The Sugar Islands

by Alec Waugh

  John Vandercook in Caribbee Cruise, the outcome of a trip in the late ‘thirties, described the shops in Charlotte Amalie as being ‘more useful than alluring’. That would not be true today. The old wharves running down from the main street to the sea, that mouldered and crumbled during the depression, have been converted into art galleries and stores by experts in the art of showmanship. Most shops have bars attached to them. You sit at Elverhoj’s over a cool Rum Collins and look down a large, high-arched, stone-built warehouse supported by red pillars, its walls painted light pink and green. At the far end of the room there is a constant movement of bright fabrics, wide-sashed belts, wide-swinging skirts, blouses low-cut over sun-tanned shoulders. I can think of no more acute inducement to extravagance.

  Everywhere in Charlotte Amalie the eye is caressed and charmed. Built as it is over and between three rounded hills that run as spurs into a harbour studded with islands, it is the ideal setting for a town. From the veranda of every villa you get a new and charming view. Years ago Sir Frederick Treves described it as the most picturesque town in the whole sweep of the Windward Islands, and that was before modern skill had developed its possibilities; before the two forts, Blackbeard’s and Bluebeard’s Castles, had been made hotels; before Ira Smith had converted a ruined street of steps into a guest-house studio and bar.

  This, indeed, is how I should sum it up. It is a question of the mood you are in. St. Croix, St. Thomas, St. John, they have each something very special to give you, provided you are in the right mood for it.

  They say that the British colonies are more British than Britain is. In a way they are. An American would learn as much about England by dividing three months between Grenada, Barbados, and St. Lucia as he would by spending a year in London. He would see a microcosm of English society. He would observe its formalities, the dressing in the evening, the punctuality, the parade atmosphere of dinner. The leaving of cards with the left hand top corner of the pasteboard turned over has now been in the main abandoned, as it has in London. But in Siam in 1926 I should have committed a grave solecism if I had not hired a car and driven out four miles into the bush, at quite considerable cost when I was short of money, to leave a card upon my host of the previous evening whom I knew I should be seeing at the club three hours later.

  That is over now. But there remains the concentration upon clubs, the ritual of Government House, the signing of the book on arrival and departure, the signing of it after you have been entertained there. ‘The sun never sets on Government House.’ So ran Noel Coward’s satire, and though in a large island like Jamaica or Ceylon a foreign visitor might not be aware of the extent to which the social life of the colony takes its tone and colour from the personality of the King’s representative, in Grenada or St. Lucia he could not fail to realize how every activity is concentrated upon Government House, how integrated is the social life and how he himself must, if he is to have any fun at all, become a part of it. English colonial life is a direct corollary to the old pattern of feudal life, with the various concentric circles radiating outward from the court to the far circumference of the artisan and peasant.

  In the U.S. Virgin Islands there is no such concentration. It may be that it is an impertinence for an Englishman to dogmatize about a country that he can necessarily only know at second-hand, but, just as I learnt a lot about France from a two months’ stay in Martinique—the extreme conventionality of French family life, the almost purdah-like imprisonment of its womenfolk, coupled with the freedom of its menfolk to mix without embarrassment with the native population—so by spending five weeks in the Virgin Islands I feel that I am now better able to understand certain aspects of American life and history.

  The Continentals, as I see it, came to the Virgin Islands in the same spirit that their ancestors came to the United States. The nineteenth-century emigrants escaping from conditions that had grown irksome, in search of a new and fuller way of life, arriving as strangers, looked about them for friends who would think as they did, with whom they could share their tastes, their interests, their ambitions; with whom they could form a group, self-contained and self-sufficient, whose strength and preservation would depend upon the existence of other groups whose rights would be maintained by a central authority acknowledging not only the privileges but the obligations of each separate group. The direction of the individual emigrant, that is to say, was a search first for the group, then through the group towards a central authority. While English life based on its feudal system represents a growth outwards from a centre, American life represents a growth inwards towards a centre. I think history would show that this principle was at work in the whole ‘manifest destiny’ operation of the nineteenth century, and I think it is in operation in the boom that has struck the Virgin Islands in the last few years.

  There is no centralized social life here in the sense that there is in a British island. There is instead a succession of different groups. Tourists to St. Thomas and St. Croix need not arrive with letters of introduction to enjoy themselves. They do not feel out of things if they do not belong to clubs. In the strict sense of the word, there are no clubs; though The Constant at St. Thomas tries through its Thursday buffet suppers and Sunday beach parties to provide for resident Continentals a common meeting ground for one another, a recent anti-discrimination law has practically, though, I suspect, unconstitutionally, made the forming of a private club illegal. The tourist who has letters of introduction will have a better time, but there is no need for him to have them. The majority of hotels are run on the American plan; it is a system that has some disadvantages, but it has the advantage of making each hotel a kind of club, and indeed each hotel in St. Thomas has its own particular cachet, its own clientele, so that it is wise for the tourist to find out in advance the hotel that suits his tastes.

