 From 1617 onwards, a Danish-chartered company began sending whaling fleets to Spitsbergen.This successful expansion by Denmark into the North Atlantic has recently been cited by historians as the first step of the Danish-Norwegian state into overseas colonialism.It eventually built a small overseas empire of East Indian trade posts, North Atlantic possessions (such as Greenland and Iceland), and a small Atlantic trade route between possessions on the Guinea Coast (in modern Ghana) and what are now the United States Virgin Islands.