Summary
Cordt Gylves Orm was a Danish sailor, born in 1724. He
was employed as a teenager by the West India and Guinea
Company in Copenhagen. In 1747, Orm was hired as a sai-
lor on the Company’s slaver PRINSESSE SOPHIA MAG-
DALENA. As he was not familiar with life at sea, Orm
changed his mind and asked the captain to be relieved of his
contract, but he was ordered to stay on board. He became
so desperate that he took his knife and stabbed one of his
fellow seamen when they weighed anchor in Copenhagen
on 15 September 1747. The wound turned out not to be seri-
ous, but Orm was immediately put ashore as a prisoner. The
ship’s voyage along the triangular route via the Gold Coast
to the Danish West Indies and back to Denmark took almost
20 months, and Orm was not released until the ship had re-
turned in April 1749.
In spite of this sad start, Cordt Gylves Orm later became
a captain on no fewer than eleven voyages to the Caribbean,
especially in public service. Already in 1755, we find him
on the frigate JÆGERSBORG which departed from Saint
Thomas in November, and where he – upon the death of the
captain – himself became acting captain. However, he was
far from successful as his navigation was inaccurate and the
ship ended up in the Bristol Channel instead of the English
Channel.
Nevertheless, Orm was engaged in 1759 by the Ex-
chequer (
Rentekammeret
) as master of the KRONPRINS
CHRISTIAN, bound for the Danish West Indies, where he
again became acting captain on board. He returned with a
cargo of raw sugar and a little cotton, rum and coffee beans.
It was Orm’s duty to see to it that the KRONPRINS
CHRISTIAN was repaired and fitted out for a new voyage
to Saint Thomas in 1762 and again in 1764. He ran into
problems with passengers who complained about the lack
of comfort and humble food on board, and on several occa-
sions it was difficult for him to get acceptable return cargoes
from the West Indian government officials.
In 1766, his ship was sold by the Exchequer to the newly
established Guinea Company. Orm was thus unemployed un-
til late 1769, when he was asked to take command of the roy-
al West India packet boat SANKT CROIX. The packet was
a small but fast vessel which transported first and foremost
passengers and mail, and only to a lesser degree the usual
cargo. SANKT CROIX had a crew of 16 men. Orm captained
a voyage every year from 1769 to 1773 to Christiansted on
Saint Croix, seat of the West India Government. Most of the
voyages were made according to schedule, but on the last re-
turn voyage the boat ran into a heavy storm which forced
Orm to return to Saint Croix for essential repairs.
His salary as a captain was 24 rix-dollars a month, or a
little over 200 rix-dollars on a direct return voyage. He was
also permitted to trade on his own account (pacotille), which
would typically yield a profit of more than 1,000 rix-dollars
on each voyage.
It appears that he did not succeed in gaining engage-
ments between 1775 and 1781. But during the hectic boom
of neutral Danish tonnage during the War of American Inde-
pendence, the experienced Cordt Gylves Orm, who by then
called himself a “retired ship’s captain”, was hired by the
Baltic and Guinea Trading Company to command the quite
new ship GREV MOLTKE on a voyage along the triangular
route. He took 511 Africans aboard at the Gold Coast (18
percent of whom died during the so-called middle passage),
took a cargo of raw sugar from the Danish West Indies, and
was back in Copenhagen in December 1783.
Orm was around 60 years old at that time, and he prob-
ably died soon after. He had had a fine career in the West
India trade, and his long life at sea is an illustration of how
Danish shipping to the West Indies and the Gold Coast was
carried out between 1747 and 1783.
Erik Gøbel (f. 1949)
Historiker, fra 1979 til 1981 stipendiat ved Institut for øko-
nomisk Historie, KU, siden 1981 seniorforsker i Rigsarki-
vet. Har publiceret adskillige bøger og artikler om økono-
misk og social historie, herunder navnlig søfartshistorie.
Har især forsket i de tidligere danske tropekoloniers histo-
rie og senest udgivet bogen
Vestindisk-guineisk Kompagni
1671-1754 (2015)
. Arbejder for tiden på en engelsksproget
bog om den danske slavehandels historie.
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