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 and creator of

a website dedicated to the sugar milling resources on St. Croix at

https://www.stcroixwindmills.org/. 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 unfolding

to 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 in

contradictions.

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 that

reverberates 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 square

miles, 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 in

the 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.