St Thomas and St John
A Visit to Two Virgins
There were so many islands I scarce knew to which one I should go.
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
Travelling to St Thomas and then St John, in the United States Virgin Islands, is to visit two different ages in the same day. Three miles of blue but boisterous Caribbean and many years of time separate them and the arrangement appears to suit both.
The islands, with the third member of the family, St Croix, lie forty miles east of Puerto Rico, the first in the long rainbow of small places that curves between and separates the Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea – what in the roaring days of history was known as the Spanish Main.
Drake hid his ships among the hundred isles of the archipelago, loitering in what is called today Drake’s Passage, and pouncing on the fat treasure galleons plodding home to Spain with the loot of South America in their holds. The superb natural harbour on St Thomas was his base as it became for privateers and freebooters through the centuries. Captain Kidd and Blackbeard the pirate were familiar with the tides, creeks and inlets.
Today the deep harbour town is known as Charlotte Amalie – surely the most felicitous name for a port anywhere in the world. It was called after the Consort of King Christian V of Denmark, for from 1666 the Virgin Islands were a lucrative colony of Denmark. It was not until 1917 that the United States, seeking a barricade to protect its interests in the Panama Canal, purchased them for the sum of $25 million. Now the Stars and Stripes, the white cross of Denmark and the banner of the Virgin Islands fly side by side in St Thomas, although the presence of the Danish flag is nothing more than an acknowledgment of the past and a tourist attraction.
Flying over the islands is a scenic experience for they spread, velvet, hilly, lying among turquoise shoals and channels. In the distance the British Virgin Islands rise in the form of the broad back of Tortola, but St Thomas leaves you in no doubt that it is American, even if with European undertones.
American, though, in quite a small-town way. I had half expected a concrete city like Honolulu, the buildings trying to outstand the mountains, and to see the sprightly red roofs of Charlotte Amalie lying among the green below was reassuring.
Along the waterfront the traffic was solid in the sunshine. A police siren squealed. After journeying through the quiet islands of the Caribbean I knew I was back in the real world.
The town, however frantic (it’s a free port and the streets are thick with tourists buying cheaply things they would never buy at home), has its past to thank for its charm. Stone warehouses, with their arched entrances, their fine door carvings and their cool interiors, have been converted into shops and arcades. Where the loot of pirates and traders was once stored side by side (the port was always ready to turn a blind eye on irregularities providing it profited by them) are now display counters.
It’s a fine place to walk about though, for its streets and alleys remain full of character, courtyards and cuttings. The great warehouses were bisected by broad, short avenues, where trees gave respite from the sun. Palm Passage and others remain, cooled by fronds and branches, with restaurant tables set beneath them. In one of the courtyards two English girls, twins Irene and Geraldine Carr, run a restaurant (called the Twins) where they serve steak-and-kidney pudding, Lancashire hot pot and roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, much to the mystification and frequently to the delight of Americans.
Charlotte Amalie was once a town of ‘ladder streets’, steps climbing up into its three hills, the trio known to sailors as the Foretop, Main and Mizzen-mast, for from the sea they look like sails. Some of these cut steps remain, joining the roads that travel on the flanks of the uplands. I climbed one, known as the Ninety-Nine Steps, to arrive at my hotel, called the 1829, an endearing and extraordinary place built by a French sea captain named Lafayette in the year that it now uses as its name. His initials A.L. were worked into the beautiful ironwork of my balcony overlooking the breathtaking harbour. A three-masted schooner lay poetically offshore and bougainvillaea and hibiscus cascaded over the walls and railings around. Outside the door was a machine gun, a novelty on wheels, dating I imagine from the Spanish-American war and coming from Puerto Rico or Cuba.
The house was built in Spanish style around a courtyard, with tiled steps and flowered landings. It was a good place for drinking and playing backgammon. The owner, Vernon Ball, would play anyone of a good standard. He was world champion in the 1970s.
