First Salutes: How Caribbean Islands Supported the Revolution and Recognized the United States in 1776

The story of American independence is usually told from Philadelphia, Valley Forge, and the

battlefields of New England. But consequential moments in the birth of the United States

happened in Caribbean harbors. Caribbean islands were among the very first places to

acknowledge the existence of the United States of America, a history that deserves to be

told.

Author William Cleveland is a longtime member of SVIH and the researcher. Through decades of research, sugar production at nearly

200 estates has been documented with research ongoing on the broader history of the

Virgin Islands.

The Caribbean and the American Revolution

By 1776, the Caribbean was accustomed to the collision of empires. Islands changed hands between European powers that displaced indigenous peoples, and Europeans living on these islands developed a sharp sense of Atlantic politics.

In 1776 extraordinary news arrived. The thirteen American colonies to the north declared

themselves an independent nation, and the question of who would recognize that claim had enormous consequences for trade, security, and the balance of power across the entire Atlantic world.

These islands were far more than passive observers. They were active participants. The

Caribbean had long been commercially engaged with the mainland colonies. When the

Revolution disrupted those trade routes, everyone felt it. But residents of each island had their own reasons, whether it be commercial, political, and at times deeply personal, for paying close attention to what Philadelphia was declaring. Between trade and support of military action, events in the greater Caribbean played decisive roles in the success of the American Revolution and its international recognition.

On at least two islands, that attention translated into something history has insufficiently

acknowledged: the first formal recognitions of the United States of America as a sovereign nation. Of all the places that played a role in the early recognition of the United States, none has a stronger claim to that history than St. Croix.

How Danish are the Danish West Indies?

St. Croix in 1776 was officially a Danish colony as part of the Danish West Indies, but

Danish in little more than its administration and its flag. The island's free population was

overwhelmingly English speaking, including British, Scottish, Irish, and American merchants, planters, managers, workers, and traders who had built their lives and their fortunes in the Danish West Indies precisely because Danish neutrality offered commercial advantages that British colonial law did not. Christiansted was a cosmopolitan port town, busy with ships from Philadelphia, London, Amsterdam, and beyond. Frederiksted was home to Fort Frederik, whose garrison was well practiced in the formal colonial harbor protocols. Vastly outnumbering the free population were enslaved people whose labor produced the sugar wealth that attracted planters to the island. Their lives, networks, and awareness of everything happening around them shaped St. Croix in ways that official colonial history rarely acknowledged but could never fully ignore.

Into this world, in July 1770, a printer named Daniel Thibou launched the Royal Danish

American Gazette. Thibou's editorial choices were revealing: he printed in English, not

Danish; and he looked to London and British North America for his news, not to

Copenhagen. The paper was superficially Danish, with the masthead carrying the royal coat of arms of Danish King Christian VII and the motto Gloria ex Amore Patriae "Glory through Love of the Fatherland". In sensibility and readership, the Gazette was essentially an American newspaper that happened to be published on a Danish island that had very few residents hailing from the fatherland. Its subscribers were people who had family, trading partners, and deep personal interests in what was happening in the colonies to the north.

The Declaration Is Published in Christiansted

On August 14, 1776, the ship The Flag of Truce from Philadelphia docked in Christiansted

harbor. Captain White brought news to Daniel Thibou, as captains routinely did. Among the papers offered was the full text of the Declaration of Independence, adopted by the

Continental Congress just six weeks earlier. Three days later, on Saturday, August 17, 1776, Thibou printed the Declaration of Independence in full on the front page of the Royal Danish American Gazette. Along with the Declaration were various speeches and reports of readings and other news of the Declaration.

Here was one of the foundational documents of American democracy: a declaration that, "all men are created equal",that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and the people have the right to alter or abolish any government that fails to secure their natural rights. And it was published outside the United States for one of the first times in English, in a town named for a Danish king, on an island shaped mostly by Spanish, French, and Danish colonial presence, by a printer working in a society where the

law and the lash enforced the bondage of thousands of enslaved human beings. The

contradictions were everywhere, and they would not be resolved for generations; arguably they are still not resolved.

The Royal Danish American Gazette of August 17, 1776, is the only known surviving

newspaper from the Caribbean that printed the entire Declaration of Independence. That alone makes it a document of extraordinary local importance. But the full content of that issue tells an even richer story about how people were engaging with the events unfoldingto the north.

