Documentary History of the Cinnamon Bay Plantation 1718-1917 Overview

A Documentary History of the Cinnamon Bay Plantation 1718 - 1917

Compiled for the Cinnamon Bay Archaeological Project by

David W. Knight, Director of Danish West Indian Research

Site Location

Centered at approximately 18° North latitude and 65° West longitude, in the extreme northwest portion of the Caribbean island chain commonly referred to as the Leeward Islands, the Virgin Islands effectively represent the demarcation point between the Greater (to the west) and Lesser (to the east and south) Antilles. Mostly volcanic in origin, the one hundred or so islands, islets, cays, and rock outcroppings which form the Virgins are divided into three basic groups: the Spanish Virgin Islands, situated directly east of the United States Territory of Puerto Rico, of which they are a part; the United States Virgin Islands, lying east of the Spanish Virgin Islands; and the British Virgin Islands, lying roughly to the north and northeast of the U. S. Virgin Islands.

The focus of this report is an approximately 300 acre land parcel located on the north central coast of the island of St. John in the United States Virgin Islands. Since the mid-eighteenth century this property has been commonly known as Great Cinnamon Bay.

Above: detail of the Cinnamon Bay area from a aerial survey photo of St. John circa 1954

(National Archives, College Park Maryland, USA)

Below: View of Cinnamon Bay, circa 1973

detail from a photo by Fritz Henle

(Alan H. Robinson, Virgin Islands National Park, The Story Behind the Scenery [Nevada, KC Publications 1974].)

Historic Overview

On March 25, 1718, the governor of the Danish West Indies and Guinea Company colony of St. Thomas, Eric Bradel, accompanied by five soldiers, twenty planters, and sixteen enslaved laborers, landed in Coral Bay to claim the island of St. John in the name of the Danish Crown. After selecting a site for the Company plantation, the governor instructed the planters to indicate the parcels of land that they intended to claim. Their mission accomplished, Bradel and his party beat a hasty retreat back to St. Thomas where they awaited any repercussions that may have been prompted by their actions. Once it became evident that the Danish claim and occupation of St. John would not be vigorously opposed by the British, who for some time had claimed legitimate possession of the island, the planters moved quickly to establish their new holdings [Larsen, 1986].

Little is known of the early years of plantation development on St. John as few documents remain from the era. From the earliest existing tax records, compiled in the year 1728, we can deduce that the first nine privately held plantagies were taken up in the years 1718 and 1719 along St. John's northwest coast, between what are today known as Caneel and Cinnamon Bay [LD, 1722; SJLL, 1728].

From a 1722 letter of report sent by Governor Bradel to the Danish West Indies and Guinea Company home office in Copenhagen, we learn that Peter Durloo, a Dutchman who had immigrated to St. Thomas near the close of the seventeenth century, was the first of the Danish sponsored settlers to take up a parcel of land on St. John, "as nobody else dared because of the threat from other nations [LD, 1720-22]." It has been previously written that Durloo initially settled at Cinnamon Bay [Hatch, 1972], but no evidence of this was found in the historical record. In fact, it seems quite evident that Peter Durloo established his first plantagie at Klein Caneel Bay, and it was not until after 1727 that he acquired a small already established "cotton piece" that lay along the shore of Cinnamon Bay [JP, Jansen vs. Durloo, 1745-49].

In order to put the events surrounding the Danish occupation of St. John in proper perspective, it must be kept in mind that the hundreds of islands, islets, cays and rock outcroppings which today comprise the Virgin Islands, were sighted by Columbus' fleet and claimed for Spain in 1493. The Danish settlement of St. John, therefore, was an event that took place quite late in the process of European colonization in the West Indies. While groundbreaking studies such as the investigations presently led by National Park archeologist Ken Wild along the shoreline at Cinnamon Bay Campgrounds are constantly shedding new light on the prehistoric inhabitants of St. John, next to nothing is known of the nearly two hundred year period between the disappearance of the island's Amerindian inhabitants around 1520 [Watts, 1997], and the arrival of the first Danish settlers in 1718: a period of time which is roughly equivalent to the total length of the Danish colonial experience on St. John (1718 - 1917). With such an apparent void in our historical consciousness it is perhaps worthy of our time to step back for a moment and consider what we know of events on and around St. John prior to the Danish occupation.