Below the Ninety-Nine Steps is a small park where slaves were once auctioned, for St Thomas was the biggest slave market in the West Indies in the early part of the nineteenth century. Now, alongside a full-sized replica of the American Liberty Bell, black schoolchildren were dancing to rowdy radios. A moustachioed bust of King Christian of Denmark sat disembodied above it all, not looking particularly approving.
Sometimes as many as six cruise liners a day lie in or just off the port, bringing their eager passengers to the even more eager shopkeepers. One morning I saw them approaching one after the other, like battleships of old advancing in line-ahead. A noisy seaplane split the everyday cacophony of the place at intervals, rising to make the forty-mile journey to St Croix, the larger but quieter brother of St Thomas.
Much mention is made in Charlotte Amalie of the Red Fort, a Danish construction on the waterfront, the hue of raspberry ice-cream. That it has history is certain, for malefactors have been tried and imprisoned there for many years and it still has cells in use (some for prisoners, some as a museum). It looks rather a reduced fortress now marooned by honking traffic. Its clock, which has stopped, is the only still and silent thing around.
Its red walls, however, do add a startling background to the bright yellow engines of the Charlotte Amalie Fire Brigade. The firemen were grouped outside, around an ornamental cannon, as if awaiting a somewhat different fire order. They have a sign over their station, almost like a pub sign, of a dependable-looking rescuer carrying a child from a blaze.
In this maritime town, in 1830, was born Camille Pissarro, the father of Impressionist painting. His parents, Spanish Jews, worshipped in the synagogue which still shines its lamp at the back of the town. Today the synagogue (the second oldest in the Western hemisphere) preserves the ancient custom of having its floor scattered with clean sand, marking the flight over the desert of the Israelites out of Egypt. Pissarro was born Jacob Pizarro; the boy worked, like Alexander Hamilton, also to find fame, in a Virgin Islands shop, this one his father’s store in Charlotte Amalie. His parents are buried in the Jewish cemetery and some of his paintings are hanging in Government House, once the Danish Colonial Council building, now the US Governor’s residence. It is only a short walk away from the synagogue where the shopkeeper and his wife went to worship.
Of all the multi-nationalities who knew St Thomas, one minority group settled in quietly but firmly more than a century ago – French people from St Barthélemy Island a few miles to the southeast. They left their isle when it was summarily handed to Sweden by urban politicians in far-off Paris, and sailed to St Thomas where they remain. They speak a Norman-French that would be recognizable in the English Channel Islands. They live by fishing and selling straw-work to tourists, as do the French people of Corrosol on St Barthélemy. They wear peaked chapeaux made of straw. Their little enclave is officially called Frenchtown, but it also answers to Cha-Cha Town for the cha-cha is the name of their special hat.
While waiting for the ferry from Red Hook on the eastern edge of St Thomas I sat in the sun and watched the somnolent activity around the odd jetty. What looked like a World War II landing barge came in from one of the out-isles and discharged a truck and a man on a donkey. At the jetty men were loading a stubby cargo boat. The consignment was entirely alcoholic, crate after crate and cask after cask. The men sweated in the mid-morning warmth. ‘If that sinks the fishes are going to be drunk for a month,’ I mentioned to one of the loaders. He smiled, a slow one that moved carefully across his face. ‘Just refuelling,’
he answered. ‘Just refuelling.’
The ferry arrived and set off again jauntily from the inlet, clearing the protecting capes and then bouncing and bounding over long humps of blue sea that came straight from the Atlantic to meet the Caribbean. St John was always near, a pyramid island, tree-coated, a collar of beaches and a few buildings like squares of paper against the green.
We were at sea only twenty minutes and then we eased into a harbour and an island so unlike St Thomas that it could have been in another far-distant age and ocean.
Cruz Bay village, with its wooden jetty and its beach, idled beneath its trees, a definite Saturday-morning look about it. It was Tuesday. I walked ashore and felt the pleasure of the place come gradually over me. A few wooden buildings, a café, a shop and a wonderful lopsided green construction like a beached Noah’s Ark bearing the legend ‘United States Immigration And Naturalization Service’. It set the tone for the island.
