknown, but Oxholm is known to have sent copies
to the West Indian administration and to the Royal Academy;
there are many exemplars in public Danish repositories.
Oxholm's map of St. Croix, like
Beck's map half a century before, became a standard reference map,
and remained so until the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey
mapped the island between 1919 and 1921. It is still in use in cadastral
connections in the St. Croix department of public works. It is quite
clear, however, that Oxholm, too, relied heavily on the theoretical
framework provided by the plantation survey, except in the areas
he surveyed around the two towns. In certain respects Muhlenfels's
cadastral map was more accurate. It is interesting that Muhlenfels,
like Cronenberg, provided the names of the owners of the various
plantations, while Oxholm, in a complete departure, immortalized
the use of whimsical plantation names like Prosperity, Hope, and
Adventure, abruptly altering some of the social and political emphasis
of the map. Oxholm's map of the island can be considered a gentleman's
intellectual exercise, an engineer's fancy, and its primary audience
was perhaps this society of wealthy planters who applied frivolous
names to their great agricultural factories built upon slave labor.
There are simple pen and ink
diagrams scattered through the official surveyors' books for the
three islands, but property plats had no official place in the land
registers. In boundary disputes, however, maps were found to be
very useful, if only for their rhetorical impact, even on St. Croix,
where it had been thought that the regularity of the survey system
would preclude such disputes. Five different maps of the Company's
plantation Princess were brought to bear in
a difficult boundary dispute in the 1740s. In the 1790s, the St.
Croix administration was unable to mediate a compromise in a troublesome
dispute in the rough country on the North Side of St. Croix. In
this case we have an elaborate key to a map made of boundaries in
question, referring to a bewildering assortment of colored lines
and points, but the map is known, from an old annotation in the
official records, to have been missing for a century. A government
surveyor named Meley surveyed disputed boundaries on the East End
of St. Croix, and the depositions of virtually all of the witnesses
in the case refer to a map he made, but the map is lost.
In the face of considerable
administrative indifference, Meley strove to institutionalize
the functions and standards of official surveys. He was
capable of very fine work. Two of his maps survive: one
a town plan of Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas, made when
the town was rebuilding itself after a couple of devastating
fires early in the 1800s, the other a map of the very
large estate Bethlehem
on St. Croix, done in 1779. This estate
plan provides an incomparable view of the layout of a
large sugar plantation. Did it have any real practical
utility in 1779? Did it enter into any decisions about
cropping or the allocation of slave gangs? Or was it a
purely proprietary statement, celebrating the success,
acumen, the very life of the planter?
Maps are crucial to the historical
study of the progress of exploration and settlement and of patterns
of land use and economic development. The Cronenberg map of St.
Croix provides a picture of the extent and distribution of the cultivation
of sugar cane and cotton around 1750 that cannot be extracted from
any other contemporary historical documents whatsoever: not land
registers, tax rolls, shipping lists, or inventories. The map is
a unique record.
However, it is not easy to pin
down the significance of the maps at the time they were made. Just
as today, people appear to have taken maps quite for granted. The
archived correspondence is by no means full of expansive critical
commentary on maps. Large-scale plans like Oxholm's maps of fortifications
had an obvious utility in planning: fields of fire, for example,
could be sketched out. It is the smaller-scale maps of whole islands
that remain problematic. The message that such a map as Cronenberg's
may have conveyed to administrators, politicians, or investors can
easily enough be imagined but not so easily documented. Certainly
Cronenberg and Oxholm and Meley understood the power of their maps
as they took shape on their desks, but very little has yet been
learned about their contemporaries' reactions to the maps. We don't
really know with any certainty who looked at them, or when, or why. |
