by Alec Waugh
It was a typically American kind of party; three-quarters of an hour of dry Martinis with the talk getting gayer, the laughs longer, with Christian names taking the place of‘Miss’ and ‘Mr.’ Then there was an arrangement of dishes on a buffet table, a lobster salad with hot rolls and cheese, coffee and a coconut-layer cake. It was the American style of meal, the American style of entertaining transported to the Caribbean as I have seen it transported to Antibes and Cannes. It was not the party itself but the guests who comprised the party that for me made the occasion special; something that I had not met before in the West Indies.
There were eleven of us. Two other tourists and eight residents; Leo Riordan, the manager of the new hotel, and his wife were the host and hostess; there was a couple who had come down from New York to help him; the agent for Pan-American; a dress designer who ran with her painter-husband a successful fashion store called ‘Elverhoj’, and finally the proprietor of the town’s Hamburg Heaven.
There was not one of us, that is to say, who four years earlier had had any links whatever with the Islands. It was that which made the party different from any of those with which I had grown familiar in the British and French islands. In Martinique, St. Lucia, and Barbados—islands which have been inhabited continuously by Europeans for over three hundred years—there has grown up a deep-rooted, integrated, residential life, of planters, business men, and the officials who administer their needs, a life into which the visitor seeks to be introduced—he would, indeed, have little social existence if he were not. But here in St. Thomas there had grown up, clearly, during the last few years a social atmosphere independent of the former colonial pattern. In islands where the French and Spanish influences predominate, the word ‘creole’ is used to indicate anything or anybody born in and native to the islands. In the American Virgin Islands the distinction is drawn between ‘natives’ and ‘continentals’, and the distinction is not particularly marked between residents and tourist continentals. ‘States side’ is a frequent phrase.
That night there was a Hawaian party at Higgins’ Gate, a recently reconstituted hotel that has become the rendezvous of the younger set. There were some fifty present, most of them in fancy dress. It was hot, the lights were dim, and clothes were scanty, with shoulders and arms sun-tanned. Round each guest’s neck upon arrival was hung a wreath of bougainvillea. The floor of the main room was strewn with plantain boughs; there were low leaf-covered tables a foot high; you ate sitting on the floor. Business at the bar was brisk. Presently a buffet meal appeared: a South Sea Island meal, fish curry and roast pork and pineapple. It was as good a picnic, as good a fancy-dress party, as I remember. It was friendly, informal, gay, and no one drank very much too much. At least not at Higgins’ Gate. When I went back to my hotel at midnight, half of the party were on their way to the town’s chief hot-spot, the Hideaway.
My first day in St. Croix could not have been more different. St. Croix is in the main part flat. The airport is eleven miles from the capital, Christiansted, and the road runs through canefields. There was the same air of departed grandeur that I had seen so often in the other sugar islands—crumbling walls, abandoned windmills, stone gateways opening on to nothing. It was a Sunday and no one was at work. The town was as empty as the country. Those who were not in church were sleeping. I was staying on the Cay, an island—once the pilot’s station—that lies a hundred and fifty yards offshore and is now entirely appropriated by an hotel. A central guest-house on the hill is surrounded by separate cottages. Tables are set under the trees; along the waterfront are beach umbrellas, white wooden chairs, macintosh mattresses, and backrests. A dozen or so guests were on the beach when I arrived. Some were reading, some gossiping, some sunbathing. They all said ‘Hullo’, but there were no introductions. Very few of them, I fancy, knew each other’s names.
The morning drifted by. Shortly before one, the lunch bell rang. There had been no Martinis. In St. Thomas I had found the meals rather meagre. Those who eschew starch rise from the table hungry, but fruit and tomatoes are plentiful in St. Croix. There was a hot casserole dish, a lobster salad, a solid block of cheese to which you helped yourself as amply as you chose; black pumper-nicle bread, iced tea, and soursop, with pineapple as a dessert. You could eat either at a long refectory-type table or at a small round table under a beach umbrella. It was a buffet meal. There were no fixed places. It was a very easy atmosphere in which to get to know your fellow guests.