With a couple from Montana, who showed me photographs of their children, their cattle and a brown bear who had called at their door, I boarded an open toast-rack and set out to explore St John. For a small place it is full of history, from the arrival of Columbus in the channel that divides it from Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, through to Drake and a pride of pirates; to battles between the French, the Danes and the British, who then became allies to crush a rebellion of the slaves.
Columbus, gazing about at the many islands, called them the Virgins in honour of St Ursula and her 11,000 virgin followers. Drake provisioned and armed his ships for his final battle, his failed assault on the Spanish in Puerto Rico, and the pirates sportingly buried a large treasure on Norman’s Island where it was uncovered recently.
After the red roofs among the green of Cruz Bay there is little of St John that is not bay-forest, beautiful beaches, silent coves and curling hills. It has become a US National Park through the efforts and the money of the Rockefeller family.
There are 3,000 people on St John, compared with 45,000 each on St Thomas and St Croix. Here, in the wooded sunshine, the zebra butterfly, the wild donkey and the mongoose (introduced in the sugar days to kill the rats) live together with the olden orb spider whose web is as strong as a fish net. Orchids, hibiscus, the oyster plant, the lipstick flowers and the flamboyant bloom together with the yellow-trumpeted Ginger Thomas, the emblem flower of the Virgin Islands. Nests of termites, as large and round as footballs, bulge from trunks. The bay tree casts its shade and so does the manchineel, whose fruit is poison and whose sap, which drips from its branches, burns the skin. Its ‘death apple’ killed some of Columbus’s men.
Limes grow by the sea at Lameshur, a Danish version of Limeshore, called so by the British seamen who came there to eat the fruit as a precaution against scurvy (which is why they were first called Limeys). The old Danish roads across St John are still favoured footpaths and go deep into and over the top of the island where there are meadows alive with blue morning glory.
St John, however, for all its sweetness, has an unpleasant past. It was here that the slaves imported by the Danish West Indies and Guinea Company (Guinea being in effect, Africa) were first landed to be ‘acclimatized’ before being transhipped to sugar plantations on St Croix and St Thomas. The shadow of this tragedy still lurks in the sunlit ruins of the Annaberg estate – the tight slave houses, the mill, the dungeon, the sugar crusher and the spirit crusher, which had a grim double-entendre. A contemporary account relates, ‘Slave auctions were the most exciting events of any month. When the slaver entered port, the white inhabitants rushed to the water’s edge and took to boats in order to get a preview of the living cargo . . .’
The inevitable rebellion flared in November 1733. The slaves marched and overcame their guards and their owners. It took months and a combined force of Danes, British and French soldiers to subdue them.
In the schoolyard at Cruz Bay, after returning from those haunted ruins at Annaberg, I watched the descendants of those slaves, infant children, hilariously trying to play volleyball with a white teacher and a solitary white boy. In the end the rebellion was worth it.
Evening came down with its customary spectacle on the harbour at Charlotte Amalie. The flying-boat was pulled out of the water for the day, the liners trooped out obediently, their lights joining the sunset, a honky-tonk piano sounded from a bar somewhere in the streets. Lying flat out on a bench by the harbour was a tramp; a real tramp, whiskers out of control, battered hat, two coats, shoes open in jagged grins, trousers which looked as if they had exploded at the bottoms. Across his chest was a plastic shopping bag with the names Rio de Janeiro, New York, Paris, Vienna. Another travelling man.
Well, as for this traveller, I was going home. At the airport next morning, boarding my flight, I saw a woman carrying five cotton bags in each of which was a live and complaining chicken. At security the metal detector was passed solidly over the bags and their owner permitted through. I smiled at the security lady and nodded at the bags. She sniffed. ‘She from St Croix,’ she said, as if that explained everything. Perhaps it did.
ST THOMAS situated latitude 18°22’N and longitude 64°57’W; area 28 sq. m (72 sq. km); population approx. 45,000; USA. ST JOHN latitude 18°22’N and longitude 64°47’W; area 20 sq. m (52 sq. km); population approx. 3,000; USA
EUROPE
Gotland and Bornholm
Treasures and Battles
We have this treasure in earthen vessels.