Thibou prefaced the Declaration with a note about the Philadelphia ship that took 19 days to bring it to St. Croix. He also printed a report of the public reading of the Declaration in New York City on July 9 and other speeches and writings about freedom. But he did not stop there. On the last page of the issue, he ran a lengthy piece called The Confessions of Ignorance, attributed to "A Briton" and originally published in the London Public Advertiser in November 1775. The piece took the form of a dialogue between two characters, Curiosity and Ignorance debating the justice and wisdom of the American cause. In one pointed exchange, Curiosity asked whether John Hancock and Samuel Adams, "the Founders of the new Western Empire" would be able to provide the colonists with a better model of government than the one they were sacrificing to the experiment of independence. Ignorance replied: "Of that I am ignorant; but I should rather imagine NOT." Thibou never explained his editorial intent in pairing these two documents. Was the Confessions meant as a counterpoint to the Declaration, a British skeptic's voice to balance an American revolutionary one? Was it ironic commentary? Or was Thibou simply filling his pages with the liveliest Atlantic content available, trusting his readers to draw their own conclusions? The ambiguity feels appropriate for a newspaper that was itself a study incontradictions.

Thibou benefitted from a freer press than found throughout the Caribbean. The Spaniards were particularly restrictive. The first printing press to even exist in neighboring Puerto Rico arrived in 1806. Similar patterns existed in Venezuela and other Spanish colonies. While printing presses existed in British colonies in the 18 th century, the crown exercised tighter control than in the Danish West Indies and were unlikely to celebrate independence of northern neighbors from the same colonial power, especially given the response by British officials to the incident in St. Eustatius described below.

What is not ambiguous is the scale of the effort. Thibou normally printed news on the front and back of a single sheet. The August 17 issue runs to four full pages, double his usual length. This meant double the cost for paper, which had increased in price in some places as much as 50 times due to the shipping interruptions caused by the American revolution. It also meant as much as 12-24 hours extra time hand setting type, letter by individual letter.

He ran out of space for his regular advertisements, running less than a column and a half

compared to the usual three. At the end of the issue, Thibou advised subscribers that the

omitted notices would appear in the following issue. The Declaration and the Confessions together were simply too important, too substantial, to be squeezed into his ordinary format. The people who read that issue of the Gazette, whether they be merchants, planters and their managers, Danish officials, ship captains, and perhaps enslaved people who found ways to encounter the text, were among the first in the world outside the thirteen colonies to read the Declaration of Independence. What they made of its promises, in a society built on the denial of those very promises to the majority of its population, is a question thatreverberates still.

The Salute at Fort Frederik: Did St. Croix Act First?

The publication of the Declaration was not the only way St. Croix recognized the nascent

United States in 1776. The island may hold another distinction even more dramatic: the first foreign salute ever given to a flag of the United States.

The evidence comes from an unsigned letter written from St. Croix to the British Vice-

Admiral Young, dated October 27, 1776. The writer, a Londoner whose primary mission was to sell or improve the performance of two plantations he owned on St. Thomas but

committed to a secondary mission of observing shipping practices involving Americans,

described the recent departure of the American schooner Packer Master carrying a small

cargo of gunpowder. The “illegal” wartime cargo of “ten small Casks of Powder” among

other goods was worrying enough from a British perspective, but the ceremony particularly struck the letter's author. "[M]y astonishment was great"; the writer informed the admiral, "to find such commerce countenanced by Government here." The Vessell went out under American Colours, saluted the Fort, & had the Complement returned the same as if She had been an English or a Danish ship – I take it for granted that a similar conduct is observed in the Islands of St Thomas & St John belonging to the Crown of Denmark – This Island is now unquestionably well supplied with Provisions, so that the favourable reception of American Vessells cannot arise from necessity.

The fort in question was almost certainly Fort Frederik in Frederiksted. If the letter is

accurate, the garrison at Fort Frederik returned a gun salute to an American vessel flying

the Continental Union flag, thirteen red and white stripes with the British crosses of St.

Andrew and St. George incorporated in the upper left, the flag of Continental forces before the Stars and Stripes was adopted in June 1777. The salute occurred sometime in late

October 1776, approximately three weeks before the better-known exchange described

below that occurred at St. Eustatius.

The St. Croix salute is less famous than the St. Eustatius salute for understandable

reasons. The American vessel was a merchant schooner rather than a Continental Navy

warship, no Danish official was publicly identified as having given the order, and nops

diplomatic action followed, increasing the difficulty in assessing the full weight of the

gesture. Combining the recent publication of the Declaration of Independence in the local newspaper and the discussion this certainly inspired, the salute made a strong statement. History, as often happens, focuses on the more theatrical story: the naval brig, the copy of the Declaration, the named governor, the formal exchange of gun salutes in the harbor of Oranjestad. But the letter to Vice-Admiral Young does not leave much room for doubt about what happened at Fort Frederik. An American vessel flying the colors of the Continental Congress was formally saluted by a Danish colonial fort on St. Croix in late October 1776. St. Croix may well deserve credit as the first foreign acknowledgement of the colors of the

new American nation.

