Roaming Through the West Indies

by Harry Alverson Franck

One of our most serious problems in the Virgin Islands is to combat disease. The Danes had only three doctors on the islands; now sixteen navy physicians are busy all the time. Their fees are turned into the colonial treasury, an arrangement nowhere else in force in American territory. Half the children die as a natural course, though the islands are really very healthful, and no white child born under proper conditions has died since American occupation. There is no hookworm and little malaria; but much pellagra and “big leg,” or elephantiasis. Tuberculosis is common, and tests indicate that eighty per cent. of the population is infected with a hereditary blood disease. There is a leper colony in St. Croix. The present generation, in the opinion of the navy men, is hopeless. In the improvement of the next they are hampered by the ignorance, indifference, and superstition of the parents. The doctors of “West End” found nothing unusual in the case of a baby that was brought to the hospital already dead because the father had taken it first to a native healer, who put “chibble” (pot herbs) under its nose to cure it of acute indigestion.

But there is a worse problem than that facing us in the Virgin Islands—the elimination of the habit of trying to live off the exertions of others. Thanks to their race, history, and situation, the islanders are inveterate, almost unconscious, beggars. Young or old, black or white—for environment has given even those of Caucasian ancestry almost the same habits and “ideals” as the negro—they are all gifted with the extended palm. If they do not all beg individually, they do so collectively, in a frank, shameless assertion that they cannot support themselves. The Danes left a “rum fund” that is designed to aid all those who “have seen better days,” and to judge by the applicants the entire population ranks itself in that category. The native woman clerk at the “West End” police station does not hesitate to give any one, even the four-dollars-a-day sugar-porters on the wharves, a certificate that he is unable to pay for medical attention, though the navy doctors’ fees are nominal and, even when they are paid, go into the colonial treasury. The admiral-governor gave a reception to the natives. Food was provided for five hundred—and was carried off by the first hundred street women and urchins who surged through the door. Next day a large crowd came to demand their share, saying they had got nothing the day before. One of the “labor leaders” told the negroes of St. Croix to hide their mahogany bedsteads and phonographs and sleep on drygoods boxes while the congressional committee was scheduled to visit the island. Of the entire crowd appearing before that committee not one had the general good of the islands on his lips, but all came with some petty personal complaint or request.

In short our new wards want all they can get out of us. They want Uncle Sam to provide them with schools, with sanitation, with irrigation, with galvanized hillsides, with roads—even in St. Croix, which has better highways than almost any State in the Union—with public markets, with libraries, with means of public transportation, with anything else which, in his unsophisticated generosity, he chooses to give, so long as he does not require them to contribute their own means and labor to that end. The colonial council of St. Croix “hopes means will be found to get Congress to appropriate a half million a year, a sum far beyond our own means, so that we can live up to the high ideals of our great American nation.” It never seems to occur to them that the schools, libraries, and streets in our cities are paid for by the inhabitants thereof; they have the popular view of Uncle Sam as the world’s Santa Claus. Yet many of the very members of that council have made fortunes in St. Croix and probably could themselves pay a large part of the sum demanded without any more difficulty than the average American finds in paying his taxes. Naïve as they are, the Virgin Islanders can scarcely expect Americans to adopt them and never let them work or want again, yet they talk as if they had some such thought in mind. Or, as a congressman put it during a public hearing, “I doubt whether the farmers of my State of Kansas will be willing to get up at four all summer and pay money into the federal treasury so that you can sleep until nine in the morning and stroll in the park the rest of the day.”

There is no reason why the Virgin-Islanders should not be sufficiently taxed to support their own schools and other requirements. Even if St. Thomas is now largely barren, many of its shopkeepers are steadily growing wealthy. The Danish planters of St. Croix send fortunes home to Denmark every year; at the present price of sugar they alone should be able easily to contribute a sum equal to that they are demanding from Congress. Should not even dollar-a-day negroes pay something in taxes? It might develop their civic spirit. The Virgin-Islanders need many things, it is true; but there are millions living in, and paying taxes to, the United States who have by no means what almost every Virgin-Islander has, or could have for a little exertion. The future of the islands depends largely on whether or not we succumb to our national tendency to make our wards mendicants for life, or give them a start and let them work their own way through the college of civilization.

Whenever I look back upon our new possessions I remember a significant little episode that took place during our first day in St. Thomas. A negro woman was sitting a short way up one of the great street stairways that climb the hills of Charlotte Amalie. A descending friend paused to ask her what was the matter, and she replied in that slow, whining singsong peculiar to the community:

“Me knees jes wilfully refuse to carry me up dem steps.”

That is the trouble with most of the Virgin-Islanders. Their own knees jes wilfully refuse to carry them up the stairway of civilization. They will have to be lifted—or booted.

THE BRITISH WEST INDIES

CHAPTER XIV
THE CARIBBEE ISLANDS

Once he has reached our Virgin Islands, the traveler down the stepping-stones of the West Indies has left his worst experiences behind him. For while connections are rare and precarious between the large islands of the north Caribbean, the tiny ones forming its eastern boundary are favored with frequent and comfortable intercommunication. Several steamship lines from the north make St. Thomas their first stop, and pausing a day or two in every island of any importance beyond, give the through traveler all the time he can spend to advantage in all but three or four of the Lesser Antilles. In these he can drop off for a more extended exploration and catch the next steamer a week or two later.