Sjæklen

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.