The cluster of islands just east of Porto Rico was discovered by Columbus on his second voyage; anything that escaped him on the first journey seems to enjoy at least that secondary distinction. He named them the Eleven Thousand Virgins; just why, not even his biographers seem to know. It may be that he had just been awakened from a bad dream, or possibly the expression was an old-fashioned Italian form of profanity. It would be easy to think of a more appropriate name, but they have remained the Virgin Islands to this day.
The Spaniards stopped long enough to exterminate the Indians, but it was a long time before any one thought it worth while to settle in such a region. Nothing is more natural than that the name should finally have attracted to it a party of Frenchmen. Evidently they found it disappointing, for they did not increase. Then the Danish West India Company laid claim to St. Thomas and its adjacent islands, and in 1671 a governor was sent out from Denmark, who founded the town of Charlotte Amalie, which he named for the then Danish queen. Of course the British captured the place a few times, and it was often harassed by fires, hurricanes, and slave rebellions, all of which it more or less successfully survived. St. Thomas became a harbor of refuge for pirates, and it frequently became necessary for the English governor of Nevis to raid it—for the British, you remember, did not believe in piracy. When the gentlemen enlisted under the skull-and-cross-bones banner had gone the way of all rascals, the island soon won a place of importance as a distributing center for slaves.
Meanwhile St. Croix, which is neither geographically, geologically, nor historically a bona fide member of the Virgin group, had been having a history of its own. The Knights of Malta colonized it first with three hundred Frenchmen, but these soon decided that Santo Domingo offered better real estate possibilities. Then when the Dutch and the British had concluded that France had a better armed right to it, the latter sold it to the Danish Company for 750,000 livres. Just how much that was in real money I am not in a position to state, beyond the assertion that it would buy far more then than it will nowadays. Thenceforth St. Croix has followed the fate of the other Danish West Indies.
Many of the colonists were disturbers of the peace or agitators, the Bolshevists, in short, of those days, who found it to their advantage to abandon the near-by French and British Leeward Islands. They became too much for the Company, which in 1764 sold the whole collection to the Danish crown. All three of the islands of any importance were long planted in sugar-cane. It covered even the tops of the hills, those of St. Thomas being cultivated by hand in little stone-faced terraces. To-day sugar-cane has completely disappeared from St. Thomas, almost entirely from St. John, and is grown only on the level southern side of St. Croix. Several slave uprisings had been suppressed with more or less bloodshed when Denmark subscribed to the then astounding theory that slavery should be abolished. The agricultural importance of the islands began at once to decline. Free labor was cheap, but it would not labor. Then, too, the competition of sugar grown more economically elsewhere and Napoleon’s establishment of a bounty for beet-sugar growers began to make life dreary for all West Indian planters.
However, as their agriculture declined, the importance of the Danish islands as a shipping and distributing center increased, though their days of greatest prosperity were from 1820 to 1830, when the two coincided. St. Thomas harbor was forested with the masts of sailing vessels, carrying goods to and from the four points of the compass. Then along came Robert Fulton with more trouble for the poor harassed islanders. Steam navigation made it easy for the West Indies and South America to import goods direct from Europe, and the Virgin Island merchants began to lose their rake-off. They picked up, however, by establishing a coaling station and making St. Thomas a free port and a general depot of sea-going supplies. Before the World War scores of ships entered the harbor every week; now the pilot often does not drop his feet from his hammock to the floor for several days at a time.
For all this, the islands were a liability rather than an asset to the Danes, and they had long been looking for some kind Samaritan to take them off their hands. Under Lincoln, Secretary Seward negotiated a treaty by which we were to have all the group except St. Croix for $7,500,000. A vote of the population showed them overwhelmingly in favor of the change; the Danish Government was paternal, but it was far away and unprogressive. The treaty was ratified in Denmark. The king issued a manifesto telling his loyal subjects how sorry he was to part with them, but assuring them, as fathers always do, that it was for their own good. He did not mention that he needed the money. Two years later he was forced to admit in another royal document that he was not parting with them, after all. Senator Sumner, chairman of our Foreign Relations Committee, did not walk hand in hand with President Johnson. For two years he kept the treaty in his official pocket, and when it did at length reappear under Grant, it was adversely reported.
In 1902 a better bargain was struck. A new treaty setting the price of the whole group at $5,000,000 was drawn up, and ratified by the American Senate. But this time the Danish Rigsdag turned the tables. Perhaps they had inside information on the future development of American politics. If so it proved trustworthy, for by 1916 we were in the hands of an administration to whom mere money was no object. The Danes quickly caught the idea, the people themselves voted to sell while the selling was good, and on the last day of March, 1917, old Danneborg was hauled down and the Stars and Stripes raised in its place.
I have yet to find any one who knows just why we bought the Virgin Islands, still less why we paid twenty-five millions for them. As a navy man engaged in governing them put it, “They are not worth forty cents to us, or to any one else; though” he added, “it would have been worth a hundred million to keep Germany from getting them.” If the loss of the twenty-five millions were an end of the matter, we might forget it; but it is costing us more than half a million a year to support our little black children. Furthermore, the Danes made the most of their ripe opportunity not only in the matter of price, but in an astonishing number of concessions in their favor. Evidently our Government said to them, “Go ahead and write a treaty, and we’ll sign it”; and then in the press of saving the world for democracy we did not have time to glance it over before adding our signature.