II Corinthians, Chapter 4 verse 7
The world’s most surprising treasure island is Gotland, the Swedish island in the Baltic Sea. No palm trees and pirate coves here, but lavish finds of silver, gold and ornaments – the majority of them emanating in the Mediterranean, Asia Minor and even riches from the Caliph’s Palace in Baghdad.
A sturdy race of merchant-adventurers inhabited this northern, green island in the Middle Ages and they reached the warm lands of the Near East in their ships, but not by taking the long and dangerous route around the outskirts of Europe. They crossed the Baltic, entered the Russian rivers and followed them down to the Black Sea and to Constantinople, the gateway to the East. The Volga, the Don and the Dneiper rivers were their trade routes, pioneered by the Vikings before them. The Russian cities of Kiev and Smolensk were established as trading centres by these northern nomads.
Gotland – today a summer-holiday island for Scandinavians – was once an independent state, a market place for Arctic traders who sold skins for Eastern gold and jewellery. It is littered with chambers and tombs dating from the Bronze Age through to the dark mediaeval times. In these tombs and in secret caches have been found amazing treasures.
In Stockholm Museum there is exhibited the great treasure uncovered in 1881 at Dune Farm, Dalhem, in the centre of the island. Here are cups and spoons and bowls of silver, filigree gold plates, gold coins minted for Moroccan princes, magnificent belt ornaments and an Oriental drinking cup of thirteenth-century silver.
To date there have been almost six hundred separate finds of treasure in Gotland. School children playing in a quarry in 1936 uncovered a cache of 2,600 Arabian coins, which ranged over two hundred years of Baghdad caliphs, and were probably concealed by some successful merchant returning from the East in the tenth century. At Asarve, on the southwest coast of Gotland, another hoard of silver ornaments was found, these the product of smiths in central Russia, on the Volga trade route.
At the fishing village of Holm yet another find of silver coins was made, this time Swedish in origin, from the reigns of Charles XI and XII. They were said to have come from the wreck of a ship carrying pay for soldiers. In 1963, in the bleak area of Gotland known as Havor, among some Viking age graves and the remnants of fortifications, was discovered a storage jar containing Roman wine ladles and strainers and a sumptuous gold ring, from the Crimea. These can be seen today in the island museum at Visby.
Across the grey Baltic lies the Danish island of Bornholm where three years after the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson’s flagship, HMS Vict
ory, refitted at Chatham Dockyard, became engaged in a campaign that brought her somewhat less glory.
It was not overwhelmingly surprising that the British fleet failed to record any sort of victory because from the days of the Vikings, through years of piracy and invasions, the Bornholmers had become used to attack. They built great round churches, which are the island’s pride today, with walls like bastions. The roundness was designed, it was said, to give the Devil nowhere to hide, but the practical uses were more convincing. At the first sign of attack the population would barricade themselves in the huge upper rooms of the churches (taking cows and goats with them) and stay there until their enemy had departed. They built their windmills on wheels so that they could be removed the moment a marauding ship was sighted.
Bornholm (whose migrants are said to have settled in France and named Burgundy after their island home) is nearer to Sweden than Denmark. The Swedes have not let this go unnoticed. One attempted invasion, so the legend goes, was thwarted when a dog belonging to the Swedish King picked up an invasion plan from his desk and obligingly dropped it at the feet of a gardener who happened to be Danish, and who quickly alerted his own King.
In October 1808, at the behest of the King of Sweden, their ally, a British fleet led by the formidable HMS Victory, approached Bornholm. The fleet was under the command of Sir James de Saumerez, who instead of attacking, believing that Bornholm was heavily garrisoned, lay far out to sea and contented himself with bombarding the off-lying islets of Christiano and Graesholm, the latter uninhabited. The ships were so distant that the guns on the Danish island could not reach them. The only casualties among the defending troops were two wounded who had tried to fire a long-range mortar at the British ships which split in two, plus six Swedish prisoners who were playing cards when a cannon ball from their British allies landed among them.
My World of Islands Page 11
