Danish Americans () are Americans who have ancestral roots originated fully or partially from Denmark. There are approximately 1,300,000 Americans of Danish origin or descent. History The first Dane known to have arrived in North America was The Reverend Rasmus Jensen, a priest of the Church of Denmark (Evangelical-Lutheran). He was the chaplain aboard an expedition to the New World commissioned by King Christian IV of Denmark in 1619. The expedition was made up of two small Danish ships Enhiørningen and Lamprenen, with 64 sailors who were Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, and Germans. Captained by the navigator and explorer, Jens Munk, the ships were searching for the Northwest Passage. After sailing into Frobisher Bay and Ungava Bay, Munk eventually passed through Hudson Strait and reached Digges Island (at the northern tip of Quebec) on August 20. They then set out across the Bay towards the southwest. By early September, they had not yet found a passage. The party arrived in Hudson Bay on September 7, landed at the mouth of Churchill River, settling at what is now Churchill, Manitoba. The two ships were put side-by-side and prepared for winter as best as they could. It was a disastrous winter. Cold, famine, and scurvy destroyed most of the men. Jensen had died on February 20, 1620. Only Munk and two sailors survived to return, leaving no settlement in the New World. The frigate Enhiørningen had been broken down by ice during the winter. However, the smaller Lamprenen could be salvaged. The return trip lasted two months. The surviving crew members aboard the Lamprenen reached Bergen, Norway on September 20, 1620. The earliest documented Danish immigrants to the new world, Jan Jansen and his wife Engeltje, along with their children, arrived in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in 1636. More than a century after Christian IV's expedition came explorer Vitus Jonassen Bering (1681–1741), a Dane who was working for the Russian empire. In 1728, he documented the narrow body of water that separated North America and Asia, which was later named the Bering Sea in his honor. Bering was the first European to arrive in Alaska in 1741. In 1666, the Danish West India Company took control of the island of St. Thomas in the Caribbean and eventually, the islands of St. John in 1717 and St. Croix in 1733. The Danes brought African slaves to those islands, where the slaves were