  Nor will the tourist feel out of things if he is not invited to parties at G.H. G.H. is not in any sense a social centre. I was surprised to find when I went to sign the book there that a column headed remarks was filled with testimonials like ‘Had a wonderful time’, ‘Everything splendid’, ‘Hope to come again’, as though His Excellency was less the President’s representative than a public-spirited hôtelier.

  In another respect, too, I found a considerable difference between the American and the British islands—in respect of the colour problem. As the United States have a domestic colour problem whereas Britain has not, I had expected that I should find this issue more acute in St. Thomas than in St. Lucia. I found the contrary.

  On my last evening but one, Jeanne Perkins Harman gave a party for me. It was an unusual party, as any party that she gave would be. Young, handsome, Amazonian, she had gone down to the Islands a year before as a Time-Life reporter to write up the Divorce Mill. Within a few hours of her arrival a proportionately outsize Lieutenant-Commander in the U.S. Navy fell in love with her. He pursued her across four islands, and on the twenty-fifth day of their acquaintance persuaded her to marry him. He retired from the Navy, she resigned from Time, and they acquired a yacht-type launch that they christened the Love Junk and anchored on the edge of French Town, beside a glass-bottomed boat in which he takes tourists round the harbour at two dollars a trip. Rarely can a more expansive and extensive couple have set up their ménage within narrower confines.

  One would not expect an ordinary cocktail party from the Harmans, and I did not get it. It was staged in the grounds of a partially disused hotel. It began at half past seven. The large courtyard was dimly lit with torches. A couple of largish tables were covered with small dishes. It was not light enough to see what you were eating; it was mainly shellfish, excellent and nourishing. The Commander moved among his thirty guests, carrying a pitcher of rum punch. It was powerful and fragrant, and cold enough to kill its sweetness. On a terrace behind the courtyard a vast cauldron was steaming above an open fire, against which long-skirted natives with broad-brimmed floppy hats moved in silhouette like the witches in Macbeth. The cauldron contained a thick fish so
up. It was not in the least like bouillabaisse; it had no saffron and no garlic and it was more substantial, but was in its own way as pungent. We sat down when it was ready. Three tables were laid and there was no fixed seating. The soup was followed by a dessert and cheese. Liqueurs accompanied the coffee.

  Before the war, the Wine and Food Society issued in its quarterly journal a record of memorable meals. This party was certainly my most memorable meal in the Virgin Islands. But it was not so much the actual food, the rum punch, and the setting that made it memorable, as the guests themselves. Half of them were of African descent.

  I am very sure that such a party could not have taken place in a British island, except at Government House. G.H. does not recognize racial distinctions, but socially, at informal parties, a Governor has to respect the prejudices of his guests. The Administrator of an island once said to me when I was the guest of a planter, ‘I’m afraid that I can’t ask you to meet the most interesting people in the island, because they are coloured. I can’t ask you without asking the—‘s too, and except on official occasions I can only invite members of the club to meet them.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘But suppose I was staying in the hotel and got to know the local politicians, would the plantocracy want to meet me?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘they wouldn’t.’

  It is a vicious circle. I remember a tennis party at G.H. on one of the smaller islands, at which the Administrator was at pains to arrange his doubles with partnerships of Africans and Europeans. As soon as each set was over, the partners regrouped themselves according to their colour. Late in the afternoon a heavy thunderstorm broke over the court and we scampered for shelter to the veranda. As a recently arrived visitor, it was easy for me to find in this change of plan an opportunity to gather round me over cocktails a mixed group of the younger people. We were some eight of us and had a pleasantly animated talk, the Europeans and Africans mixing naturally. When the party had broken up I asked the Administrator if he thought that those young people who had seemed so friendly together were likely to meet again. ‘Not till they come here next. Their parents will see to that,’ he said.

  ‘The parents on both sides?’ I asked.

  ‘The parents on both sides,’ he answered.1

  Even when they meet at official parties, the Whites and the Africans try to keep apart; they are reserved and cautious, unnatural with each other. It was only because a thunderstorm had broken the pattern of that particular party, because the guests were young, and because I as a stranger had acted as a catalyst, that that easy talk took place.

  And that is why the Harmans’ party was for me so memorable. Though there was no fixed seating and no stage-management beyond general introductions on the part of the host and hostess, the guests of European and African descent mixed easily, grouping themselves at tables irrespective of colour. The conversation was spontaneous and general.

  I remember four of the guests particularly—a Federal Court judge, a minor local politician, a youngish married woman who had spent several years in Harlem, and the Chief of Police. They all behaved exactly as their opposite numbers would in Europe. The judge was urbane, relaxed, courtly, a little conscious of his importance. He was accorded the same kind of deference that in London at Pratt’s the Lord Chief Justice receives from his fellow members. The lady from Harlem was definitely more polished and better dressed than the others, who she impressed in the way that an international socialite who is dressed by Hartnell dazzles a provincial gathering. The policeman was rather silent, as men who have had a security training invariably are. The politician talked just a little bit too much, as local politicians tend to do, arguing parochially on the need for Federal funds to stimulate relief work and discourage the spread of Communism in the islands. They all behaved in character. They were not different through being of African descent, whereas I have usually found in British and French colonies that certain types of behaviour are indicative of African descent. In a British or French island it is difficult for a man of European origin to be natural with a man of African descent. I did not find this difficulty in the Virgin Islands.

