Danish West Indies: Stamps & Postmarks

One delivery of the imperf 3c arrived in St Thomas stuck together having suffered from dampness  on the voyage. They were soaked and regummed locally with something resembling molasses. This stained the paper of a large proportion dark brown which might explain at least one of your 3cent .

you should never try to compare used and unused for colour strength. Who knows what rigours the used stamp has suffered?  Sunlight exposure , soaking, wear and tear .   

as far as I know the shade differences apart from the 3c are not regarded as significant varieties.

The green shift is interesting , the stamps in this series are printed in two stages …..frame and portrait vignette, most other values are bi coloured of course, and so not always perfect registration.


The fact that the print is a two stage process might indicate lesser ink intensity in the frame as the colour in the vignettes look more similar than the frames do, though I do incline to aging wear and tear. ( I mean in the stamps …….not in me !)

Hi, vikingeck,

The boxed "UTILSTRÆKKELIGT FRANKERET" (insufficient franking) was used on both the 7 and 14 Cents stamps in the St. Thomas post office for about three months in late 1875 and was used for accounting purposes. There are no recorded usages of it on mail (as per Arnold Sorensen) and there was a similar hand stamp in Denmark. Whole sheets of 7 Cent stamps would be canceled and the cancel would cover three stamps, and it was known applied horizontally and vertically. As with the fiscally canceled stamps, a post office clerk was allowed to sell the stamps/sheets. According to Sorensen, "this practice was documented by a response from the St. Thomas Postmaster to the Danish authorities after a German stamp dealer inquired why large multiples of the 7 Cent stamps were available with full gum, and then he ceased this practice (or least stopped selling the stamps)."

This cancel is challenging to find, and pairs/strips of three command a premium as they are definitely hard to find!

vikingeck , regarding the first 3 Cent issue, most of the sheets were indeed stuck together. The pharmacists in Christiansted and St. Thomas were paid to soak and remove the gum, and reapply gum. Each pharmacist used gum arabic, and those with the "brown" gum came out of Christiansted first and those stamps are often stained. The St. Thomas pharmacist, Albert Heinrich Riise, was supposedly unimpressed with the quality of the gum of his counterpart (F. Benzon) and applied a higher quality gum arabic, thus the "yellow" gum. Those with brown gum are more plentiful than yellow gum. This "re-gumming" was authorized by the Danish government.

A.H. Riise is a relative of mine. I can post more on this later!

laeding

I just wanted to say thank you for all the informative posts you made yesterday.  That was some very good information about how the stamps were used and the resulting fiscal cancels, as my 14c copy seems to illustrate.

Just an observation: it seems to me that they went way overboard on the fiscal-cancelling practices.  If these were later sold to collectors, I would have thought that using the circular cancel in one corner to put a quarter-circle on each of four stamps would have been much more efficient.  They certainly would have looked better, with the idea that the stamps were eventually going to be sold to collectors.

By the way, if you are interested to see how I was able to clean up the DWI 14c from its original state, which was completely pasted down to an old album page with dark brown glue, please have a peek at this thread on "philatelic surgery":

thestampforum.boards.net/post/165401/thread

Now that you have explained about the practice and resulting appearance of DWI fiscal cancels during this time, I can see that there is at least one other example of a fiscal cancel (4c) in that small lot.  All of the stamps in that small lot were fully pasted down to the page remnant with dark brown mucilage glue.  They were a real mess, and fortunately for me, all were salvaged successfully.  The 3c numeral was already damaged, but all of the other stamps turned out to be in sound condition, a real stroke of luck for me.

I also appreciate your comment that the paper on which the 14c was printed is very thin.  I noticed that, too, as I was going through the soaking and press-flattening process, and I was very concerned about handling it safely.  Luckily, it worked out in this case!  Anyway, thank you very much for all of the new information you have provided about the condition of these stamps and the fiscal-cancelling process in particular.

philatelia ,

You also shared some great looking stamps! There may be a variety on one of the overprints, I'll check it out more closely when I can see it on a better screen. As for the stamps you posted with the "bullseye" cancel, that cancel is quite common and I don't believe it had any defects while in use.

Beryllium Guy, the "8 CENTS/10 CENTS" local overprint features the "long E in VEST." Take a look at the base of the E, and you'll see that there is "a little bit extra" there. This is 26v16 in Facit and 19t in AFA.

The 4 CENTS and 10 CENTS postage dues have a small dot to the upper left of the "I" in "IND," which means they are from one of the first two printings, while the 1 CENT is from the 3rd or 4th printing and the 6 CENTS is from the 3rd printing (there wasn't a 4th). There are also shade differences to further identify the printings, but this is easier to do with "stamps in hand."

Postage dues without gum are likely used as they weren't typically canceled, meaning canceled stamps are far less common.

Fakes/forgeries are very, very common and range from poor quality to quite good!

Beryllium Guy,

Below are images of the red cancels I had mentioned regarding the 10 CENTS bicolor shown in your "Philatelic Surgery" post. I initially stated that it may be a "Paid London" cancel, but I should have said it may be one of the British "Paid (at) St. Thomas" cancels used for pre-paid mail. They can also be found in black ink, though not common and are believed to be clerical errors as they were to be struck in red. 

The "crowned circles" were in use from 1849-1877, while the "circles" were in use from 1863-1877 (DWI Mails, Engstrom). The image below is from the 1997 DAKA (Erik Paaskesen). 

Beryllium Guy ,

Here is a (partial) example of the red "London Paid" cancel along with the British St. Thomas C51 duplex cancel. I still have a feeling that I've seen red "London Paid" with a DWI stamp and will do some digging around...

Scanned the "London Paid" postmark from "The Postal History of the United States Virgin Islands" by J. Alfred Birch (the clipping is mine!). 

The postage dues below consist of genuine stamps and fakes, with the Bit fakes being much less common than the fakes of the "Cents" dues. There are multiple printings of each of the Bit values, so color alone may not offer clues. 

So, what do we look for? 

The genuine issues are perfed 12.75 x 12.75 (Scott lists them as perf 13), while the fakes are about 12 x 12. Note the 50 Bit is also found perfed 14 x 14.5 and is less common.

The ornaments (swastikas) of the fakes are not as well-defined as the genuine copies. 

The left and right sides of the "numeral tablets" are more clearly "scalloped" on the genuine stamps.








I purchased this "fake set" as "genuine" awhile back knowing they were fakes. The price asked was reasonable for a genuine set, and it was the nicest set of fakes of this issue I had come across, so I didn't hesitate to buy them and then share with the dealer the differences. I knew the dealer well and felt no need to "haggle" the price down. Sitting on a stock card or in an album on its own, this is a very, very easy set to overlook. 

 Here's a set currently listed on eBay where only the first stamp is genuine: