A cistern in which rain water is stored for drinking purposes
We met all the élite of St. John at the Moravian mission of Emmaus at the head of Coral Bay. The census showed the island inhabited by one Catholic, forty Lutherans, and the rest Moravians, hence there were few local celebrities missing at the annual “show” which happened to coincide with our visit. Negroes dressed in their most solemn garments, the men in staid black, the women in starched white, poured in on horseback and afoot from moonrise until the first of the doleful religious songs and the amusingly stupid dialogues began in the school chapel. There was the black government doctor, the negro owners of the two or three farms so large as to be locally known as “estates,” the island’s few school teachers—its policeman himself might have been there had I not deprived him of the use of his “Candy Kid.” To tell the truth they gave a rather good impression, decidedly a better one than the traveler-baiters of St. Thomas. They were almost English in their cold leisurely deportment, yet more volubly courteous, and with few exceptions they frankly looked down upon white men. Many of them had the outward indices of education, speaking with a chosen-worded formality that suggested a national convention of pedagogues; not a hint of hilarity enlivened their intercourse. Perhaps the most amusing part of all was the overdone company-manner in which they treated their wives, those same wives who no doubt would take up the chief family burdens again, once the night had separated the gathering into its natural component parts.
We found Carl Francis more nearly what it is to be hoped our new wards can all gradually be brought to resemble. A member of the Colonial Council, notorious throughout the colony as the man who dared tell the congressional committee in public session that the chief trouble with the Virgin Islands is the laziness of their inhabitants, he would outrank many a politician of our own land in public spirit, for all his ebony skin. He confirmed the famous statement above mentioned, but added that there were other things which St. John needed for its advancement. It needs a mail service, for instance, such as it had under the Danes, instead of being obliged to go to Charlotte Amalie to post or receive its letters. It needs more schools, so that its children shall not have to walk miles over the mountains morning and evening. It must have something in the nature of an agricultural bank to lend the inhabitants wherewithal to replant the old estates, if St. John is to regain under the American flag something of its eighteenth century prosperity.
If the Virginia was unworthy of her calling, what shall I say of the Creole, which carried me from St. Thomas to St. Croix? A battered old sloop of a type so ancient that her massive wooden rail resembled that of a colonial veranda, barely fifty feet long, and nearly as wide, her bottom so covered with barnacles that she did little more than creep in the strongest breeze, she represented the last stage in ocean-going traffic. Not only were there no other whites on board, but not even a mulatto. The passenger-list was made up chiefly of a batch of criminals and insane who were being sent to their respective institutions in St. Croix. Most of them wore handcuffs and leg-irons, and the rattle of chains and the shrieks of their wearers suggested the slave-ships of olden days. One of the mad women screamed for unbroken hours in the lingo of the Dutch West Indies; another conducted single-handed an entire church service, hymns, sermon, prayers, and all.
Yet the crew were at least grown men, and if they were monkey-like in their playful moods, they had real discipline and a sense of responsibility when the time came for it that was a welcome contrast to the surly indifference with which the boys on the Virginia carried out their orders. The captain was a black man of the coast fisherman type, but the most entertaining part of the voyage was the unfailing “sir” with which the mate, a cadaverous old negro who wore a heavy wool skating-cap and a sort of trench-coat fit for the Arctic even at high noon, ended his careful repetition of the skipper’s every command. Moreover,—for we are all apt to judge things from our own petty personal-comfort angle—the captain and most of his men treated a white man as if he were of royal blood. Not only did he find me a canvas steamer-chair, but he refused any of the other passengers admittance to the three-berth cabin, lest they should “disturb de gen’le-man.” If only he had been able to adjourn the church service and the other uproar beyond the bulkhead, I might have had a real night’s sleep.
We left at five in the evening, and by sunrise had covered the forty miles,—though not, unfortunately, in the right direction. Had our destination been Frederiksted at the west end of the island, we should have landed early. But the Creole’s contract calls for a service between St. Thomas and Christiansted, the two capitals of our Virgin group, and all day long we wallowed eastward under the lee of St. Croix’s mountainous northern coast, while “de lepards,” as the sane passengers called their unsound sisters below, shrieked their maudlin complaints and the church service began over and over again with a “Brethren, let us pray for her.”
Christiansted is prettily situated amid cocoanut-palms and sloping cane-fields at the back of a wide bay, but a long reef with an exceedingly narrow entrance gives it a poor harbor. Its white or cream-colored houses, with here and there a red roof, lend it a touch that is lacking in the half-dozen rather grim-faced villages and estates that may be seen scattered to right and left along the rugged coast. The town has wide, rather well-kept streets, many stone houses, an imposing government building, and climbs away up the stony slope behind as if it had once planned to grow, but had changed its mind. Old-fashioned chain pumps supply it with water, from wells rather than from cisterns; a big Catholic church is barely outrivaled in size by the Anglican; on the whole, it seems better swept than more populous Charlotte Amalie. Its people are simple-mannered, rather “gawky,” in fact, with a tendency to stare strangers out of countenance, and have a leisureliness that shows even in the long-drawn “Good ahftehnoon, sar,” with which they greet passers-by.
Christiansted, and all St. Croix, has a special grievance against the Americans. Under the Danes the governor spent half the year in this second capital. Now the ruler of the islands only occasionally runs over from St. Thomas in his private yacht, often returning the same day, and the Croixians feel slighted. When the admiral and his aides land, it is mildly like the arrival of royalty. A band or two and most of the population are drawn up in the sanded space facing the wharf, whence all proceed to a meeting of the Colonial Council in the old government building.