Across the street from this is a shop in which Alexander Hamilton once clerked. His mother, born in St. Croix, married a man named Levine, who abused her, whereupon she went to live with a Scotchman named Hamilton in the neighboring British island of Nevis. There Alexander was born, but when his father went to seek his fortune elsewhere, the mother returned to her native island. While clerking in the Christiansted shop, the son wrote his father a letter describing a hurricane that had swept St. Croix, the father showed it to influential friends, with the result that Alexander was sent to King’s College (now Columbia University), and, thanks partly to Aaron Burr, never returned to the West Indies. Meanwhile his mother remained in St. Croix until her death, and was buried on a knoll a few miles west of Christiansted. It is a pleasant burial place, with constant shade and a never-failing trade wind fanning the flowers above it, a quaint old homestead behind it, and a modern monument erected by an American woman, inscribed:
Rachael Fawcett Levine
1736–1768
She was the Mother of Alexander Hamilton
St. Croix is far more of a real country than all the other islands of the group put together. Not only is it much larger, being twenty miles long and five wide, but is much more extensively cultivated. Three splendid roads run nearly the length of the island, with numerous cross roads in good condition. Only the rocky eastern end is a wilderness to which deer, brought into St. Croix by the British when they controlled it during the Napoleonic wars, go to hide after the cane-fields are cut, such a wilderness that hunters rarely succeed in stalking the wary animals in the dense undergrowth. There are far more signs of industry in St. Croix than in St. Thomas; its estate-owners are on the whole an intelligent, progressive class, with a social life quite different from that on the more primitive islands. When one has seen St. Croix, the twenty-five million does not seem quite so complete and irreparable a loss.
I took the “King’s Road” through the middle of the island. It runs for fourteen miles, from Christiansted, the capital, to Frederiksted, its rival. These names being too much effort for the negro tongue, the towns are known locally as “Boss End” (either a corruption of the French Bassin or an acknowledgement that the “bosses” of the island always lived in the capital) and “West End.” The northern side is abrupt, with deep water close to the shore, its highest peak, Mount Eagle, rising 1180 feet. South of this range are undulating, fertile valleys and broad, rolling plains not even suggested along the northern coast, and the land slopes away in shoals and coral ledges for several miles from the beach. The highways are maintained by the owners of the estates through which they run; therefore they follow a somewhat roundabout course through the canefields, that the expense of maintenance may be more evenly divided. They are busy roads, dotted with automobiles, of which there are more than one hundred on the island, many donkeys, heavy two-wheeled carts hauled by neck-yoked oxen, a kind of jaunting car of the conservative gentry, and innumerable black pedestrians. The island is everywhere punctuated with picturesque old stone windmill towers that once ground cane, their flailing arms long since departed, and gray old chimneys of abandoned sugar-mills break the sky-line on every hand. Some of these dull-white heaps of buildings on their hilltops look like aged Norman castles; there is something grim and northern about them that does not fit at all with the tropics. They suggest instead the diligence and foresightedness of the temperate zone. Old human tread-mills may still be found among them, and slave-house villages that in some cases are inhabited by the laborers of to-day. Rusted sugar-kettles, such as are strewn through the West Indies from eastern Haiti to southern Trinidad, lie abandoned here and there throughout the island.
Sugar-cane once covered even the tops of the hills, but to-day only the flatter lands are planted, though there are splendid stretches of cane-green valleys. The names of estates are amusing, and range all the way from cynicism to youthful hopefulness,—“Golden Grove,” “Work and Rest,” “Hope and Blessing,” “Whim,” “Slob,” “Judith’s Fancy,” “Barren Spot,” “Adventure.” The ceiba, or “silk-cotton tree,” beautiful specimens of the royal palm, the tibet-tree, full of rustling pods that give it the name of “women’s-tongues” in all the English-speaking West Indies, everywhere beautify the landscape. Ruins of the slave rebellion, of the earthquake of 1848, of the disastrous hurricane of 1916, are still to be found here and there. There is a marvelous view from King’s Hill, with its old Danish gendarmérie, now a police station, from which the central highway, lined by palms and undulating through great valleys of cane, may be seen to where it descends to “West End” and the Caribbean. In the center of the picture sits Bethlehem, the largest sugar-mill on the island, with its cane railway and up-to-date methods. For the modern process of centralization is already spreading in St. Croix; the small independent mills are disappearing, and with them much of the picturesqueness of the island. These big mills, as well as most of the small, are owned by Danes, half the stock of the largest being held by the Danish government. Unfortunately St. Croix has put all its eggs in one basket, or at most, two, sugar and sea-island cotton.
There is not a thatched roof on the island. The people live in moderate comfort, as comfort goes in the West Indies. Toward sunset the roads are lined with women cane-cutters in knee-length skirts, with footless woolen stockings that suggest the tights of ballet-dancers, to protect their legs in the fields, pattering homeward, with their big cane-knives lying flat on the tops of their heads. Bits of colored rags sewed on the hatbands of the men indicate that they are members of the newly organized labor-union. They still bow and raise their hats to passing white men, yet one feels something of that bolshevistic atmosphere which their black leaders are fostering among them. The King’s Road passes a large distillery, which prohibition has closed. Formerly St. Croix made much rum; now it is giving its attention rather to syrup than to sugar, as there is more money in the former; but estate-owners are threatening to give up cane-growing and turn their fields into cattle pastures, so greatly have the wages of field laborers increased in the last two years—from twenty-five cents to a dollar a day. For St. Croix is one of the few islands in the West Indies where “task work” has never taken the place of a fixed daily wage. Cattle are plentiful on the island, from which they are sent to Porto Rico in tug-towed open barges. Some of them are so wild that they are brought down to the coast in cages on wheels, and all of them are roped and swung on board with little regard to their bodily comfort.
Fredriksted, the third and last town of our Virgin Islands, is a quaint, “Dutchy” place some five blocks wide and seven long, with wide sanded streets, two-storied for the most part and boasting no real public sidewalks; for though what look like them run beneath the arcades that uphold the upper-story verandas, they are rather family porches, shut off by stairways or barricades, which force the pedestrian to take constantly to the sun-scorched streets. The town has only an open roadstead; indeed, there is not a good harbor in the island. A native band recruited by the American navy breaks the monotony of life by playing here once a week, as it does daily in Christiansted. The cable company is required by law to furnish the world’s news to the press, but as the pathetic little newspapers are so small that they can publish only a few items at a time, the despatches are habitually some two weeks old, each taking its chronological turn irrespective of importance.