Pre-ceramic and Ceramic-period Cultures in the Virgin Islands

The first human inhabitants of the Virgin Islands are believed to have been the Ortoiroid people. Recent studies indicate that this population group slowly migrated northward through the Windward and Leeward Islands from the South American continent, and reached the area of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands sometime between 2000 and 1000 BC [Rouse, 1992]. Fortunately, the Ortoiroid have left enough evidence of their presence in the Virgin Islands -- most notably at the Crum Bay site on St. Thomas -- that it can be determined that they were predominantly hunter-gatherers who tended to occupy areas along inland waterways and the islands' sea coasts. They utilized fire, possessed the ability to fashion projectile points, and formed rudimentary stone tools such as hammer-stones and grinding devises. It seems, however, that they did not engage in agriculture, nor did they form pottery. For this reason, the Ortoiroid people are often referred to as "Pre-ceramic" Indians [Highfield, 1995; Rouse, 1992].

The fate of these early Stone Age residents of the Virgin Islands remains unclear. Today, it is commonly accepted that they inhabited the islands for a period of more than one thousand years before their tenure was abruptly halted. Be it that they perished due to sickness or disastrous natural occurrence, or perhaps were forced out, exterminated, or assimilated by a more dominant and sophisticated wave of immigrants, we simply do not know. We do know that at some point roughly concurrent with the disappearance of the Ortoiroid people, there appeared another population group in the Virgin Islands who are characterized by a more advanced material culture. Due to this distinction, the people who replaced the islands' earliest inhabitants are often referred to collectively as "Ceramic-period" Indians, while the culture they bore is termed "Cedrosan Saladoid" after the distinctive style of pottery they produced [Highfield, 1995; Rouse, 1992].

Like the Ortoiroid, it is believed that the first Cedrosan Saladoid, or Ceramic-period people, migrated out of the South American continent and gradually made their way northward along the West Indian island chain, reaching the area of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands by about 200 BC. Popularly referred to as Arawaks or Island-Arawaks, this group is believed to have migrated in considerable numbers into the Lesser and Greater Antilles over a period of many centuries.

Along with their ability to produce ceramic ware, the Cedrosans possessed a knowledge of agriculture. The fact that their culture was based upon the cultivation of the hearty manioc plant, and the preparation of a nutritious and durable staple food from its pulp, meant that the Cedrosan Saladoid tended to establish more permanent agrarian settlements. This afforded them the time, and therefore the opportunity, to advance themselves in areas that were not necessarily related to every day foraging for sustenance: a fact displayed by the presence of creative adornments on their pottery, as well as other household, religious, and personal items [Highfield, 1995; Rouse, 1992].

Between 600 and 1200 AD, yet another culture, termed "Ostionoid" (or in its later period of development, Taíno), appears to have grown out of, or came to supplant, the Cedrosan Saladoid. By mingling the skills and traditions which their ancestors had brought from the South American continent, with the specific needs and resources of the islands they had come to inhabit, the Ostionoid culture developed a distinctly Caribbean nature [Wilson, 1997]. It is believed that the succeeding Taíno culture was still in a somewhat early stage of development, when, in the closing years of the sixteenth century, its progress was effectively disrupted and ultimately destroyed by European intervention [Highfield, 1995].

History has left us written accounts of the first contact between the Taíno people of the Virgin Islands and the European invaders. On November 14, 1493, while on his second voyage to the West Indies, Christopher Columbus engaged in a brief but violent skirmish with Indians along the north coast of an island that his native guides referred to as Ayay. Heading in a northerly direction after the encounter, Columbus soon came upon a cluster of small but mountainous islands which he named Las Virgines (The Virgins). As with all of the many islands which Columbus observed, Las Virgines and Ayay (St. Croix) were from that day on presumed by the Spaniards to be conquests, and therefore Spanish domain [Highfield, 1995; Morison, 1939].

It is not known whether any further contact with the Taínos of Las Virgines occurred over the course of the next week while vessels of Columbus' fleet explored the bays and channels of their newfound archipelago. In any event, the arrival of Columbus' fleet, and the subsequent European invasion and occupation of the Taínos' homelands marked the beginning of the end of the indigenous Indian presence in the Virgin Islands. Within the course of only a few decades, a people whose ancestors had endured for some two millennium were driven by violent conquest, enslavement and imported disease, to the point of near extinction.

Early European Colonization in the West Indies

After Columbus' voyages the European presence in the West Indies grew rapidly. By 1509 (only 17 years after Columbus' first voyage), Spain's premier colony of Hispaniola was reported to have between 8,000 to 10,000 colonial inhabitants. Within that same time-frame, the contemporary chronicler, Las Casas, stated that some 3,000,000 of the islands indigenous inhabitants had died due to causes directly related to the Spanish presence. An official Spanish census taken in Hispaniola in 1508 recorded only 60,000 indigenous peoples left on the island by that date [Watts, 1987].

