The Gold Coast to Elsinore and Kronborg Castle

We drove up the Danish coast today. It was a gloriously sunny day, a good day for the beach. The houses here on the gold coast toward the city of Elsinore were stately and set back from the road. It was, as our guide told us, the high rent district.

We pulled into where a ferry docks that goes back and forth between Denmark and Sweden. They were going to build that big connecting bridge between the two countries here…it would have made sense since it is about a third of the distance of the longer span further south. But the currents of the water somehow made this too difficult. In the distance we could see Kronborg Castle, a huge square edifice with towers…this was the famous castle where Hamlet was set.

Inside we saw what you’d expect inside a castle–a vast courtyard, tapestries, paintings, and old furniture. But in another wing there was a maritime museum that fascinated me, though I was the only one of us who wanted to see it. The museum showed lifesize depictions of what cabins on freighter ships looked like and some of the models showed modern containerships, groaning with hundreds of stacked containers. They fall off the ships in heavy seas, I’ve heard.

Ship models of all shapes and sizes waited inside glass boxes. I read a story about Jonas Bronk. In 1639, he bought a 40-square-mile tract of land from the local indians. It was later known as the Bronx. More than 300,000 Danes emigrated over to the US during the heyday of crossings. It reached its peak in 1910, when one million immigrants came to the US.

Some of the ships in the museum were built just to carry this massive wave of humanity. The flow of people continued until about 1921, when quotas began to be put into effect. The ships carried fewer and fewer immigrants and tried to revive their business by taking immigrants back the other way. By the mid-thirties the ships were sold off, there was not enough traffic to keep them going. I also learned that early in the 20th century, the Danes sold the island of St. Thomas to the US for $25 million. Without slaves their businesses there were not worth pursuing.