A so-called road traverses the island from east to west. In company with a navy doctor I bumped by Ford along the eastern half of this to Water Bay. A cattle-raising estate called “Tatu,” with a three-story, red-roofed dwelling, was the only sign of industry along the route. Near the bay we overtook a man on his way—at nine o’clock in the morning—to dig a well for the estate owner, and soon talked him into rowing us across to St. John instead. For the wind was dead ahead, and the old sail in the bottom of his patched and weather-warped dory would have been far more hindrance than help in negotiating the stormy three-mile passage between the islands. Once landed, in Cruz Bay, we rented St. John’s only public means of conveyance,—two hard-gaited horses named “Bess” and “Candy Kid”—and rode out into the wilderness.
St. John is little more than that. Its twenty square miles have almost entirely gone back to forest, through which a few trails meander amid a silence as unbroken as that of Robinson Crusoe’s place of exile. There is not a wheeled vehicle on the island; one may ride for miles without meeting an inhabitant, and the very birds seem to have abandoned it for more progressive climes. Yet rusted iron kettles and the ruins of stone sugar-mills, scattered here and there in forest and scrub, show that the island was once a place of industry. Sugar and cotton plantations almost completely covered it when, in 1733, a slave rebellion started it on a decline that has never since ceased. The whites quelled the uprising, after a half hundred of them and four times as many blacks had lost their lives, but the negroes won in the end, for the last census showed but four white men on the island. To-day it has barely eight hundred inhabitants, of whom, unlike the other islands, the majority are men. A few mangoes and bananas, yams, okra, and a kind of tropical pumpkin keep its hut-dwellers alive. Here and there is a little patch of cane, from which rum was made before the Americans came to interfere with that; limes are cultivated rather languidly in a few hillside orchards, and the high ridge between Hope and Bordeaux is covered with bay-trees.
These vary in size from mere saplings to trees twenty feet in height. The picking is best done in June, when men and boys break off the smaller branches and carry them to the distilleries. Here the leaves are cooked in sea water in immense brass decanters, from which the bay oil is drawn off, and the leaves tossed out, apparently unchanged except from green to a coppery brown. One hundred and thirty pounds of leaves are required to produce a quart of oil, which sells at present for six dollars, and has long had the reputation of being the best on the market. The bay-tree estates give occasional labor to the inhabitants, but their livelihood depends chiefly on their own little patches of tropical vegetables, their cattle, and their fishing. From the high points of the island one has an embracing view of the British Virgin Islands, separated from our own by only a few miles, and framed in the Caribbean like emeralds of fantastic shape in a setting of translucent blue.
There are no towns on St. John. The nearest semblance to them are a few scattered clusters of huts around the shores, where customs are as backward as those of Africa, or Haiti. A handful of these simple dwellings are rather picturesquely strewn up the steep fishhook-shaped peninsula that forms the eastern end of the island, connected to the rest by a narrow neck of land. Between this and what might be called the mainland is Coral Bay, a harbor of far greater depth than that of St. Thomas, and so much larger that, experts tell us, the construction of two break-waters would make it a safe anchorage for the largest navy in the world. But what, in the name of Neptune, would the world’s largest navy find to do there?
A corner of Charlotte Amalie
Picking sea island cotton, the second of St. Croix products
A familiar sight in St. Croix, the ruins of an old sugar mill and the stone tower of its cane grinding windmill