THE VIRGIN ISLANDS
Early History
ONE
Columbus, despairing of finding individual names for all the islands he sighted, called the rocky archipelago which is the subject of this number of The Mentor, “‘The Virgin Islands,’ after Saint Ursula and her martyred maidens.” The group designated by this name includes upwards of fifty islands and islets, several of which are owned by Great Britain. When Spain ceded Porto Rico, ownership of three of the Virgin Islands—Vieques, Culebra, and Culebrita—passed to the United States. St. Croix is not one of this group, according to strict geographical classification, but, together with the Virgin Islands, is one of the Leeward Islands group, which comprises, among others, St. Kitts, Nevis, St. Christopher, Antigua, Guadaloupe and Martinique.
Over a century and a half after Columbus discovered the Virgin Islands, in 1493, adventurous Danes cast anchor in the harbor of St. Thomas, but soon forsook this little isle of the southern seas for another island at the mouth of the Hudson River—the Island of Manhattan, where the Dutch had settled. The Dutch and the English, the French and the Spanish, had previously visited the islands we call St. Thomas and St. Croix when, in 1666, the Danish made another unsuccessful attempt at colonization. Six years later, the Danish West India and Guinea Company fathered a settlement from which descended all later colonies.
By the year 1680, over three hundred settlers were established on St. Thomas. The principal industry was the raising of tobacco. Half the population was composed of slaves. To further increase their number, King Christian V of Denmark decreed that natives of Africa be brought across-seas in ships specially engaged in slave traffic. All the European countries that had undertaken to develop the agricultural resources of the West India Islands had found after repeated disasters that only black men were fitted to work in the tropics. Besides tobacco, estates were now planted with sugar cane, sprouts of which were obtained from Tortola, another island of the Virgin group, twenty miles east of St. John, and owned by the British.
The British still had a jealous eye on the fine harbor of St. Thomas, and to prevent attacks by them and by the French, who had taken St. Croix from the Spanish in 1650, the Government of Denmark built, about 1690, a fort and a thick-walled tower overlooking the bay and its peaked islands. In 1701, a priest, Father Labat, made a voyage to the islands of America and wrote a book that contained the first lengthy description of the well-cared-for estates, the streets and neat houses of St. Thomas. Europe being then at war, and Denmark a neutral nation, this broad haven at the crossroads of travel was the refuge of ships escaping pursuit, and boasted a brisk commerce. Many tales of piracy date from these rousing days of trade and warfare.
St. John was permanently settled by the Danes in 1716. The French, Knights of Malta, and “miscellaneous rovers” occupied the island of St. Croix, thirty-five miles south of St. Thomas until, in 1733, France sold it to Denmark. King Frederick V, in 1755, purchased the Danish West India Company’s land, forts, buildings, slaves, merchandise and ships for $1,500,000, and made St. Thomas a closed port. However, within a decade the former policy as to world commerce was resumed by order of the king, and during the pre-Napoleonic wars St. Thomas was the meeting-place of vessels flying the pennants of all the warring nations. “Things were lively in those days,” writes Mr. Luther Zabriskie. “Money flowed like water into the coffers of the merchants. Population increased, the town limits were extended, stores and dwellings were rapidly built, and thousands of refugees and adventurers sought these shores for the purpose of traffic.”
But St. Thomas was not to remain a neutral port for long. In 1801, England blockaded the island and held it for ten months. The British flag again flew over the islands between the years 1807 and 1815, as a precaution against seizure by Napoleon. In the readjustment of nations following the events of the latter year, the group was restored to Denmark. Once more, St. Thomas became the queen port of the West Indies, and exacted tribute from the hundreds of ships that plied this golden lane of commerce between the Atlantic and the Pacific. On the birth date of American Independence, July 4, 1848, the black bondmen of the Danish West Indies were freed by decree of the Crown, and forthwith they forsook their agricultural occupations. The prosperity of the Danish islands was affected when profits decreased in the production of cane sugar. The abolition of slavery and the development of the beet sugar industry both had a share in bringing about this condition. Formerly, St. Thomas had been the sole port of call for steamers carrying cargoes of goods that were in demand on neighboring islands, including Porto Rico. Now other lines of transportation were organized, and direct communication was established between Porto Rico and the north. By the year 1866, planters and officials of the Government were ready to consider the proposals of Secretary Seward that the islands should become the property of the United States.
PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION
ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR. VOL. 6. No. 13. SERIAL No. 161
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION, INC.