The Spaniards' intentions in the New World were initially not to trade or establish plantations, but to conquer and extract available natural resources they found of value. Prominent on their list, of course, was gold. With the large, well watered, and potentially ore rich islands of the Greater Antilles at their disposal, the small and barren islands of the Las Virgines group were initially viewed as unsuitable for exploitation. It is possible, therefore, that while the Spanish had laid claim to the Virgin Islands as early as 1493, their presence had relatively little impact on the indigenous people of the area in the years immediately following Columbus's arrival [Rochefort, 1656].

This situation, however, was soon to change. Between 1508 and 1520, as resources on the island of Hispaniola began to be depleted and the supply of locally available labor rapidly diminished, the Spaniards ventured out to occupy more territories, moving on to create settlements on Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica. They also at this time began to actively raid and deplete the human and natural resources of the smaller islands, such as those of the Las Virgines group. It is believed that by 1520 virtually all of the indigenous peoples had been removed from the northern Leeward Islands, with the exceptions of St. Kitts and Nevis, and that in the Windward Islands, St. Lucia, Tobago, and Barbados had all been depopulated. The islands along the Venezuelan coast were similarly affected, with the exception of Cubagua and its adjacent cays, where pearls continued to be harvested by enslaved Indians [Watts, 1987].

Between 1519 and 1521, two earthshaking occurrences took place that were to have a profound effect on the course of Spanish colonial history in the Caribbean: Hernan Cortez's expedition into Mexico redirected the focus of Hispanic colonization and expansionism to the American continents; and, Magellan's navigation of the Capes opened up a new ocean (the Pacific), making the long sought prospect of sea born trade with the East Indies a reality.

Spain now began to dream on a global scale, and the small and relatively unproductive islands of the West Indies diminished in importance. While the larger islands were retained, they largely became provisioning and transshipment points for Spanish ships navigating between continental American and Spanish mainland ports; their arable grounds converted to agriculture and grazing to support colonial ventures elsewhere.

While the Spanish doggedly defended their rights to the possession of all of the islands in the West Indies for the remainder of the 16th century, by the turn of the 17th century, it was becoming increasingly evident that Spain could no longer afford the manpower and resources required to uphold her far flung claims of sovereignty over the region. Thus, a window of opportunity was created, allowing other expansionist minded nations to gain inroads into what had previously been exclusively Spanish territory.

A diversity of peoples soon sought to capitalize on the void left by Spain's diminishing influence in the region. British, French, Netherlanders, Portuguese, expatriate Spaniards, the surviving native peoples and their mixed race descendants, the Black Carib, all now joined in the fray, struggling amongst themselves for control over a share in the opportunities for trade and agriculture in the West Indies. Among the earliest arrivals in this second wave of European Colonial migration were the Dutch, who successfully occupied Aruba in 1596. The English and French soon followed suit, jointly occupying St. Christopher in the 1620s -- which, at the time, was still home to one of the Caribbean's' few remaining Amerindian communities.

By the mid-seventeenth century, almost all of the islands of the Eastern Caribbean, which the Spaniards had dismissed as unprofitable, were occupied by groups of settlers claiming to represent the best interests of the dominant European powers of the time. Amidst this turbulent backdrop the Virgin Islands lay seemingly neglected; marginal lands poised on the brink of opposing worlds [Watts, 1987; Knox, 1852; Bro-Jørgensen, 1966].

The First Danish Attempt to Establish a Colony in the Virgin Islands

It was not until 1665, while the Dutch and English stood at the verge of open warfare for the second time in just over a decade, that a group of Copenhagen based (mostly Dutch) merchants put forth to the Danish Crown a plan to colonize the island of St. Thomas with a multinational citizenry under the protection of a neutral Danish flag. By May of that year the Crown granted its approval, and a small colonizing force set out from Copenhagen lead by the Danish colony's newly appointed Governor, Capt. Erik Nielsen Smit.

But claims of peaceful neutrality could not protect the Danish led settlers from harassment by both British and French forces in the Caribbean, who undoubtedly viewed the fledgling colony as a thinly veiled attempt to extend and protect Dutch mercantile interests in the region. After only 19 months, the first attempt to establish a Danish West Indian colony had ended in failure. Kjeld Jansen Slagelse, the Lutheran minister who had assumed command of the colony upon the death of Erik Smit, returned to Denmark with a handful of Danish survivors. Other colonists dispersed to various islands throughout the West Indies [Bro-Jørgensen, 1966; Knox, 1852; Westergaard, 1917; Dookhan, 1994].

