The great majority of the population is undernourished. Even when their earnings are sufficient, most of the money is spent on dress. The chief diet of the rank and file is sugar. A sugar-cane three times a day seems to be enough to keep many of them alive. The morning meal for the rest consists of “tea” only, the local meaning of that word being a cupful of sugar dissolved in warm water. Then along in the middle of the afternoon they indulge in their only real food, and not very real at that. This is a plate of “fungee,” a nauseating mixture of fish and corn-meal, which to the local taste is preferable to the most succulent beefsteak. The natural result of the constant consumption of sugar is an early scarcity of teeth. Barely three men in twenty could be enlisted in the native corps, chiefly because of their inability to cope with navy rations.
It goes without saying that such a population does not furnish model workmen. From Friday night to Tuesday morning is apt to be treated as “the Sabbath.” The man who works two days a week at eighty cents has enough to provide himself with sugar-cane and “fungee.” On the whole, the women are more industrious than the men, perhaps because the great disparity of sexes makes the possession of a “man” something in the nature of a luxury. Time was when the women of St. Thomas were able to support their husbands in a more fitting manner than at present. In the good old days hundreds of ships coaled here every month; now many a day passes without one bringing a throng of negresses scampering for the coaling-wharf far out beyond “Bluebeard’s Castle.” In a constant stream the soot-draped women jog up the gang-plank, balancing the eighty-pound basket of coal on their heads, often without touching it, thrust out a begrimed hand for the three cents a trip which a local labor leader has won them in place of the original one, drop the coins into a dust-laden pocket, dump their load into the steamer’s chute, and trot down again. Sometimes the ship is a man-of-war that unfairly speeds up the pace of coalers by having its band play rousing music on the upper deck. Here and there a man may be made out in the endless chain of black humanity. At least one of them works with his wife as a “team”—by carrying the empty basket back to be filled while she mounts with the full one. But most of the males have the point of view of the big “buck nigger” who was lying in the shade of the coal-pile watching the process with an air of languid contentment. “Why de coalin’ is done by women, sah?” he repeated, scratching his head for a reply. “Why, dat’s woman’s work.”
The population of our Virgin Islands is overwhelmingly negro. Even Charlotte Amalie cannot muster one white man to ten of African ancestry, and not a fourth of the latter show any Caucasian mixture. Once upon a time the Jews were numerous; there is still a Jewish cemetery, but the synagogue has been abandoned for lack of congregation. Though the islands were Danish for nearly two and a half centuries, their language has always been English, probably because their business has ever been with ships and men who, though it may not always have been their native tongue, spoke the language of the sea. Some six years before we purchased the islands the Danes made an attempt to teach Danish in the schools. But though many little negroes learned to chatter more or less fluently in that tongue, to the detriment of more essential studies, the local environment proved too strong, and the very Danish officials became proficient in English in spite of themselves, though even the British school superintendent was required to write his correspondence and reports in the official tongue.
The only element of the population that has never succumbed to its environment, either racially or linguistically, are the “Chachas.” They are a community of French fishermen, who have themselves lost any certain notion of how they came to be stranded on rocky St. Thomas. Some two hundred of them live in their own village on the outskirts of Charlotte Amalie; others are scattered along the trail to a similar village called Hull, on the opposite side of the island. Intermarriage has given them all a striking family resemblance, and it is hours before the newcomer realizes that it is not the same man he has met over and over again, peddling his fish, his goats, or his crude straw hats in the streets of the town, but a score of more or less close relatives. They have preserved their blood pure from the slightest negro strain; but their aloofness has given them a sort of sick-bed pallor, an anemia both of physique and manner, especially among the women, an almost complete loss of teeth, and little power to resist disease. Yet the men at least have by no means lost their old “pep.” They can still fight in a two-fisted manner that is the awe of their negro neighbors, and they venture fearlessly far out to sea in their little narrow-chested fishing boats.
The adults speak a perfectly comprehensible French, but the “creole” of the children is but little improvement on that of Haiti. For many years they had their own school, taught by an old Frenchman who drew the princely salary of five dollars a month. Since his death the children have been attending the English-speaking Catholic school, and some of them already mispronounce a certain amount of that tongue—and can beg as fluently as the little black urchins that swarm about any white stranger. But their aloofness from the colored population remains. The latter scorn them as only a negro can the white man who has fallen socially to his own level, though they take care not to refer to them by the popular nickname within reach of their hardened fists. The term is said to have had its origin in the word chasser with which the fishermen interlard their cries. They call themselves français, and have a simplicity which suggests they have followed the same calling for many generations. Their houses are mere cabins, with shingled walls and thatched roofs, scattered about the sand knolls at the edge of the bay. These are always floored, decorated with a few chromo prints of a religious nature, and have a better claim to neatness than the hovels of the negroes about them. While the latter loaf, the “Chachas” ply their chosen calling diligently, but on Sunday afternoons they may be found in groups, playing cards in the shade of their date palms, their curious hats of sewn ribbons of straw tossed on the sandy soil about them. They profess complete indifference to their island’s change of sovereignty, except to wonder in vague voices if it is this that has brought the appalling increase in the prices of food.