After lunch I took a stroll into the town. In a sense it was a waste of effort. I could have seen all I needed from the Cay—the red-brown battlements of the fort, the clock tower above the school, the square and gardens, and the public library with its long flight of ‘welcoming arms’, the schooners awash against their moorings. Or rather I could have had from the Cay the most picturesque view of it. There is actually more to it than you would expect; it has a greater depth than you would imagine in looking at it from across the water. But it is, in fact, a casual, haphazard kind of town with wide, untarmaced streets, its pavements flanked by colonnades of low, very thick stone pillars: the kind of town that grew up casually to administer and satisfy the needs of an agricultural community. There was the same sense of departed grandeur that I had seen on my way in from the airport— crumbling walls enclosing untended gardens, flights of half-ruined steps leading to a colony of derelict native shacks. In an hour I had seen it all. By four I was back at the hotel for tea.
All day the sun had shone. The hotel time-table announced five to seven as the cocktail hour, but most of the guests lingered on the beach gossiping, playing bridge and Canasta, reading and taking dips till dusk fell. Everyone was exhausted by sun and exercise, by long hours in the open air. By nine o’clock ‘Good-nights’ were being said. By ten o’clock the lights in the lounge were out.
To the same extent that St. Croix is different from St. Thomas, St. John is different from St. Croix. I left St. Croix by the morning plane with a fellow guest who was returning to New York. Though I had seen from the hills above Christiansted the outline of St. John on the horizon, my fellow traveller was in New York before I had reached Trunk Bay. There are only two boat trips daily from St. Thomas, and the morning boat had already gone when I reached the airport.
The caprice of geography as of history has played its part in St. John’s fortunes. Although separated from St. Thomas by only a few miles of water, it is so protected by islands that when you make the half-hour journey across to it by launch you do not feel you are in the open sea but in a large inland lake. Though in actual size it is only a little smaller, twenty square miles against twenty-eight, you have the sense, after making that short trip, of being upon another planet. Too mountainous to be suitable for agriculture or pasturage, cut off by that narrow channel from the commerce of Charlotte Amalie, St. John supported under two thousand five hundred even in the peak period of the eighteenth century, when St. Croix’s population was twenty-eight thousand. When sugar slumped, as the result of emancipation and the discovery of beet-sugar, St. John folded up. Only eight hundred people are living there today.
It is as empty as any place could be. Not even in the interior of Haiti have the relics of former grandeur been obliterated more completely. The jungle has reclaimed it all—the canefields, the carriage drives, the slave quarters, the plantation houses. The old walls are buried deep in scrub and creeper. There are no roads now, only trails. There are no motor cars. You travel on foot or horseback; or by motor launch around the coast from bay to bay. You lead a completely rural life, getting up at sunrise, breakfasting at seven, going to bed almost directly after dinner; an open-air life of sailing, swimming, fishing. Everything is very primitive. Each house is responsible for its own supply of water. Rooms are lamp-lit. There is no town, there are no shops, no telephones. There are no cocktail parties and no newspapers. There is one quite substantial resort, at Caneel Bay. There is a guest-house or two; four or five private homes, and that is all.
Myself, I was bound for the Bul
on Guest-house. Trunk Bay, which it overlooks, is a couple of headlands beyond Caneel, where the launch deposits you. A minute launch awaits you at the jetty. Before you have been in it five minutes you have very markedly the sense of being in the open sea. You no longer have the protection of the islands. The launch dips and plunges and vibrates, splashing water over you. On your right the hills rise, covered to their summits with trees and scrub. On one of the lower promontories is an abandoned windmill. Trunk Bay is a beach and nothing more. There is no projecting jetty. You change from the launch into a rowing boat, and then wade ashore. The Bulon Guest-house is half-way up the hill. It has a wide, decklike veranda facing west and north. It was noticeably cooler than Charlotte Amalie or Christiansted. The veranda was lit by hurrican lamps, not electric light.