St. Eustatius: The Shots Heard Round the Atlantic

Some three weeks after the possible salute at Fort Frederik, the most famous Caribbean act of recognition took place in the Dutch colonial harbor of Oranjestad, St. Eustatius. Like St. Thomas, St. Eustatius was built on free trade. The inhabitants of St. Eustatius were a bit rebellious by nature and did not espouse strong allegiance to any European power. Since many of the merchants were Jewish, this immediately made them outsiders. In the Dutch empire, trade came naturally, consistent with the entire history of Dutch colonization. The role of St. Eustatius in the Revolution was no accident of geography. At only 8 squaremiles, no agriculture of consequence was poised to bloom. The island’s merchants spent decades building a reputation as a place where traders of every nation could do business without awkward questions about cargoes, flags, or political allegiances. Its warehouses stored goods from across the Atlantic world, and its merchants grew wealthy precisely by being useful to everyone. By the time the Revolution began, St. Eustatius had already become an essential conduit for American war supplies. Critical gunpowder, muskets, and cannon shot flowed from European manufacturers through Oranjestad to American agents, then north to the Continental Army. Exemplary of the importance of trade, as early as March 1776, Abraham van Bibber was on the island operating as the official agent managing trade

for the state of Maryland.

On November 16, 1776, the Continental Navy brig Andrew Doria (not to be confused with

the far more famous cruise liner Andrea Doria that sank in 1956) sailed into Oranjestad

harbor under the command of Captain Isaiah Robinson. The Andrew Doria left New Jersey on October 23 with a dual mission: take on military supplies and deliver a copy of the Declaration of Independence to Governor Johannes de Graaff. That copy was particularly precious. An earlier copy bound for the Dutch Republic was intercepted by the British; according to one account, the Declaration was wrapped in documents written in Yiddish, addressed to Jewish merchants in Amsterdam, and the British considered the Hebrew script a strange secret message, diverting it to London to be deciphered. Robinson's copy made it through to St. Eustatius intact.

As the Andrew Doria entered the harbor, Robinson ordered a salute of thirteen guns, one for each of the new United States. She also flew the Continental Union flag.

Governor de Graaff, from Fort Oranje above the harbor, ordered the fort to return the salute with eleven guns: the established protocol for acknowledging a fellow sovereign republic. That eleven-gun reply is what history records as the "First Salute" the first time a foreign government officially recognized the sovereignty of the United States to one of its warships.

Painting by Phillips Melville, depicting Continental Brig Andrew Doria receiving a salute from the Dutch fort at St. Eustatius. Courtesy of

the U.S. Navy Art Collection, Washington, D.C.

The British response was swift and furious. The president of nearby St. Kitts sent an

outraged remonstrance to de Graaff and fired off indignant dispatches to London. De Graaff was recalled to the Netherlands under diplomatic pressure but later exonerated on inquiry and returned to his post. The British anger was perfectly understandable. St. Eustatius was not merely making a diplomatic gesture: it reinforced its role as the logistical backbone of the American war effort. Lord Stormont declared in Parliament in 1778 that "if Sint Eustatius had sunk into the sea three years before, the United Kingdom would already have dealt with George Washington. The most conservative estimates, nearly half of all Continental Army military supplies at some point passed through the warehouses of St. Eustatius merchants.

Britain eventually settled the account. In February 1781, Admiral George Brydges Rodney

sailed into Oranjestad with a fleet and stripped the island bare. St. Eustatius never fully

recovered its commercial position. But by then the Revolution had already been decided in America's favor, in no small part because of what flowed through this small Dutch island inthe eastern Caribbean.

The Greater Caribbean: Privateers, Rebels, and the Revolution

The formal acts of recognition at St. Croix and St. Eustatius were part of a much broader

Caribbean engagement with the Revolution that is woven into the region. Other activities

deserve a brief mention here of privateers, acts of war, and rebellions playing out across the

greater Caribbean in the 1770s.

American privateers, ship captains operating under license from the Continental Congress,

ranged throughout Caribbean waters from the earliest months of the war. Hunting in

coordinated groups, they targeted British merchant convoys wherever they could be found.

