Swiftly the Vigilant drew near the island gem, heading in for Rendezvous Bay, once the favorite meeting-place of privateer and freebooter, and off the beach the schooner’s anchor splashed over and dropped swiftly through the crystalline water to the floor of coral sand. Here, in the neighboring [[67]]bush, I had been told, was to be found many a relic of buccaneer days; but so wild and untouched did the shore appear that it was hard to believe even the buccaneers ever had set foot upon it.
But then, St. John is almost deserted throughout its length and breadth. Yet it was once a prosperous and well-inhabited spot, a land of broad fields, great plantations, and rich estates. Its shores were fortified, its sheltered bays were filled with shipping, and it was a source of envy, dispute, and even bloodshed among the powers. To-day it is all but unknown; its landlocked harbors are bare of ship or sail; its plantations are overgrown with bush; great forest trees have sprung from gardens and have hidden the crumbling remains of once stately residences; its forts are ruins.
St. John is one of the most fertile of the islands, the best by far of all the Virgins, incomparably superior to St. Thomas in point of scenery, climate, and resources, and worth more intrinsically than St. Thomas and St. Croix rolled into one, while Coral Bay is probably the safest and most commodious harbor in the Lesser Antilles. Unlike St. Thomas, it is well watered, with an abundance of streams; it is the source of nearly all the bay-oil which goes to make the famed St. Thomas bay-rum, its waters teem with fish, and as a winter resort it would be [[68]]ideal. Why, we may ask, is the most attractive of Uncle Sam’s three Virgin Isles in so lamentable a state? It is difficult to say, but present conditions are due largely to its past; for, like human beings with a shady record, the West Indies find it hard to live down a reputation acquired in years gone by, and lands, like individuals, seldom “come back.”
And so, while Sam and his black and brown shipmates are furling the old Vigilant’s sails, a brief outline of St. John’s turbulent history may not come amiss.
Although the Spaniards saw little in the Virgin Isles to attract their cupidity and insatiable lust for gold, and, with so many far richer and more promising lands to loot and ravage, left them alone, yet other Europeans saw promise in them and took possession in the names of their respective sovereigns.
Just when St. John was first settled, or by whom, is not recorded; but in 1687 the papers appointing the governor of the Danish islands included St. John as a Danish possession. Two years previously Barbadians had attempted to settle on the island, but the jealous governor of the Leeward Islands promptly ejected the forty colonists who had established their homes on St. John. From that time on, the little island was a bone of contention [[69]]between England and Denmark, and although the Danes were anxious to settle and to cultivate St. John they hesitated because of the dog-in-the-manger attitude of the governor of the neighboring British island of Tortola.
It was not until 1717 that, acting under instructions from the Danish West Indian Company, Governor Erik Bredal—arriving in an armed vessel carrying five soldiers with an officer, sixteen negro slaves, and twenty planters—set the flag of Denmark on St. John’s soil and, having duly fired a salute and drunk the king’s health, erected a fort overlooking Coral Bay. But while the little garrison remained loyally to guard this addition to the Danish possessions, the faint-hearted planters withdrew to the more secure shores of St. Thomas until it might be seen how the dreaded British would take the move. And they had not long to wait. No sooner was word carried to the Leeward Islands that the Danes had had the temerity to place their flag upon a fort on St. John than a man-of-war was despatched to St. Thomas, demanding, with dire threats, that the Danes at once withdraw their claims and abandon the fort. But, apparently, stout old Governor Bredal had inherited some of the Viking spirit as well as blood, and instead of meekly acceding to the British demands he [[70]]promptly sent to Denmark a request for one hundred soldiers to augment his little garrison on St. John. With this reinforcement the Danes felt quite secure, and by 1720 thirty-nine planters were established on the island.
From this nucleus the colony rapidly grew, for the land was fertile and the grants given the settlers were larger than in St. Thomas. By 1733, or only thirteen years after the first real settlement was established, St. John had a population of nearly thirteen hundred, of whom two hundred were whites and the other one thousand and eighty-seven negro slaves. Oddly enough, these settlers were not Danes but Dutch, and to-day the majority of local names and the family names of the few remaining inhabitants are largely Dutch.
But in that same year, 1733, other and more serious troubles than the British beset the islanders, for in November the inhuman treatment accorded the slaves resulted in a bloody revolt. And if we look at the old records we can scarcely blame the negroes, and can almost forgive the fiendish savagery with which they carried on their hopeless struggle for freedom.
Gardelin, who was then governor, was an unusually brutal man even for his time, and in order to prevent the slaves from running away to Porto [[71]]Rico an inhuman assortment of punishments were decreed. A leader of runaway slaves was to be hanged after having been pinched three times with red-hot irons. Any runaway slave was to forfeit an ear or a leg, or receive one hundred and fifty lashes, according to his owner’s preference. A slave who was cognizant of a plot and did not betray his fellows was branded on the forehead and received one hundred lashes as well, and any black who raised his hand against a white was hanged, or had his right hand cut off, as his accuser chose. To attempt to poison a white man meant to be pinched three times with red-hot irons and then broken on the wheel. Any slave giving information of a conspiracy received a reward of money equal to about ten dollars for every negro named as participating in the plot.