In the wake of the buccaneers

by A. Hyatt Verrill

A DESCRIPTION of The South Sea & Coasts of AMERICA Conatining y^e whole Navigation and all those places at which Capt. Sharp and his Companions were in the years 1680 & 1681

From all of which it will be gathered that our hero of Pocahontas fame was an adventurer of many parts in divers lands, and that his activities in Virginia were but minor incidents in his romantic career. In fact, for a space, Smith was something of a pirate himself, judged by our standards at least, and his accounts of sea battles and prizes taken are fascinatingly quaint. Of St. Kitts, too, he has much to say, and he gives us more of an insight [[145]]into the troubles and tribulations of the first settlers on this “fayre islant” than any other writer. Aside from raids by the man-eating Caribs, being harassed by pirates, and constant quarrels with the French, the early English settlers seem to have had a most unfortunate experience with hurricanes, which Smith naïvely explains are “overgrowne and most monstrous stormes.” Indeed, the very year of its settlement by the English, 1623, a hurricane swept the island and wiped out the settlers’ gardens, their tobacco-fields, their houses, and their fort. Hardly had they recovered from this when, in September, 1625, another hurricane hurled itself upon the island. This was even worse than its predecessor of two years before, and Smith states that, in addition to blowing down all the houses, the tobacco, and “two drums into the air we know not wither,” it also “drove two ships on shore, that were both split.” He adds: “All our provisions thus lost we were very miserable, living only on what we could get in the wild woods.… Thus we continued till near June that the Tortels came in, 1627.” Six months later the colonists were once more made homeless through a hurricane, and until the end of the narrative hurricane followed hurricane.[1] [[146]]

To-day, however, St. Kitts is by no means noted for its “overgrowne stormes,” which may be of interest meteorologically as tending to show that hurricanes are not so frequent in the Antilles as formerly and may, in centuries to come, cease altogether.

Another interesting fact brought out by Smith is that St. Kitts was largely populated by malefactors and convicts bought at so much a head from British prisons, shipped to the West Indies like cattle, in the stinking holds of small ships, and auctioned off as slaves among the planters. When we stop to think of such things, of the unspeakable atrocities practised by the masters or owners of these unfortunates upon their own countrymen (whom they branded with red-hot irons and mutilated or tortured on the least provocation), to say nothing of compelling white men, women, and children to labor half naked from sunrise to sunset in the cane- and tobacco-fields, under a broiling sun and urged on by the cruel lash, the buccaneers seem tender-hearted gentlemen by comparison.

South of this emerald isle, plainly visible from Basseterre and separated from St. Kitts merely [[147]]by a narrow strait, lies Nevis. In a gigantic, absolutely symmetrical cone of green the massive volcano of Nevis rises against the sky, its brow crowned with a perpetual diadem of drifting fleecy clouds and at its feet the undulating green fields sloping to the sea.

Once the Mecca of the wealth and fashion of Europe and the Antilles, the world’s most famous watering-place, a spot so thronged with notables, so gay with great balls, state receptions, and palatial gambling-resorts, so ablaze with silks, satins, and jewels, so flooded with gold and riches that it became known as “The Gorgeous Isle,” Nevis to-day is almost as dead as its volcano’s crater. And yet it is as charming, its climate is as salubrious, its thermal springs and mineral waters as life-giving, its fields and forests as alluring as in those days when its harbor was thronged with stately ships and its streets and hostelries rang to the song and laughter of satin-clad, bewigged gentlemen, and ladies with powdered hair; and liveried negro link-bearers lit the way for sedan-chairs ablaze with gilded scrolls and cupids. But the vast estates, the palatial mansions, the great Bath-House, and the marvelously appointed casinos are but memories—crumbling ruins forlorn and overgrown. Nevis is but a ghost of the “Gorgeous Isle” of the eighteenth [[148]]century, though a very beautiful ghost.

Aside from its one-time fame as a spa, Nevis is mainly noted as the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton and the place where Admiral Lord Nelson was married. The house wherein our statesman was born still stands on a hill near the town, though in a badly ruined state, and in the ancient but well-preserved “Fig Tree Church” there is still the thumbed and faded marriage register wherein one may read, under the entries for the year 1787: “March 11, Horatio Nelson Esq., Captain of H. M. S. Boreas, to Frances Herbert Nisbet, widow.” What a matter-of-fact record of the mighty, one-armed old sea-fighter’s love romance!

But to my mind the most interesting thing in Nevis is the submerged ancient capital of Jamestown, which in 1680 was destroyed by a severe earthquake. Then, as though Nature wished to hide the ruin she had wrought, the town with its tumble-down buildings, many of its inhabitants, and—so it is said—vast wealth, sank bodily below the sea. To-day, in calm weather, one may gaze downward through the crystal-clear water and trace the faint outlines of coral-incrusted walls of buildings that mark the resting-place of the drowned city. [[149]]

History, unfortunately, has little information to give us concerning Jamestown and its destruction, or of the events of that awful day. One of the few survivors was a noted freebooter, a Captain Greaves,—otherwise known as “Red Legs,”—who, having seen the error of his ways, had abandoned his piratical career and had settled down in Nevis to a life of peace in the guise of a well-to-do planter. But the reformed pirate, being recognized and denounced by a former victim, was arrested and cast into an underground dungeon, only to be miraculously saved by the earthquake, which destroyed his prison and heaved him up quite unharmed. Finding himself floating upon the sea with the remains of the town fathoms deep beneath him, the ex-pirate clung to a piece of wreckage, and after numerous adventures safely reached another island, where he once more essayed a respectable existence, and lived and died a highly honored citizen.