Danish Gold Coast

The Danish Gold Coast, Dansk Guinea, was the group of colonies that Denmark-Norway held on the Gulf of Guinea, roughly the present-day southeast of Ghana. The Scandinavians came late, after the Portuguese, Dutch and English, but Hendrik Carloff, a former employee of the Swedish Africa Company, offered the Danish crown a cheap route in: with a letter of marque of 1657 he captured the Swedish forts on the coast at his own cost, keeping most of the proceeds. The Danes then held the land first through the Danish West India Company and later as a crown colony. Their influence spread over ten thousand square kilometres, and about forty thousand people lived under it in 1837. Plantations of cotton, coffee and sugar were tried and largely failed, and after the abolition of slavery the cost of the posts rose faster than their profit. One by one the forts were closed until, by 1817, only Fort Christiansborg at Osu remained, and in 1850 it and the other four forts were sold to Britain, which folded them into the Gold Coast colony.