In 1776 alone, they captured half the ships of the Jamaican sugar convoy bound for

England. By February 1777, they had taken over 250 West Indian merchant ships and

stripped them of 25,000 hogsheads of sugar. Martinique became a preferred base of

operations, because the French administration there, not yet officially at war with Britain,

quietly overlooked the activities of American commerce raiders using their harbors.

The Continental Navy's first offensive operation of the war was in the greater Caribbean. In

March 1776, Commodore Esek Hopkins landed 270 sailors and marines at New Providence

in the British colony in the Bahamas, secured the surrender of the fort there, and carried off

71 cannon, 15 mortars, and over 16,000 bombshells and cannonballs — supplies that went

directly to the Continental Army's depleted arsenals.

The upheaval of the Revolution reverberated through the enslaved communities of the

British islands. On Jamaica, the withdrawal of a British garrison regiment 'fight in New

York triggered an open slave rebellion in 1776. On St. Kitts, enslaved people launched a

campaign of systematic arson in Basseterre. In the rugged interiors of Jamaica, St. Vincent,

Dominica, and Tobago, maroon communities intensified their raiding, emboldened by a

general atmosphere in which the old certainties of colonial authority were visibly cracking.

The Revolution was not a distant drama playing out on a foreign stage. It was reshaping life

throughout the Caribbean in counting houses and cane fields, in harbor forts and

newspaper offices, in the calculations of governors and the prayers of the enslaved.

Why These Islands Stepped Forward

It is worth asking, plainly, why the Danish and Dutch colonial authorities on St. Croix and St.

Eustatius were willing to take the risks they took in recognizing the American cause.

Part of the answer is commercial self-interest, which in the Caribbean has always been a

serious force. St. Eustatius had prospered for decades by being useful to all sides, and the

American war created an enormous new demand that the island was perfectly positioned to

supply. Acknowledging the American flag reinforced their allegiances, underlining its open

port and profitable trade.

But there was more than commerce at work. The Dutch Republic had its own deep tradition

of resistance to imperial overreach including expelling Spanish domination, and Dutch

merchants on St. Eustatius recognized something of their own political inheritance in the

American claim to self-governance. On St. Croix, the Danish colonial administration was

governing a population that was, in cultural and commercial terms, already half-American;

many planters left British colonies to pursue their fortune on St. Croix and brought Scottish

and Irish managers with them. Antagonizing American trading partners on behalf of a British

king made little sense.

There was also the matter of information. Caribbean ports like Christiansted and Oranjestad

were among the best-informed places in the Atlantic world. News from Philadelphia,

London, Paris, and Amsterdam arrived constantly by ship. The merchants, officials, and

printers of these islands understood the significance of the Revolution before many people

in Europe did. Daniel Thibou, printing the Declaration of Independence on the front page of

his newspaper just six weeks after it was adopted, was not a man following events at a safe

distance. He was a Caribbean journalist working at the center of the Atlantic news world,

publishing a document he clearly believed his readers needed to see.

An Unsung Role in American Independence

The history of American independence is usually told as if it happened entirely on the North

American continent. But that version of the story leaves out the Caribbean, and without the

Caribbean, the story is simply incomplete.

It was in the printing office of Daniel Thibou in Christiansted on August 17, 1776, that the

Declaration of Independence was first published in the Caribbean and the only Caribbean

printing of that document known to have survived. It was at Fort Frederik on St. Croix in

October 1776, that the flag of the United States may have received its first foreign salute. It

was in the harbor of Oranjestad on November 16, 1776, that Governor Johannes de Graaff

gave the order that made St. Eustatius the first place where the sovereignty of the United

States was formally acknowledged to one of its naval vessels. And it was through the ports

of St. Eustatius, Martinique, St. Croix, St. Thomas, and a dozen other Caribbean islands

that the gunpowder, cannon, and muskets that sustained Washington's army reached their

destination.

The Caribbean was not a sideshow to the American Revolution. It was a theater of

diplomacy, supply, and historic recognition, a place where people, forts, warehouses,

harbors, and newspaper presses played a decisive role in the founding of a nation. While

St. Croix later became part of the United States, it provided initial recognition of the new

nation. And this was part of a much wider set of circumstances that supported the American

Revolution and emergence of the United States as a nation.

Additional Resources

J. Franklin Jameson. 1903. St. Eustatius in the American Revolution. The American

Historical Review, 8(4), 683–708. https://doi.org/10.2307/1834346

Emily Sneff. 2026. When the Declaration of Independence Was News. New York: Oxford

University Press.