  I would not, however, dismiss this difference with the explanation that Americans are more democratic than Europeans. The reason lies, I think, in the history of the islands. An American, an Englishman, a Frenchman, and an Italian can meet, at a normal time, at dinner on equal terms. But if they meet in wartime on neutral territory, when one is a non-belligerent and another a potential enemy, there would be embarrassment. In the British and the French islands there is still a certain wartime element. The planters were once slave-owners who distrusted and feared their slaves. There were revolts and massacres. All that is a long time ago, but the white landowners are the heirs of the men who once lived on terms of enmity with their labourers. The atmosphere is not yet wholly cleared.

  The landed proprietors in the Virgin Islands are not, however, the heirs of slave-owners. They are Americans who have come down from the north to make their homes here, in the same spirit that New Yorkers moved north into Connecticut and Iowans moved west to California. They have no ingrained, inherited feeling of distrust; they have no sense of guilt; nor equally have they any sense, as many planters in the British islands have, that an injustice was done them at the time of emancipation and that their case has been misrepresented by the abolitionists. The American residents in St. Thomas and St. Croix have not those particular reasons for feeling ill at ease with men and women of African descent. The Africans equally need not on those grounds feel ill at ease with them.

  America has many problems to face in the Virgin Islands, but she seems to me to have been spared that headache. If friction ever arises between the natives and the Continentals, as some think it may, the cause is likelier to lie in the resentment that is invariably felt in a small community when ‘strangers from the north’ buy up its property.

  1 The incident described here took place in 1948. Racial discrimination is rapidly disappearing at the Caribbean. The administrator of a small British West Indian island would not make the same remark today.

  Saba

  Published in HOUSE AND GARDEN

  Written in 1952

  If one cannot trust the Encyclopaedia Britannica, where can faith begin? Because of a reference to it in that august authority, I had long been anxious to visit the Dutch West Indian island, Saba. The reference is brief; but how it whets the imagination! Saba, I was informed, produced the finest boatmakers in the Caribbean, but since it has no beach, the boats had to be lowered over the side of the cliff. I was most curious to observe this industry.

  Saba was, however, hard of access. Small as it is and a Dutch colony, there is no economic reason why the British and French islands should maintain contact with it. Unless you were a yachtsman, the only way of getting there was from St. Kitts— itself a little off the map—in a thirty-five ton two-masted schooner, the Blue Peter, which made a weekly five-day tour of the Dutch Windward Islands to deliver mail. I had often seen Saba, shadowy on the horizon, a single cone-shaped mountain like Vesuvius, but I had failed to fit a visit there into my schedule. So when I wrote a comprehensive book about the West Indies, and came to Saba, I had to content myself with copying from the Encyclopaedia.

  To my surprise I received a letter from a correspondent assuring me that there was no truth whatsoever in that paragraph and calling my attention to an article contributed by Charles W. Herbert to The National Geographic magazine in November 1940. ‘Saba’, Mr. Herbert wrote, ‘has no natural timber and if the material was imported, it is hard to believe that men would struggle to carry the massive timber fifteen hundred feet up to the top and then be faced with the colossal task of getting the completed schooner down to the salt water.’ It was very clear that whatever else I might miss on my next trip to the West Indies, I must not skip Saba.

  Now, having kept that promise to myself, I am convinced that Mr. Herbert was right and that the Encyclopaedia was wrong. I asked a number of the oldest men
and women in the island if they could remember a time or had heard their grandparents talk of a time when boats had been lowered over the cliff by ropes. Nobody could, though one man did recall that in recent years a film company had arranged an exhibition recreating for the screen the scene as it had been described in the Encyclopaedia. Having been all over the island and examined its remarkable geological conformation. I doubt whether boats have ever been built on Saba. It seems far likelier that they were built on the neighbouring Dutch island of St. Eustatius and sailed across.

  That may sound a very negative result for a visit that involved considerable planning, but in fact I have rarely spent five days more profitably. Saba is unique, and the life that has been built up by its thousand or so inhabitants on this barren rock with its area of less than five square miles has no counterpart in my experience.

  From a distance it looks like several other islands, Nevis in particular, but as you approach you see where the difference lies and why Père Labat two and a half centuries ago described it as a natural and impregnable fortress. It has no foreshore, no flat cultivated land at the mountain’s base. It seems uninhabited; and it is not until you are quite close that you see high in the hills a red smattering of roofs. Saba is an extinct volcano, and the Sabans have perched themselves round the hp of the crater. There are many uninhabited islands in the Caribbean, and it must be assumed that the only reason why a settlement was made here was because as a natural fortress it presented complete immunity at a time when the Caribbean was the cockpit of constant conflict. At that time the settlements round the crater could be reached only by a single narrow passage cut in the stone, too narrow to admit more than one person at a time, and the Sabans heaped stones over the passes in such a way that by the pulling of a string, they could be catapulted onto an invader. Saba was able to survive, and built up its own personal way of living while all its neighbours were the victims of attack and siege and plunder.