Seen from any of its three hills, Charlotte Amalie looks more like a stage setting than a real town. Its sheet-iron roofs, many of them painted red, seem to be cut out of cardboard, and the steepness of the slopes on which the majority of its houses are built suggests the fantasy of the scene-painter rather than cold practicability. A single long, level street, still known, on its placards at least, as Kronprindsens Gade, runs the length of the town and contains nearly all its commerce. The rest start bravely up the steep hills, but soon tire, like the inhabitants, and leave their task incompleted. On the eastern side, where the storms come from, the houses have glass windows, almost unknown in the larger islands to the westward, and are fitted on all sides with heavy wooden hurricane-shutters. If these are closed in time, the roofs can withstand the frequent high winds that sweep down upon the island, but the local weather prophet has an unenviable task, for to give the signal for closing the shutters when there is no need for it is as reprehensible from the native point of view as to fail to foresee real danger. Bulky stone or brick ovens, separate from the houses, are the only buildings with chimneys, and many of these were mutilated by the hurricane of four years ago. Palm-trees and great masses of red and purple bougainvillea add a crowning beauty to a scene that would be entrancing even without them.
Of a score of solemn old buildings the most imposing is the residence of the governor on the middle of the three hills. Higher still stands a grim tower known as “Blackbeard’s Castle,” about which cling many legends, but no other certainty than that it was built by a turbulent colonist of long ago, who was credited, justly no doubt, since that clan has not wholly died out in St. Thomas to this day, with being a pirate. But this structure is of slight interest to the average visitor compared to a similar one on the eastern hill, reputed far and wide as the original “Bluebeard’s Castle.” Just how it gained this reputation is not easily apparent, for its real history is almost an open book. Built by the Danish government in 1700 as a fort, probably to overawe the slaves in the town below, it remained the property of the king until a century ago, when it fell into private hands. If any other proof of its entirely unromantic character is needed, it is sufficient to know that it now belongs to an Episcopal clergyman living in Brooklyn!
With stone walls five feet thick, three rooms one above the other, and all in all a pitiless visage, the tower easily lends itself to the imagination as the scene of marital treachery. The old negro caretaker will assure you that the dreadful crimes took place in it “jes’ like de storybook tell.” The yarn that has a wider local belief is somewhat different. According to this an old trader married a beautiful girl of Charlotte Amalie and locked her up in the castle while he left the island on business. During his absence she discovered a mysterious old chest in the upper story and finally yielded to the feminine impulse to open it. In it she found letters from a dozen of her husband’s discarded sweethearts, all of whom still lived in the town. She invited them to a banquet in the castle—the significant detail of how she got the door open being passed over in silence—and poisoned them. From there on the tale forks. One ending has it that the husband returned, repented, and committed suicide while the beautiful wife was being tried for murder; the other, that he rushed in and carried her off just as she was about to be burned at the stake.
The eyes of the modern visitor are sure to be drawn to what looks like an attempt to pave a large section of the steep hill behind the town. A great triangular patch of cement gleaming in the sun on one of the slopes brings to mind the island’s greatest problem. St. Thomas depends entirely upon the rains for her water-supply, for the water to be had by boring is so brackish that it ruins even a steamer’s boilers. When renting or buying a house the most important question is to know the size and condition of its cistern and what provision has been made for filling it. In the dry season, which is heartlessly long and appallingly dry, the poorer people wander from house to house begging a “pan” of water, and the word means a receptacle of any size or shape that will hold the precious liquid. The town is convinced that its commercial decline is due to its lack of water, and that it will come into its own again if only Uncle Sam will cover its hillsides with cement or galvanized iron. If they had immense cisterns and a means of filling them, they say, ships would no longer go to Ponce for water, and perhaps pick up their coal in Porto Rico also, but would put in at St. Thomas for all their supplies. To make matters worse, the change of sovereignty has brought with it the inability to furnish other liquids for which sea-faring men have looked to St. Thomas for centuries. That seemed the last straw, but another has since been added to the already crushing burden. St. Thomas has long been famous for its bay rum. As a matter of fact the bay oil comes from St. John and the rum came from St. Croix, until the colonial council voted the islands “dry”—“as if we were not dry enough already.” But the mixture and sale thereof brought many a dollar into local pockets. Soon after the “dry” law went into effect, the natives, to say nothing of our thirsty marines, made the brilliant discovery that the addition of a bit of bay oil to their favorite refreshment left it none the less exhilarating. Banished hilarity returned. The governor was shocked beyond measure, and the sale even of bay rum is now forbidden except on a police permit, issued only on proof that it was not to be used for beverage purposes. It is almost as easy to prove that the moon is made of green cheese. The Virgin Islanders have several grievances against the Americans who have adopted them, the strictness of their color-line, for instance; but the greatest of these is prohibition.