The U.S. Virgin Islands: Another Reason (July/August 1987 | Volume: 38, Issue: 5)

The U.S. Virgin Islands: Another Reason

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July/August 1987 | Volume 38, Issue 5

Very few people who visit the Virgin Islands go in search of history—sun and duty-free shopping are more powerful lures. But once there it’s difficult not to give the past at least some thought. Alexander Hamilton grew up on St. Croix, and the U.S. Navy has been an intermittent presence in the islands since 1822, when President Monroe dispatched a squadron in pursuit of pirates. But American culture is only one ingredient in a rich blend.

You get clues to the islands’ cosmopolitan heritage the minute you step out of the airport and find cars driving on the left. Or when you unfold the road map and find that each of the three main islands in the group is still divided into sections corresponding to the old plantations: Bonne Esperance, Fortuna, and Zufriedenheit on St. Thomas, Sans Souci and Johns Folly on St. John, Prosperity and Stony Ground on St. Croix. Each island is different from the others, but on any one of them you can still get a sense of the great age of exploration and colonization, when the nations of Europe maneuvered for the riches of the New World. Even duty-free shopping turns out to have a long and honorable past: St. Thomas has been a free port since 1764.

Columbus discovered the Virgin Islands on his second trip to the New World, in 1493. His men went ashore at St. Croix, on a sandy beach in a bay now called Salt River, and were attacked by Carib Indians. (Go to Salt River today and, except for a small marina, not much has changed, although a developer is eyeing the area. Since this is one of only two places under the U.S. flag that Columbus actually discovered, it would be a shame to lose it.) The islands weren’t really settled until the seventeenth century, by which time most of Europe was vying for the chance to colonize them. In the end Denmark won out, but, not able to attract enough of her own citizens, the Danes opened settlement to anyone who wanted to come. Colonists from Britain, the Netherlands, France, and other places acquired land and African slaves and began raising tobacco, sugar cane, and cattle. There followed about a century of prosperity and then everything fell apart. The slaves won emancipation, the price of sugar fell, and trade suffered. By 1917, when the United States paid the Danes twenty-five million dollars for the islands, they had fallen on hard times. Our interest was strategic: we wanted to keep Germany from using St. Thomas as a base in our hemisphere.

 

Today Charlotte Amalie, the capital of St. Thomas, is the most popular cruiseship port in the Caribbean. Named for the consort of a Danish king, the town hugs the level land along the waterfront for a few blocks, and then, with nowhere else to go, climbs straight up the four hills facing the harbor, up grades so steep some of the