It is not that strange this was cancelled in Puerto Rico, as all mail from the Danish West Indies first went there for a long time. 30 February is quite remarkable though. Special Spanish calendar? Or was a "1" missing on the canceller?
Hard to say why the date is wrong on the canceler -- either they took the "1" out of "12," which would be an odd thing to do as there are 31 days in December. Or it was February, and the person with the canceler thought there might be some fun to be had, which is possible, but unlikely.
My first thought was that 1857 was a leap year, and the canceler was simply set the next day to the 30th -- but I checked and there wasn't a leap year in 1857.
As JanSimon stated, a lot of DWI mail flowed through Puerto Rico. I specialize in DWI, and Puerto Rican cancels on covers franked with DWI stamps are not uncommon, though they are more so on the stamps themselves.
Either way, it is a fun oddity...
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The Danes have a very peculiar way of counting. For instance, their way of saying seventy is "a half (times twenty) and three times (twenty)", so I would not be surprised at all if they had come up with a similar calendar. And that they exported it to their neighbouring Spanish islanders at Puerto Rico
It could be that both Danish and English use the same biblical source for this equation for 70. We do not have an expression like that in Dutch, so I have to guess, perhaps rely on my maths knowledge to understand what you write. Is "three and a half score" 13?
