Gabriel Milan, the governor of the Danish West Indies, was beheaded on Copenhagen’s Nytorv Square on this date in 1689.
Born to an emigre family of former Marranos that had resumed open Judaism, Milan (English Wikipedia entry | Danish) was a cavalryman turned merchantman married to the daughter of one of Europe’s most prominent Jewish scholars.
Well-connected in the court of Prince George of Denmark, Milan in 1684 was tapped to govern the struggling nascent sugar colony of the Danish West Indies — the islands of Saint Thomas, Saint John, and Saint Croix that have comprised the U.S. Virgin Islands since Denmark sold the money pits off in 1917.
There he proved to be a pettifogging despot who was noxious to the island’s planters and conspicuous about exploiting his office to fatten his own coffers. His incompetent predecessor, who was only supposed to be sent back to the mother country, Milan instead clapped in a dungeon. Even his brutal treatment of slaves — using impalement for an execution! — shocked peers accustomed to a different spectrum of cruelty.
“I wish for my part that your Excellency could have been here a single day and heard what thundering there has been in the commission, with howling, shouting, and screaming, one against the other,” the official reporter noted. “God be thanked it is over.”
On this day..
- 1907: Joseph Jones, no workhouse - 2019
- 1720: Antoine-Joseph de Horn, humanity from an executioner - 2018
- 1437: Walter Stewart, Earl of Atholl - 2017
- 1785: Three at Shrewsbury, in depraved times - 2016
- 1822: Hannah Halley, scalding infanticide - 2015
- 1913: Henry Lovell William Clark, Raj poisoner - 2014
- 1907: Emile Dubois, Valparaiso popular saint - 2013
- 1555: William Hunter, reader - 2012
- 1918: Emile Ferfaille, the last in Belgium - 2011
- 1910: Ahn Jung-geun, Korean nationalist - 2010
- 1697: Godfrey McCulloch, on the maiden - 2009
- 922: Mansur al-Hallaj, Sufi mystic - 2008