Postal traffic in the Danish West Indies (since 1917 US Virgin Islands) between Charlotte Amalie (capital of St. Thomas), Cruz Bay (St. Jan) and St Croix was organised using a number of small ships and schooners. The most famous was “Vigilant”. This was originally a pirate ship, built in the 18th C. It was renamed and adapted for passenger and mail transport by the Danes and ploughed the waves from 1802 till 1928 (126 years) before disappearing in a local scrap yard.
St. Thomas was one of the busiest harbours in the West Indies with scores of forwarders.
It was therefore logical for the Danish administration to try adding transport capacity to the various routes. Clara Rothe was one such additional ship, and as can be seen on the stamps, she was both steam and sail driven. The earliest record for the ship is dated 1865.
Many forwarders and trading companies had their own stamps (e.g. Jezurun, Royal Mail Steam Company and Hapag), so there was nothing new in the thought of producing stamps for Clara Rothe, assuming she would create a profitable route for G. Nunez & Co’s mail service between St Thomas & Puerto Rico. The stamps were printed as essays, engraved and printed by M.Stern in Paris, 1869. However, they don’t seem to have been put to use for some reason, and if so, only for a very short time. I have found no record of genuinely cancelled stamps.
Most people therefore talk about the Clara Rothe “fakes”.
This is definitely a misconception.
The plan was genuine enough, conditions simply changed. Contrary to the habit of the Danish Post Company of destroying obsolete stamps, this never seemed to happen with the Clara Rothe essays. That’s one of the reasons they appear so controversial today.
The second reason was, as usual at the time, created by the brothers Spiro in Hamburg, who took advantage of the Nunez-enterprise and produced a range of Clara Rothe fakes.
They are quite easy to recognise:
1. The crown is pushed upwards so the ball is hidden by the St Thomas / Porto Rico banner
2. The ‘M’ in ‘Thomas’ is almost equally thick in both legs (the genuine stamp has a left leg almost like a thread)
3. The Danish flag is unclear
4. The ‘o’ in ‘Thomas’ is narrow, while the genuine ‘o’ is more pointed, thin and open
5. The vertical background stripes are uneven
6. The ship’s background is very ‘coarse’.
7. The smoke-stack is shorter
8. The drawing is of a generally bad quality
9. A genuine stamp is unlikely to be cancelled. Spiro always used incomplete and very inventive cancels, dots, an ‘o’, various stripes as in the GB colonial stamps or just a faint arc.
You can practise your Sherlock Holmes skills on these 3 stamps !
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