Roaming Through the West Indies

by Harry Alverson Franck

Charlotte Amalie, capital of our Virgin Islands

Sunrise overtook us still within sight of Porto Rico, but with her dependencies of Culebra and Vieques abeam, and the hazy mass of the Virgin group visible on the horizon ahead. Brown, rugged, strangely aged-looking, Culebra showed no signs of life except the lighthouse set upon its highest cliff. Vieques, on the other hand, known to English-speaking mariners as “Crab Island,” is a diminutive replica of Porto Rico, with four large sugar-mills and a population of some eleven thousand, American citizens all. The Danes once claimed this also, but Spanish buccaneers established the more efficacious right of actual possession, and at length the Porto Rican Government sent an expedition to annex it to the Spanish crown.

With monotonous deliberation the Virgin group grew in size and visibility. St. Thomas and St. John took on individuality amid their flock of rocky keys, and British Tórtola gradually asserted its aloofness from the American islands. Far off on the blue-gray horizon we could even make out St. Croix, like a stain on the inverted bowl of sky. Yet, though the breeze was strong, it was a head wind, and the ocean current sweeping in from the eastward held us all but motionless when we seemed to be cutting swiftly through the light waves. For five profane hours we tacked to and fro within gunshot of a towering white boulder jutting forth from the sea, and fittingly known as Sail Rock, without seeming to advance a mile on our journey.

We turned the isolated precipice at last, and headed in toward mountainous St. Thomas. Neither its scattered keys nor its long broken coast-line showed any evidence of habitation, but at length three white specks appeared on its water’s edge, and grew with the afternoon to a semblance of Charlotte Amalie, a city rivaled in its beauty, at a distance, by few others even in the beautiful West Indies. We greeted it with fervent exclamations of delight, piled up white and radiant in the moonlight on its three hills, like occupants of royal boxes at some gala performance in its amphitheatrical harbor below. Scarcely a sound came from it, however, except the languid swish of the waves on what seemed to be the base of its lower houses, as we dropped anchor near midnight within rowboat distance of the wharves. It had been an unusually swift voyage, according to the uncommanding captain, a mere two days instead of the four or five it frequently requires.

In due course of time a negro youth rowed out to examine us. He was an exceedingly courteous negro, to be sure, his white uniform was spotless, and his English impeccable; but there was something incongruous in the fact that American citizens must have his permission to be admitted into one American possession from another. The “Grand Hotel,” which virtually monopolizes the accommodation of transients in St. Thomas, could not house us, or rather, on second thought, it could, if we would be contented in the “annex” over a barber-shop across the street. Its creaking floors were unbroken expanses of spaciousness, but at least there was a mahogany four-poster in one corner. We sat down on it with a sigh of contentment—and quickly stood up again, under the impression that we had inadvertently sat upon the floor. The Virgin Islands have not yet reached that decadent degree of civilization that requires bed-springs. As to a bath—certainly, it should be brought at once; and a half hour later a loose-kneed negro wandered in and set down on the floor, with the rattle of a hardware-shop in a tornado, a large tin pan, red with rust. All we had to do, explained the ultra-courteous octoroon manager, was to call another negro to bring a pail of water when—and the emphasis suggested that the time was still far off—we “desired to perform our ablutions.” The tub-bearer was evidently too worn out from his extraordinary exertion to indulge in another before he had taken time to recuperate.

That loose-kneed stroll of the Virgin-Islander is typical of all his processes, mental, moral, or physical. It is not merely slow, rhythmical, and dignified; there is in it a suggestion of limitless wealth, an untroubled conscience, and an ancestry devoted to leisurely pursuits for untold generations. In local parlance a “five minutes’ walk” means a block. One must not even speak hastily to a native, for the only result is wasted breath and the necessity of repeating the question in more measured cadences. Politeness oozes from his every pore; “at your sarvice, sar,” and “only too glad to be of use, ma’am,” interlard every conversation; but any attempt, courteous or otherwise, to hurry the Virgin Islander brings a sullen resentment which you will never succeed in smiling away. As the navy men who are governing him put it in the technical vernacular of their calling, he has only two speeds,—“Slow Ahead” and “Stop.”

Once the visitor has shaken off the no doubt ridiculous notion that things should be done in a hurry, or done at all, for that matter, he will find our newly adopted children an amusing addition to the family. Like all negroes in contact with civilization, they are fond of four-jointed words where monosyllables would suffice, and of pompous, rounded sentences in place of brief-to-the-point statements. “Presently” means “now”; “He detained from coming” is the local form of “he can’t come.” Talking is one of the Virgin Islanders’ chief recreations. They buttonhole the unknown passer-by and unburden themselves to him at endless length, ceaselessly chattering on until he can forge some excuse to tear himself away, when they hasten to ask their friends if they, too, have seen “the stranger with the beard,” “the American who arrived last night,” “that rich-looking gentleman in a white helmet,” that the friends may not lose their chance of waylaying the victim who is already listening to a new monologue around the corner. If they can not find a hearer, they do not for that reason abandon their favorite sport; it is commonplace to meet a pedestrian, particularly a woman, chattering volubly to herself as she shuffles along the street.

Their lack of self-restraint is on a par with their loquacity. When the first navy hydroplanes flew into the harbor, the entire population became a screaming mob of neck-craning, pointing, shoulder-clapping, occupation-forgetting children. The winner of a dollar at the local “horse” races, in which the island donkeys are now and then pitted against one another, may be seen turning somersaults in the midst of the crowd, or throwing himself on the ground, all fours clawing the air, as he shrieks his ecstasies of delight. It is their joy to parade the streets in their gayest costumes on any holiday, American, Danish, or imaginable, that can be dragged into the calendar, dancing and capering with an energy which their work-a-day manner never suggests. Once a month, at full moon, the local band marches through the town playing “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” the population trailing en masse behind it, singing, clapping hands, and swaying their rather slender, underfed bodies violently in cadence with the music. They are ardent church-goers in theory, there being six large churches of as many denominations in town—but it takes a rousing round of hymns to bring the majority to indoor services, though boatmen far out in the bay recognize a street meeting of the Salvation Army by the howling chorus of “Lord, ha’ mercy on mah sou-ul,” which the cliffs echo out to them.

The Sunday evening band concert, on the other hand, is staid enough to make a Spanish-American retreta seem uproarious by comparison. It begins at nine, after the last church service of a Britishly dead Sunday. The native band, recruited by the administrative Americans, jet black in features and snow-white in uniform, mounts to the roof of the old red fortress, while outwardly immaculate negroes, stroll rather funereally about little Emancipation Park and along the edge of the quay. The élite of the town sit in their houses, piled steeply up the pyramidal hills, and let the music float up to them on the harbor breeze. Our new fellow-countrymen are ostentatiously patriotic in all that concerns mere formalities. Every morning at eight all St. Thomas becomes static when the marine band plays our national anthem. The market-women on the wharf halt as if suddenly turned to stone, holding whatever posture they happen to be caught in until the last note has died away; the very boatmen in the bay sit with their poised oars motionless. Flags burst forth not merely on our own holidays, but on Danish, on every possible fête day, public or private, even on the birthdays of distant relatives or mere friends. Curious superstitions enliven the quaint local color. The appearance of a lizard in the house is sure proof to the lower classes that there is soon to be an addition to the family. Servant girls cannot be induced to remove their hats, whether cooking, making beds, or waiting on table at the most formal dinner, for fear of sudden death from “dew” falling on their heads—though it be full blazing noonday.