Selling California to Denmark is not the craziest idea. We’ve been eyed for takeover before
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Fond of Danish almond kringle? Have warm feelings toward Copenhagen’s favorite son, Hans Christian Andersen, and his little tales about lovelorn mermaids and ugly ducklings?
And yet you love the West Coast warmth, and the closest you’d like to get to living in charming but chilly Denmark is the California town of Solvang?
Well, you’re in luck! Here’s your opportunity: become Danish — and still live in sunny California!
President Trump’s threats to take over Denmark’s semi-autonomous island of Greenland — either by checkbook or by muscle — have sent Americans off to have a closer look at world maps.
Californians, with their years-long disdain for Trump and his politics, have been offered an “out,” a different course: get Denmark to buy us.
It’s a jokey effort, but remember that Ted Cruz, the senator from the Lone Star State, said he was laughing when the Danish ambassador told him Greenland was not for sale. “I said, ‘You know what? Everything’s for sale.’”
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OK, then: Golden Staters can hop aboard the “Let’s Danify California” train, and sign a petition to help Denmark buy California for something in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars.
That’s more than twice Denmark’s annual GDP, but only about a quarter of California’s GDP equivalent. So it’s not like we don’t have the money.
Denmark and California would both be getting something out of this. Blue-state CA would become the biggest part of Blue Denmark, and receive, as the petition promises, “the rule of law, universal healthcare, and fact-based politics.” Denmark would also get Yosemite, Hollywood, redwood forests, and Venice Beach.
The petition baits the hook this way: “Have you ever looked at a map and thought, ‘You know what Denmark needs? More sunshine, palm trees, and roller skates.’ Well, we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make that dream a reality. … Mickey Mouse in a Viking helmet? Yes, please.”
This is no hostile takeover proposal — more like an actual proposal-proposal, with a really big dowry.
For a very long time, other nations have been sizing up California with a covetous eye.
In the 16th century, California came within a Tudor whisker of being a queen’s land: Elizabeth I.
Sir Francis Drake was an English privateer, sailing and seizing stuff on behalf of the queen. In the summer of 1579, the seas were like a space race, explorers and privateers from several seafaring nations sailing hither and yon, and, like a little kid surveying the presents under the Christmas tree, making landfall and claiming, “That’s mine! And that’s mine!”
Drake had sailed his ship from England around the bottom of the Americas and up the west coast. He was, to use a phrase he coined 10 years later, “singeing the beard of the king of Spain,” raiding his way up the Spanish territories along the Pacific.
He made landfall somewhere around what is today known as Point Reyes in June 1579. He provisioned his ship and gave to the Coast Miwoks who greeted him pieces of blue-and- white Chinese porcelain that he had evidently “liberated” from the Spanish.
He left behind, according to the account by the ship’s chaplain, a “plate of brasse” lavishly engraved with Queen Elizabeth’s claim to the land as “Nova Albion.” Typically for an age that steamrollered Native Americans’ actual possession of the land, the plaque declared the Miwoks to have made “the free giving up” of that land (as if). The chaplain recorded that the plaque was nailed to some kind of marker, with a silver sixpence bearing the queen’s image. Bits of the porcelain have been found in the right places, but not the plaque — and that, I’ll detail later, is one of the two of the best tales of California invaders that have come down to us.
Drake didn’t find a shortcut to the exotic East, and he headed back to singe the Spanish king’s beard closer to home and to English supply lines.
About a half-century on, the Dutch West India Company was running big sugar operations in northeast Brazil, and naturally began thinking that a California “New Netherlands” sounded pretty good. Nothing came of it, but other nations’ desires and devices began to get the attention of Spain, which had been a bit offhanded about how it ran its California possession.
Americans, in the meantime, kept poking at nominally Spanish California from the sea and overland, looking for weak points and deploring what they and Europeans thought were wasted possibilities in California’s under-exploited amenities. They were sizing up their own chances of getting a piece of that.
Imperial Russia sent explorers toward North America, looking for ever-more furry animals to kill, and in 1741, a fellow named Bering reached Alaska and of course claimed it for Russia. But Alaska was no cornucopia, and hungry Russia cast its eyes south, to verdant California. In 1806, the Russians sailed into San Francisco Bay, essentially on a shopping expedition to feed its outpost in Sitka.
There quickly followed a romance and an engagement between an imperial court official, Count Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov, who held a tsarist monopoly on trade along the Pacific Northwest, and Conchita Arguello, daughter of the San Francisco Presidio’s commandant. Theirs is the other grand story from would-be California conquerors.
In 1812, a year of dramatic battles in North America, Europe and Russia, some Russians founded a Sonoma County outpost called Fort Ross, probably an Anglicized mangling of the word “Russ,” for Russia. One account said the Russians paid the Kashia Pomo people already living there “three blankets, two axes, three hoes, and a miscellaneous assortment of beads” for the use of the land.
Over the course of not quite three decades, hunters killed off so many California sea otters that Russia’s fur business became unprofitable, and those loooong supply lines to the politically fraught homeland became even harder to keep up. Fort Ross was abandoned in 1841. In the going-out-of-business sale, a Swiss-born man named John Sutter — on whose property gold would be discovered seven years later — bought up a lot of Fort Ross land and equipment.
