Before it was a cruise port. Before it was American. For 250 years, the harbor you just sailed into was the center of the New World — and almost nobody knows it.
They Named It After a Bar
The first Danish settlers arrived on St. Thomas in 1666 with ambitions of empire and, apparently, an immediate thirst. Before there was a proper fort, before there was a governor’s mansion, before there was a city — there was a place to drink. The harbor they found was so deep, so protected, so perfectly positioned between the Old World and the New that within a generation it would become one of the most consequential ports on earth. But first, they built somewhere to sit down with a rum.
They called it Taphus. In Danish, tap hus means tap house — a drinking hall, a rum shop. That was the name of what is now Charlotte Amalie: a collection of drinking establishments clustered around a perfect harbor at the edge of the known world. It was not a subtle beginning. It was, however, an honest one.
What grew from Taphus over the next two and a half centuries is one of the most extraordinary and least-told stories in the history of the Western hemisphere. A small Scandinavian kingdom that most people associate with Vikings and fairy tales built, in this harbor, one of the most cosmopolitan trading ports the world has ever seen — financed by rum, built by enslaved people, and open to every nation on earth at a time when every other empire was hoarding trade behind walls.
You walked off your ship into the middle of that story. Most people never realize it.
The Danes Had a Plan
In 1671, the Danish West India and Guinea Company was founded in Copenhagen with a mandate to carve out a piece of the enormously profitable Caribbean trade that the Spanish, British, French, and Dutch were already fighting over. The following year, Danish settlers established a permanent colony on St. Thomas — a small, hilly island with limited agricultural potential but one extraordinary asset: a deep natural harbor that could shelter any ship ever built.
The Danes were realists. They understood quickly that St. Thomas would never be the sugar powerhouse that St. Croix or Jamaica could be. The terrain was too rugged, the land too scarce. But a harbor is a different kind of asset. A harbor is a place where everyone has to stop — to resupply, to repair, to trade, to rest. And if you make that harbor free and open, if you remove every tariff and restriction that every other port in the Caribbean maintained, you can become the center of everything without growing a single crop.
In 1764, King Frederick V did exactly that. Charlotte Amalie was declared a free port — open to all nations, all flags, all goods, no questions asked. In a world of mercantilist empires that controlled trade through monopoly and exclusion, this was a radical and electrifying idea. Ships from every nation in the Atlantic world began diverting to Charlotte Amalie. The harbor filled. The warehouses multiplied. The money arrived.
Within a generation, what had been a modest colonial outpost became the busiest harbor in the Caribbean.
The Most Cosmopolitan Street in the Western World
Picture the waterfront of Charlotte Amalie at its peak — roughly 1780 to 1840. You are standing on what is now Main Street, then called Dronningens Gade — Queen’s Street, in Danish. The buildings around you are Danish colonial architecture: thick masonry walls, red-tiled roofs, shaded arcades at street level to cut the Caribbean heat. The street names are Danish. The fort flying over the harbor is Danish. The law is Danish.
But the people are everything else.
American importing houses operating next to Danish ones. Sephardic Jewish merchants — many of them refugees from St. Eustatius after the British sacked it in 1782 — running trading operations alongside German and French commercial houses. British factors, Italian merchants, Spanish traders. By 1803, the Jewish community alone comprised nearly 200 households from across the Sephardic diaspora — from Curaçao, from Amsterdam, from London, from the Ottoman Empire. They would eventually build what remains today the second oldest synagogue in the Western Hemisphere, its floor laid with sand in memory of the desert wandering of their ancestors.
The languages spoken on a single block of Dronningens Gade on a Tuesday morning would have included Danish, Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Ladino, German, and the emerging Creole of the islands themselves. Ships in the harbor flew flags from a dozen nations. The harbor master’s protocols — now preserved in the Danish National Archives in Copenhagen, 5 million pages digitized and available to anyone — recorded every vessel entering and leaving Charlotte Amalie between 1821 and 1865: where it came from, what it carried, where it was going. It was, by any measure, one of the most internationally diverse trading ports in the history of the world.
Alexander Hamilton — then a young man, later the architect of the American financial system — visited and was reportedly stunned by the density of wealth. He observed that gold moved through the streets of Charlotte Amalie in wheelbarrows.
He was not speaking metaphorically.
From the German port city of Flensburg — then under Danish rule, perched on a fjord near the modern German-Danish border — ships loaded with yellow ballast bricks made the transatlantic crossing to Charlotte Amalie. The bricks stabilized empty hulls on the outbound journey and were offloaded here upon arrival to make room for the return cargo. Today, those same distinctive yellow Flensburg bricks — so uniquely Danish that marine archaeologists used them in 2023 to identify 18th-century Danish shipwrecks off the coast of Costa Rica — frame the doorways of a building on Back Street. Flensburg, meanwhile, became known as The Rum City, home to some 200 refineries processing the Caribbean rum that came back on those same ships. The bricks went one way. The rum went the other. Both journeys are still visible, if you know where to look.
The Engine That Ran It
None of this happened in a vacuum. None of it happened cleanly.
The cosmopolitan vibrancy of Charlotte Amalie — the wheelbarrows of gold, the polyglot waterfront, the extraordinary free port — was built on an engine that demands to be named directly: the labor of enslaved Africans and the trade in human beings that fueled the entire Caribbean economy.
