Journey
Danish India — 1620 to 1868
Denmark held Indian ground for two hundred and forty-eight years and never fought a battle for any of it. Too small to compete, its settlements sold neutrality instead: shelter for other flags in wartime, and a landing for the missionaries and printers the East India Company would not admit to Bengal.
Stops (10)
- Ove Gjedde · the 1620 treaty
Christian IV sent a twenty-six-year-old admiral east in 1618 with five ships and no clear brief. Two ships and two-thirds of the crews were lost on the way. Gjedde reached the Coromandel and signed a treaty with Raghunatha Nayak of Thanjavur on 20 November 1620 for one village and the right to fortify it.
- Tranquebar (Tharangambadi) · 1620–1845
Fort Dansborg and a walled town of about a square mile, held for two hundred and twenty-five years on a lease from Thanjavur. Denmark's smallness was the asset: in every European war the flag was neutral, so cargo, capital and refugees moved through Tranquebar when Madras and Pondicherry could not trade.
- Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg · arrived 1706
Ziegenbalg was sent by Frederik IV, learned Tamil by sitting on the floor of a village school, and printed the first book in an Indian language on movable type in 1713 and the New Testament in Tamil in 1715. He also wrote the first sympathetic European account of Hindu practice and was disciplined for it.
- Balasore (Baleshwar) · 1636–1845
The Odisha roadstead that was Europe's first entry to Bengal, before the Hooghly was regularly navigated. Four companies had factories in one silting river mouth. The Danes came about 1636, abandoned the post, and reopened it in 1763 under a Maratha farman, holding it until the sale to Britain. Four companies had factories in one silting river mouth, and the Danes held theirs until the 1845 sale.
- Machilipatnam / Masulipatnam / Bandar · 1625–c.1700
A Danish factory was working at Masulipatnam by 1625, five years after Tranquebar, buying the painted cottons that were the Coromandel's export to Persia and Southeast Asia. Denmark never controlled the port and did not try; the lodge existed to put Danish capital into a trade that Golconda's officials administered.
- Kozhikode / Calicut · 1752–1791
A pepper-procurement lodge on the Malabar coast, taken up a century and a half after the Zamorin's first European visitors and abandoned during the Mysore wars. It is the westernmost Danish position in India and shows what the later Danish Asiatic Company actually was: a buyer of commodities at other people's ports.
- Serampore & the Mission Press · 1755–1839
Frederiksnagore, bought in 1755 fifteen miles above Calcutta, and the most consequential square mile Denmark ever held. Because it was not British territory, the Baptist mission the Company had refused entry settled here, and its press printed scripture, newspapers and grammars in forty languages from a Danish enclave inside Bengal.
- William Carey · Serampore 1800–1834
Carey, a shoemaker turned Sanskritist, ran the press, translated the Bible into dozens of languages with Indian pandits, founded Serampore College under a Danish royal charter in 1827, and taught Bengali and Sanskrit at Fort William College for the Company that had refused him a landing. He also compiled grammars and dictionaries of Sanskrit, Bengali and Marathi, and his press cut the first types for most of the languages it printed in.
- Hooghly–Chinsurah · Gondalpara 1698–1845
Thirty kilometres of one river carried Portuguese Bandel, Dutch Chinsurah, French Chandernagore, Danish Serampore and English Calcutta. Denmark's second Hooghly post, Dannemarksnagore at Gondalpara, sat between them. The competition was not for territory but for the same Bengal weavers and the same customs concessions from the Nawab. Denmark's second Hooghly post, Dannemarksnagore at Gondalpara, sat between the Dutch and the French, and none of the six flags on this reach held more than a few square miles.
- Nakkavaram / Nicobar Islands · 1756–1868
Denmark declared the Nicobars Frederiksøerne on 1 January 1756 and tried four times to settle them; malaria defeated every attempt. The claim was maintained on paper for a century largely to keep other flags out, was abandoned in practice from 1848, and was sold to Britain on 16 October 1868.