Runaway advertisement, St Croix 1770–1810
Presentation
This dataset were created by students at Aalborg University. The advertisements until 1779 were collected by Pernille Wolff-Tæstensen as part of her MA-thesis. The later articles were created by Alexander Jochims Johnsen, Frederik Tange Holmberg Holst, Sarah Lydia Blok Kloster and Sophie Sine Brøndum as part of their BA-thesis.
The dataset contains 685 advertisements from the main newspaper at St. Croix. The advertisements mainly relate to people enslaved in the plantation economy of the Danish colony. However, because the elites of the island had diverse backgrounds, dominated by people of English and Dutch descent, the newspapers were printed in English. The newspapers have not survived in their entirety. There is a large gap from 1779-1789, and 1793 to 1802 and smaller gaps elsewhere. The original newspapers are held by the Royal Library in Denmark and accessible as images scanned from microfilm here at https://www2.statsbiblioteket.dk/mediestream/avis/.
The newspapers were read manually and the advertisements were transcribed by hand. While the contributors carried out quality control, mistakes are inevitable.
The material presents enslaved (and sometimes non-enslaved) people in fundamentally racist terms, and should be used from a perspective that is informed by the history of Caribbean and Atlantic slavery.
Download
Below you can download the data as a csv.
Search the data
Below you can browse the runaway advertisements from St. Croix.