Gothenburg

The importance of Gothenburg for the trade of Europe has neither before nor since been so great as during the two years 1810 and 1813. The fact that the two intervening years showed less commercial activity was due partly to French and Danish captures, and partly also to the general decline in the Baltic trade under the pressure of a scarcity of corn and Napoleon's Russian campaign; and, moreover, the more and more open connexions between Great Britain and Russia manifestly diminished the need for Swedish intermediacy. In September 1810, Axel Pontus von Rosen, the Governor of Gothenburg, and the most original, humorous and energetic Swedish actor on the stage of the Continental System in this exciting time, describes how the roadstead presented an appearance such as it had never had since the Creation, with 19 British men-of-war and 1,124 merchantmen lying at anchor; and in the course of one single day, when the wind veered round to the east, several hundred vessels sailed away at the same time. The instructions given to von Rosen in the following November explained that in the case of vessels with cargoes belonging to Swedish subjects, and flying the American or other acceptable flag, 'His Majesty does not require you to recur to extremities of diligence, but on the contrary to suppress facts and facilitate traffic as far as you may do so in consonance with necessary precautions and without compromising your position.' Imports which had quadrupled between 1807 and 1809, quintupled in 1810. Especially flourishing, of course, was the entrepôt trade in colonial goods. Thus the exports of raw sugar were 14,500,000 pounds (about twice as much as the year before), and of coffee 4,500,000 pounds, not reckoning what was conveyed to other places in Sweden and from there to foreign countries. A native of the town who returned in 1811, after an absence of fifteen years, declared that he looked in vain for traces of the past and that he moved in an unknown world. But Gothenburg under the Continental System has as yet no historian. In the Baltic itself it was Hanö and the little loading-place of Matvik on the Swedish south coast, in the province of Blekinge (by some writers erroneously located in Finland), which, like Gothenburg on the west coast, was made, by the instructions of the Swedish government, both a base for the British squadron and an emporium for colonial goods and manufactures. But, for that matter, Sweden as a whole formed a great point of transit for British and American trade, partly to Russia and partly to the southern ports of the Baltic, because that route was regarded as more secure from French and Danish privateers than the direct route.