Successful Danish Occupation and Colonization Within the Virgin Islands

Upon his accession to the Danish throne in 1670, Christian V granted yet another group of wealthy Copenhagen merchants the right to form a company to engage in colonization and commerce in the West Indies. Four months later, the newly crowned King concluded negotiations with the British securing a "treaty of alliance" which insured that any legitimate colonial objectives of Denmark would not be opposed by British forces. The stage was thus set for Denmark's second attempt to establish a mercantile colony on the small and still officially unoccupied island of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands.

On October 20, 1671, Jørgen Iversen, the appointed Governor of the proposed Danish West Indian settlement, along with a handful of Company employees, a Lutheran clergyman, and a colonizing force comprised largely of indentured servants and imprisoned laborers, set out aboard the ship Færo for the journey to the Caribbean. Plagued by difficulties from the outset of their voyage, it was not until the night of May 25, 1672, that the Færo finally dropped anchor off St. Thomas' southern coast. Over the course of the seven months voyage, seventy-seven of the expedition's members had died and another nine had deserted. Of the one hundred and four souls that came ashore on that day, only twenty-nine were to survive the first seven months of the colony's occupation. As for Company officials, Iversen alone remained to bring order and leadership to his country's fledgling New World foothold [Bro-Jørgensen, 1966; Knight, 1997].

Despite considerable hardships the Danish settlers persevered, and in time the critical period of initial occupation was behind them. As word of St. Thomas' successful occupation spread, persons from throughout the region, eager to escape the deprivations of war and ethnic persecutions, chose to seek new opportunity under the Danish flag of neutrality. Among the first of these emigrants to arrive were a small contingent of Dutch nationals, who, only a few weeks after the Danes arrival, had been expelled from the neighboring island of Tortola by occupying British forces at the outbreak of the Third Dutch War (1672 -1678) [Dookhan, 1994; Bro-Jørgensen, 1966]. By the time the first census of the Danish West Indian colony was compiled in 1686, eighty-three plantagies had been established by settlers of Danish, German, French, Dutch, English, Irish, and Creole West Indian backgrounds [STLL, 1686]. Still, it was to be many years before all of the arable land on St. Thomas would be occupied.

Although during the closing years of the 1600s occasional attempts were made by St. Thomas settlers to venture forth and establish themselves on the nearby islands of St. John and Crab Island (Vieques), Danish West Indies Company authorities appear to have been little inclined to risk armed confrontation to expand their colonial holdings. It was, therefore, not until after the turn of the eighteenth century that soil and resource depletion, along with the dynamics of a growing population, forced the island's administrators to seek new and more fertile lands upon which the unfortunate planter might gain his fortune and the successful ones extend theirs. In 1717, when the decision was finally made to formally extend the Danish West Indies and Guinea Company's colonial holdings in the Virgin Islands, it was the nearby island of St. John that became the stage for this endeavor [STLL, 1686, 1688, 1691- 1718; Bro-Jørgensen, 1966; Larsen, 1986; Westergaard, 1917].

Notes on the Historical Context of the Danish Occupation of St. John

It was not until the establishment of the Danish West Indian colony of St. Thomas by Jørgen Iversen, and the British capture of Tortola by Williem Stapelton, that stable governments were established and the systematic recording of matters concerning the two Virgin Islands colonies was begun. As a result, it is the date of those two concurrent events, 1672, at which point the modern political history of the British and American Virgin Islands (exclusive of St. Croix) is generally recognized to begin.

Formal reports sent back to Denmark by Iversen's occupying party indicated that St. Thomas was unpopulated at the time of their arrival. However, there are numerous references in the historical record of occasional visitation and attempts to establish settlements on that island prior to Denmark's successful colonization. For example, in Rochefort's volume, History of the Antilles, penned in 1656, the author states, "... the Spaniards often visit them (the Virgin Islands) for the purpose of catching the numerous fish which abound in their channels and bays..." and, "... there is so little good soil, that after cultivation had been tried, and the islands thoroughly explored (by the Spanish), they had not been considered fit for settlement." It is only logical that among those islands "often visited" by the Spaniards, St. Thomas and St. John can be included. It was also recorded by the noted Danish historian Hóst, that when Erik Smit arrived on St. Thomas in 1665 he found the island already inhabited by "Hollanders and Caribs" ¹ [Hóst, 1791]. No indication is given as to how long the Dutch settlers had been on St. Thomas before Smit's arrival, but it is believed that they stayed on and were among those who joined the attempted establishment of the first Danish West Indian colony.