There were four or five guests on the veranda. It was shortly after six. Most of them had a glass beside them. ‘Do I ring for a drink?’ I asked. There was a laugh at that. They had the honour system, they explained. You could buy your own bottle or you could mix your own drinks by the glass. You signed for them in a book. Limes and ice and sugar, but not soda, were on the house. Beer and Cola were in the icebox.
It was Sunday, and supper took the place of dinner, a cold meal served on the veranda. Conversation turned on the next day’s activities. A party was going round the island in the launch. The trip was to start at half past seven. I had known many picnics scheduled to start at least an hour before they do. I was more than surprised next morning, before sunrise, to hear footsteps below my room. As I went down to the beach to swim shortly after six, I met one of the guests coming up from the cottages fully dressed. I was the last arrival at the breakfast-table at five to seven. By a quarter past seven I was on the veranda, my manuscript before me.
Rarely have I felt myself more surrounded by peace and beauty than I did as I sat writing on that high deck-like veranda with a white, palm-line beach below, with the mountains climbing green behind, with pelicans gliding above, then diving suddenly into the shallow water, with sloops from Tortola drifting across the middle distance, with the whole horizon littered with the shapes of islands, with the water every shade of blue, and with the trade wind cooling the sun’s heat. St. John was certainly as different from St. Croix as St. Croix had been from St. Thomas.
Those first three days illustrate not inaccurately the differences between the islands, though as regards St. Thomas and St. Criox those first days are less typical than symptomatic. It was on a Saturday that I reached St. Thomas, and normally Charlotte Amalie is not all that gay. It was on a Sunday that I reached St. Croix, and St. Croix is not normally that quiet. On the contrary, it has a very active social life. There are probably more cocktail parties in St. Croix in a week than there are in St. Thomas in a month, but they are a different kind of party.
St. Croix was originally an exclusively agricultural community. Its early history is involved; at one period or another it was owned by practically every European power, including the Knights of Malta. Under the French it failed for a time to prosper. For a few years it was practically uninhabited, and the French in 1733 were glad to sell it to the Danes to prevent its falling into British hands. The Danes invited planters from other islands to undertake its cultivation, and under Danish rule, with Denmark a neutral throughout the succession of eighteenth-century wars, it prospered so rapidly that within twenty years every acre of the island was under cultivation; it supported a population of thirty thousand. Today that population has been halved. The sugar industry, as bankrupt in St. Croix as in the British islands, is subsidized, as a form of poor relief. All the cane is ground at a single central mill under Government control. Only about half the island is under cultivation. The sugar is not particularly good. There is so much unsold Cruzan rum under Federal seal that the manufacture of it has been abandoned. None of the Continentals who have settled in St. Croix during the last four years are planters to more than an amateur extent, though some of them run small five- to ten-acre estates as a hobby. They have come to paint, to design furniture, to write, to sail. But though the patrician planter aristocracy exists no longer, the traditions of an agricultural community have been maintained. Agriculturists are always vaguely contemptuous of townsfolk, and Cruzan society is centred in the country. It is a residential society, existing independently of tourists. It does not depend on tourists for its amusement or support. It has its homes, its parties, its private beaches, where groups of friends take picnics out on Sunday and play volleyball afterwards on the sand.
On the west coast of the island, fifteen or so miles from Christiansted, is Frederiksted. It is an even quieter town than Christiansted, and it suffered heavily during a workers’ riot in the eighteen-seventies; but it has a definite life of its own. Just as one part of the island treats Christiansted, so does another section treat Frederiksted as its market town. Eric Hatch has organized a Jonkey Club, which holds donkey races on the baseball field. The five-days’ visitor to the Cay or to the Buccaneer who did not arrive with letters of introduction to any of the residents might imagine that not very much was happening in St. Croix. He would have an enjoyable and healthy life, bathing, sailing, fishing, taking motor trips, but he would interpret the absence of restaurants and bars and night-clubs to mean a lack of social life. He would be mistaken. A great deal is going on, only it is going on in private houses; it is a life built up by the residents among themselves, carrying on the original traditions of the island.