Denmark was not a bystander in this. The Danish West India and Guinea Company transported an estimated 120,000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. The triangular trade that made Charlotte Amalie rich moved goods from Europe to Africa, human beings from Africa to the Caribbean, and sugar, rum and molasses from the Caribbean back to Europe. The rum that made Flensburg prosperous, the sugar that made Danish merchants wealthy, the trade volume that made Charlotte Amalie’s harbor the busiest in the Caribbean — all of it rested on this foundation.
This is not a footnote to the story of St. Thomas. It is the story of St. Thomas. It is the story of the Caribbean. And it is a story that can be held alongside the rest of the history — the beauty, the commerce, the cultural richness, the extraordinary cosmopolitan experiment of a free port — without either truth canceling the other.
Human beings can build something remarkable and do something unconscionable at the same time. Acknowledging both is not contradiction. It is accuracy.
The People Who Lived Here
One street over from Main Street — from Dronningens Gade with its importing houses and its wheelbarrows of gold — is a smaller street that the Danes called Wimmelskafts Gade. On this street, at number 13, stands a single-story U-shaped building that appears on the 1837 Hindelberg map of Charlotte Amalie almost exactly as it stands today.
It was the slave quarters for the Lange estate — the property of one of the wealthiest merchant families in Charlotte Amalie, whose main house across the street is now the Enid Baa Library. Between ten and fifteen people lived here at any given time, in individual rooms, each with its own door opening onto a shared interior courtyard. In that courtyard: a double brick oven. A saltwater well. Space to cook, to gather, to breathe.
These were people with names. People who knew each other’s children, who cooked together over that brick oven, who sat in that courtyard in the evenings after the merchant families across the street had gone inside. Across the Caribbean, enslaved people were not passive figures in the rum economy — they were its most skilled practitioners. The actual work of fermentation and distillation, the knowledge of how molasses becomes alcohol, how alcohol becomes something worth drinking — this knowledge lived in the hands and minds of the people who did the labor. Almost certainly, in this courtyard, some version of that knowledge was being practiced quietly, personally, for reasons that had nothing to do with any merchant’s profit.
The people who lived at 13 Wimmelskafts were held in bondage by a system of extraordinary violence and moral failure. They were also people who loved and laughed and endured and built lives inside the walls of that courtyard. Both of these things were true every single day. The building does not ask you to choose between them. Neither should you.
The Empire Fades. The Building Stays.
By the 1840s, steam power was changing everything. Ships no longer needed the same deep-harbor safe anchorage that had made Charlotte Amalie indispensable. Trade began flowing elsewhere. In 1848 — before the American Civil War, before Abraham Lincoln, before the Emancipation Proclamation — slavery was abolished in the Danish West Indies, prompted by a rebellion on St. Croix. The plantation economy that had financed the whole enterprise began its long collapse.
Denmark tried to sell the islands several times over the following decades. Nobody wanted them badly enough, at the right price, until 1917 — when the United States, alarmed by the possibility of Germany acquiring a Caribbean harbor during World War I, purchased St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John for $25 million in gold. On March 31st of that year, the Danish flag came down and the American flag went up.
Danish archivists came to collect the records. They packed up the ledgers, the protocols, the census documents, the shipping logs — everything that documented 250 years of Danish colonial life — and sent them to Copenhagen. They are there today, in the Danish National Archives, 5 million pages digitized and waiting. The history of this place is largely stored in a country most of its current residents have never visited.
The building at 13 Wimmelskafts moved on without them. It became a sporting goods store. Then a nursing school. Then a daycare. A beauty salon. The decades passed and the traffic dwindled and eventually the building was simply left — the roof opening to the sky, trees growing through the masonry, the courtyard filling with debris. The Flensburg bricks in the doorframes held. They had, after all, crossed an ocean.
In 2020, the building was purchased and restored — stone by stone, brick by brick, with support from the Virgin Islands Historic Preservation Office. Almost every original material was saved. The walls were repointed. The courtyard was cleared. The brick ovens still stand. The saltwater well is still there.
And now there is rum again.
What’s Still Here
Walk through Charlotte Amalie today and the Danish empire is everywhere, if you know what you’re looking at. The street names — Dronningens Gade, Kongens Gade, Kronprindsens Gade — Queen’s Street, King’s Street, Crown Prince’s Street — are Danish. The step streets the Danes called frigangs, built in the mid-1700s from brick brought over as ship’s ballast, still climb the hillsides. Fort Christian, built in 1672, is the oldest standing structure in the Virgin Islands. The synagogue on Crystal Gade, its sand floor still in place, has held continuous services since 1796. The red-roofed colonial architecture that gives Charlotte Amalie its character is Danish. The three hills that frame the harbor — Frenchman Hill, Berg Hill, Government Hill — still carry the phantom geography of an empire that has been gone for more than a century.
And on Back Street, one block off Main, the building at 13 Wimmelskafts Gade stands with its yellow Flensburg bricks framing doorways that have been here since before the United States was a generation old.
Behind those doorways: a small-batch distillery making rum from scratch, on island, the way rum has been made in this harbor since the harbor had a name. The fermentation, the distillation, the aging — all of it happening in the same courtyard where it was happening two hundred years ago, in the shadow of the same walls, under the same Caribbean sky.
The Danish empire is gone. The trading houses are gone. The Guinea Company ships are gone. The wheelbarrows of gold are gone. But the rum is still here. The bricks are still here. The courtyard is still here.
Come find it.
3 Queens Distillery is located at 13 Wimmelskafts Gade, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas — one block from Main Street, a five-minute walk from Fort Christian. Tasting room open daily. Tours available through Blue Mango Tours. The Danish National Archives on the Danish West Indies are accessible at en.rigsarkivet.dk.