The renovated, restored and reconstructed Fort Ross is now a state historic park. In 1867, the retrenchment was complete — the Russians sold Alaska to the United States for what Vladimir Putin has lately called an “inexpensive” price: $7.2 million. Almost 150 years later, Russian rumblings about wanting Alaska back were laughed off by the Biden administration.
It was Russia’s ambitions that President Monroe cited right out of the box in the very first sentences of the speech he gave on Dec. 2, 1823, the one that became known as the Monroe Doctrine: a few mollifying words about the Russian emperor, and then, bam, “the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” California grizzly 1, Russian bear 0.
California was the big get, the land-rush catch of the century, of two centuries, and some pretty fanciful schemes were concocted to claim it.
A couple of years before Fort Ross opened, the French foreign office sent one Count Eugene Duflot de Monfras to check out the California real estate. In his marvelous history, “Americans and the California Dream,” Kevin Starr wrote that de Monfras made a secret addendum to his report to his government, with this quixotic plan for a Gallic takeover:
A number of agents acting undercover for France would buy up land above roads and harbors. Then, French Canadians would loyally hurry south to gather at John Sutter’s property, to ready an occupying force. Next, Starr wrote, “under the pretext of protecting the violated rights of French California” — where have we heard that dodge before? —warships would sail into key California harbors and … voila! Califrancia!
That, too, came to naught. Not until 1867 would France achieve a colonial dream in North America, with the brief, catastrophic “reign” of France’s puppet emperor, the Habsburg prince Maximilian, in Mexico.
In fact, the French more or less conquered Southern California, not by the bayonet but by the corkscrew. Frenchmen such as Jean Louis Vignes came here bearing know-how and wine grape stock, and put the old mission varieties in the shade with ever-better vintages.
Then, centuries after Drake departed these shores, the British made a kinda-sorta-serious play for California. Mexico, newly free from Spain in 1821, had borrowed a lot of money from London banks, and to pay off the debts, British money moguls suggested that Mexico give them “shares” of Mexico, which were understood to include California’s fine ports and harbors. Nothing came of that, either, but one plan came close: the “Proyecto McNamara,” named for an Irish priest named Eugene McNamara, or Macnamara — the record uses both.
His plan — which Starr notes “might have been a cover for a London company anxious to acquire land” — was for Mexico to give over as much as 20,000 square miles of land in Mexican California to settle about 15,000 Irish Catholic families. McNamara came this close to pulling it off. Mexico had apparently agreed to it, but the deal was derailed by the Mexican-American War, and California lickety-split became a part of the United States.
And now for those two great tales I wrote about some paragraphs earlier.
The Russian court official, Count Rezanov, sailed into San Francisco Bay in April 1806, with commercial and imperial ambitions. Then he laid eyes on 15-year-old Conchita Arguella, who was also, conveniently, the daughter of the commandant of the San Francisco Presidio.
The Russian ship’s doctor wrote that she possessed “brilliant eyes and exceedingly beautiful teeth” and “a thousand other charms.” And yet their engagement, the good doctor wrote more cynically, also promised “a close bond … for future business intercourse,” for which Rezanov “decided to sacrifice himself, by wedding Dona Concepcion,” a.k.a Conchita.
Alas for true love and territorial aspirations, on his way back to St. Petersburg for further orders and permission to marry, Rezanov got sick, again and again, and finally died after falling from his horse. His fiancée did not learn of it for some time, and she eventually took the veil, becoming a Dominican nun at a convent in Monterey — California’s first native-born Catholic sister. There’s a Russian rock opera about their story, based on a poem by one of Russia’s “big three” modern poets, Andrei Voznesensky.
And then there is the tale of the plate. That “brasse” plaque left by Drake never did turn up — or did it?
A man who stopped his car with a flat tire near San Rafael in 1936 ran across what he thought was a piece of scrap metal, about 5 by 8 inches, covered in curious writing.
He took it to a UC Berkeley historian and Drake scholar who was thrilled at the discovery and summoned his fellow historians to a San Francisco hotel. He hoisted the plate above his head like a champion prizefighter’s belt and exclaimed: “Behold! Drake’s plate!”
It took decades, but the plate came to light for what it was — a prank played on a historian by his fellow historians, a practical joke that got way out of hand. The hoaxsters’ confessional notes were unearthed around 2003, and metallurgical tests proved that the plaque, and its workmanship, were all of 20th century origin.
That group of prankster historians called itself E Clampus Vitus, a kind of bogus Latin. The name has lately been taken up by a modern network of jovial California history lovers, shorthand name “The Clampers.”
The present-day group’s motto is in actual Latin: Credo Quia Absurdum — “I believe because it’s absurd.”
And that circles us back to the Denmark-buys-California proposition, the comic counterweight to Donald Trump’s. Let’s give the last word, plus one of mine, to the famous phrase of French philosopher and scientist Rene Descartes: “Cogito ergo sum ridens” — “I think, therefore I am laughing.”
Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison
Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.
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