In 1667, when the English occupied the Dutch islands of St. Eustatius and St. Martin during the Second Dutch War, they also went on to capture St. Thomas; thereby ending the Smit party's brief attempt at colonization. But, perhaps due to its proximity to the Spanish on Puerto Rico, the English found St. Thomas unsuitable for prolonged occupation and were reported to have abandoned the island sometime prior to Jørgen Iverson's arrival in 1672 [Bro-Jørgensen, 1966; Knox, 1852; Westergaard, 1917; Dookhan, 1974].

As for Tortola, Williem Stapelton's "capture" of that island in 1672, and his subsequent expulsion of a number of already well established Dutch settlers, confirms a continued Dutch presence in the Virgin Islands up until that date. It has been written that a party of "Dutch buccaneers" established themselves on the western end of Tortola as early as 1648, but little documentation exists to substantiate this report, so it remains unclear at precisely what point the Dutch actually settled on Tortola [Knox, 1852]. What is clear, is that while Dutch efforts to establish themselves in the Virgin Islands appear to have consistently met with resistance from opposing forces, elements of their citizenry doggedly held on to remain an enduring entity in the Virgin Islands throughout the first two centuries of the islands' colonial history. Indeed to this day, names such as Jost van Dyke, the Durloo Cays, and Caneel and Grootpan Bay remain as testaments to the presence of early Dutch settlers in the region.

To what extent the early occupations of St. Thomas and Tortola impacted St. John can not be readily determined. Without having had any officially sanctioned settlements prior the arrival of the Danes in 1718, a documentary record of the island is unfortunately nonexistent. Still, it would seem reasonable to assume that St. John was frequently visited by the Spanish throughout the one hundred and fifty years or so after Columbus' second voyage: first, for the purpose of exploration and watering; secondly, for the capture and enslavement of the Amerindian population; and lastly, to harvest natural resources such as fish, salt, game, medicinals, and timber. With the emergence of an increasing number of European privateers into the West Indian theater around the turn of the seventeenth century, St. John surely saw an increase in periodic visitations. We know that Sir Francis Drake passed along St. John's north coast on his way to Puerto Rico in 1595 and may well have landed there while assembling his fleet. In succeeding years any number of transient French, Dutch, or British nationals would have ventured through the Virgin Islands chain, exploring the coastlines, and, from time to time, putting ashore in search of log wood, game, salt, fresh water, or to service their sea-weary vessels. Yet it is altogether likely that it was not until the Dutch established their tenuous foothold on Tortola sometime in the mid 1600s, that St. John was first actually inhabited by Europeans. These first settlers would have initially occupied the semi-cleared areas along the island's coast, where Amerindians had previously planted their staple manioc crops and cultivated the indigenous cotton plant from which they spun thread to produce cloth. But, with the English expulsion of the Dutch settlers from Tortola in 1672, any Hollanders found to be on St. John would have been quickly evicted as well.

We know that after Stapelton's capture of Tortola the British clearly viewed St. John as part and parcel of their prize: a perspective not shared by the Danes on St. Thomas who also considered St. John a part of their chartered territory. So it would seem that for nearly half a century after the British capture of Tortola and the Danish occupation of St. Thomas, the island of St. John, which lay between those two imperious strongholds, became a no-mans-land: claimed and undoubtedly utilized by both parties, though officially occupied by neither. But, by the early 1700s the British had turned their attentions toward their more prosperous possessions in the Windward and Leeward Islands, and it became increasingly apparent to the Danes that the English would be little inclined to forcibly exert their claims over the remaining unsettled islands of the Virgin group. This situation soon prompted a small party of Danish settlers to venture out and cautiously attempt to establish themselves on St. John. And while the British governor on nearby Spanish Town (now called Virgin Gorda) vehemently threatened the Danes with dire consequence if they did not remove themselves, after Governor Bradel and his party planted the Danish flag at Coral Bay in 1718, no significant resistance to their settlement was ever mounted [LD,1720-22].

¹ While John P. Knox, in his book, A Historical Account of St. Thomas (New York, Charles Scribner, 1852), accepts Hóst's account that there were "Hollanders" present on the island of St. Thomas upon Smit's arrival, he too hastily discounts the presence of the "Caribs". In fact it seems quite logical that the so called "Caribs" were Amerindian slaves captured along the Guyana or Spanish Main coasts and transported to St. Thomas via the Dutch colony of Curaçao; or, perhaps they were the Creolized descendants of enslaved Indians who had been brought to the West Indies by the Dutch after they were expelled from Brazil by the Spanish and Portuguese in 1626. In any event, it is well documented that the Dutch were utilizing the labors of enslaved Amerindians with a diversity of backgrounds during this time period.