Just as, in their different way, are the Thomasians.
From the earliest days there has been that essential difference between the islands—St. Thomas is commercial, St. Croix agricultural; St. Thomas is urban, St. Croix is rural. The soil of St. Thomas is as poor as that of St. Croix is rich. The sole industry in St. Thomas in all its history was the manufacture of bay rum, and the bay leaf was grown upon St. John. Most of its food has always had to be imported. Only in its north-west corner, and to a small extent, have the descendants of French colonists been able to exploit their hereditary capacity to wring sustenance from the most barren soil.
St. Thomas is a port. That is its history. That is its significance. Not only has it a fine natural habour but it is the first landfall for ships sailing west from Europe. Denmark’s neutrality during the eighteenth century made it the perfect rendezvous for the ships of warring nations. For a time it was a hide-out for the buccaneers, and two of its forts are known respectively as Black-beard’s and Bluebeard’s Castle, though there is little historical evidence to support the legend that it was the home of the fierce Edward Teach of Bristol, who tucked the ends of his great black beard behind his ears and justified his habit of suddenly snuffing the candles over dinner and firing his pistols at his guests with the retort, If I don’t kill one of you now and then, you’ll forget who I am.’
Perhaps the legend grew because there was so little other scope for legend. The people is happy that has no history, and St. Thomas has been a happy island. While the others—St. Lucia, Grenada, Haiti, Martinique—were the scenes of war and massacre, St. Thomas followed its pacific way, sheltering, succouring, and gathering the fruits of its immunity; becoming, as soon as the brief Napoleonic interregnum, when the Union Jack flew from Christian’s Fort, was over, once again an open port and the exchange centre of Caribbean trade. Only by slow stages did it lose that fortunate position, as the other islands—in particular Puerto Rico—came gradually to realize that through the power of steam-driven vessels it was not only possible but profitable to deal direct with Europe; one by one the main steamship lines began to move their headquarters—the R.M.S.P. to Barbados, the C.G.T. to Martinique. In time, so far as Denmark was concerned, an asset became a liability. But the slump came slowly. For Thomasians themselves there was always a modicum of prosperity.
Charlotte Amalie is St. Thomas. A fact which might sound a condemnation. It is a safe rule in the tropics to get out of town as soon as possible. In essence no matter how superficially dissimilar, tropical cities are the sam
e—hot and noisy, with honking car-horns, the air stale and fetid, juke-boxes playing, a restless vibration in the atmosphere; you feel that something is going to happen, but it never does; your head aches, you sleep too little and you drink too much. A much-travelled friend wrote to me from New York, ‘St. Thomas doesn’t sound like the ideal place for you to re-establish your communication and respect for islands. From all I’ve heard, St. Croix will be more like it. I’ve always imagined that St. Thomas would have a pathetic honkeytonk atmosphere about it, which is bearable when it’s a place like Marseilles or Christobal that has a waterfront culture to go with it all, but I prefer my islands straight and hot, without blues notes. . . .’
And she was right: dead right, or rather she would have been right nine times in ten. St. Thomas is an exception. What Juan-les-Pins is to the Riviera, Charlotte Amalie is to the Caribbean. It has admittedly a restless, gaudy, night-club atmosphere; and it has, in addition, the exacerbation of its divorce mill. Not so many people come down ‘to take the cure’ as is generally supposed, four hundred a year is a rough average. But each of those appeals involves a six weeks’ visit. Each appeal involves a personal problem. Each applicant is in her own particular way worried, lonely, at a loose end, uncertain of her immediate future; not sure, now that it has come to the final point, whether she has done the wise thing, after all. The presence of those four hundred plaintiffs is a highly flavoured ingredient in the general atmosphere. Yes, Charlotte Amalie is a restless place, just as Juan is, but it has also, just as Juan has, an air of elegance.
