A Merchant with Caribbean Ambitions

Herman Hoë 1751–1837: A Merchant with Caribbean Ambitions

Herman Hoë, a native of Flensburg, established himself as a merchant in Trondheim and ventured into trade with St Croix in the Caribbean.

In the 1890s, bundles of letters, records and other written material were discovered in the attic of the warehouse at Kjøpmannsgata 39. The papers had belonged to the merchant Herman Hoë, who had owned the warehouse a century earlier. The documents shed rare light on Trondheim’s place in global trade at the end of the eighteenth century.

Herman was 15 years old when he came to Trondheim from Flensburg in 1766 to serve an apprenticeship with a local merchant. Over the following decades, he became part of Trondheim’s mercantile elite. He traded goods, built networks and participated in an economy that increasingly extended far beyond the city’s boundaries. This was a time when the wider world was drawing closer, even for Trondheim.

At the age of 26, Herman Hoë joined other Trondheim merchants in an attempt to establish direct trade with the Danish-Norwegian colony of St Croix in the West Indies. He did not make the journey himself, but sent his younger brother, Friedrich Wilhelm Hoë, on the hazardous voyage across the Atlantic. On St Croix, Friedrich was to build networks, organise trade and establish commercial connections on behalf of the family trading house in Trondheim.

The venture involved considerable risks. The journey was long, the climate unfamiliar and the threat of disease severe. Yet the potential rewards were enormous. Commodities such as sugar, coffee, tobacco and rum could yield substantial profits if the enterprise succeeded. However, like so many others, Friedrich Wilhelm died of illness on St Croix, bringing the venture to an end. After the loss of his younger brother, Herman Hoë became more cautious in his overseas trading activities.

Herman Hoë’s story nevertheless offers us a rare insight into how global ambitions emerged in eighteenth-century Trondheim, and how vulnerable such ventures could be.

Éa Ariel Åsen Bjørnevog