Books, Geography and Denmark's Colonial Undertaking in West Africa, 1790–1850

In a quietly dramatic passage in Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s protagonist is astonished to come upon a book, An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship, in an abandoned hut in the African forest. ‘Fancy a man lugging with him a book of that description into this nowhere and studying it – and making notes’, he thought. ‘The simple old sailor, with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the jungle … in a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real’. ¹ It is with somewhat the same surprise that one comes upon the traces of Milton and Shakespeare in the archives of the old Danish slaving forts on the West African coast in what is now southeastern Ghana. ² Indeed, substantial numbers of books can be followed through these archives into the hands of colonial officers and merchants in Denmark’s African enclave in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To do so is to throw light on the unmistakably real geographical perspectives that underlay Danish colonial enterprise on the African coast.