CHAPTER XIII

IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS

“It’s all I can do to keep from barking at you,” said a passenger on the _Virginia_, as he crawled on hands and knees from one of the four kennels that decorate her afterdeck. As a matter of fact, we all did a certain amount of growling before the voyage was over. Yet the four of us who had won the kennels were lucky dogs compared to the unfortunate dozen or more who had to snatch what sleep they could curled up on the bare deck or in a single sour-smelling cabin below, where neither color, sex nor seasickness knew any distinction.

The weakest link in the shipping chain down the West Indies is that between our own possessions. Once a week a little schooner that was built to defend America’s yachting championship, but which never reached the finals, raises its wings in San Juan harbor and, the winds willing, drops a flock of disgruntled passengers, the United States mails, and an assorted cargo in St. Thomas and St. Croix in time to return for a similar venture seven days later. Congressional committees, of course, have their battleships, and the white-uniformed governors of our Virgin Islands their commodious steam-yacht; but the mere garden variety of tax-paying citizen has the privilege of tossing about for several days on the _Virginia_, subsisting on such food as he has had the foresight to bring with him, and drinking such lukewarm water as he can coax from the schooner’s cask.

It is nearly fifty miles from Porto Rico to St. Thomas. All day long our racing yacht crawled along the coast, San Juan and the island’s culminating peak, El Yunque, equally immovable on the horizon, while the half-grown crew alternated between pumping water from the hold and playfully disobeying the orders of the forceless old mulatto captain. Nine at night found us opposite Fajardo light—more than an hour by automobile from our starting-point! While the crew slept, without so much as posting a lookout, a boy of thirteen sat at the wheel, and the kennel-less passengers tossed restlessly on their chosen deck spots. A half-grown pig—the only traveler on board whose ticket specified ship’s food—wandered disconsolately fore and aft, now and then demanding admission to one or another of the four “cabins.” No doubt he recognized them as built for his own, rather than the human, species.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

If a farmer bought a farm for, say, twenty-five hundred dollars, and found, when he came to take possession of it, that it would cost him fifty dollars a year out of his pocket to run it, that it was inhabited by a happy-go-lucky lot of negroes who expected him to do many things for them, from curing their wide-spread disease to sending them to school; if, furthermore, he discovered that the former owners still held everything on the farm that was worth owning except the title-deed, he would probably give it away to the first unsuspecting tenderfoot who happened along. Unfortunately, governments cannot indulge in that dying-horse method of laying down their burdens. Even had the purchase price of almost three hundred dollars an acre included everything of monetary value on the islands, from the wardrobes of the inhabitants to the last peasant’s hut, we should have made a bad bargain. But about all we got for our twenty-five millions is the right to fly our flag over the islands, and half a dozen old forts and government buildings entirely stripped of their furniture. The Danish Government has the reputation of being conservative and economical. It surely is, in more senses than one. By the terms of the treaty “the movables, especially the silver plate and the pictures, remain the property of the Danish Government and shall, as soon as circumstances permit, be removed by it.” By virtue of that clause they sold at auction every stick of furniture in the public buildings; they tore the mirrors off the walls; they removed the gilt moldings from them; they tried to tear off the embossed leathery wall-paper, and left the rooms looking as if a party of yeggmen had gutted them; they took down and carried away the rope on the government flagpole! Economy is a splendid trait, but they might have left us a chair in which to mourn the loss of our twenty-five—and more—millions.

Everything worth owning in the islands is still in private, principally Danish, hands. When we planned to erect a naval station on an utterly worthless stony hill on St. Thomas harbor, the owners demanded twenty-five hundred dollars an acre for it. We must maintain all the grants, concessions, and licenses left by the Danish Government. “Det Vestindiske Kompagni” retains most of the harbor privileges; another Danish company, of which the principal shareholder is Prince Axel, cousin of the king, holds the coaling rights, the electric lighting rights, the right to operate a dry-dock. We cannot even use American money in our new possessions. The Danish West Indian bank has the exclusive concession for issuing notes until 1934, paying a ten per cent. tax on profits to the Danish Government, and the good old greenback must be exchanged for the domestic shin-plasters. Naval men stationed in St. Thomas are forced to pay this institution as high as two per cent. discount on their U. S. government pay checks; the yearly budget of our new colony must be made in Danish francs. But though the domestic money is officially in francs and “bits,” the people talk in dollars and cents as universally as they speak English instead of Danish. It is difficult to find anything left by the old régime that is not protected by that curiously one-sided treaty. An American remarked casually to an old Danish resident one evening as they were strolling through Emancipation Park:

“I think we’ll tear down that old bust of King Christian IX and put one of Lincoln in its place.”

“Vat?” shrieked the Dane. “You can’t do that. Eet ees in de treaty.”

By some oversight the Danes failed to provide for a few of the minor concessions. There were the apothecaries, for instance. Under Danish rule one was given exclusive rights in each of the three towns and its contiguous territory. They were inspected often, old drugs being thrown out; and they were not allowed to sell patent medicines. Their prices are reasonable as monopolies go, their stores well kept, and their stock ample, within Danish limits. When the islands were sold, the apothecaries complained to the king that they were in danger of being ruined by American competition; whereupon the king, out of the goodness of his heart—and the fullness of the twenty-five million—gave them $30,000 each. Four years have passed since the druggists pocketed this salve to their injured profits, and they are still doing business at the old stands without a rival in sight.

Indeed, there is little evidence of that influx of American business men which was predicted as sure to follow the flag. So far the only one is a young ex-marine who is breaking into the restaurant and soda-fountain business. He has been fought at every step by the local merchants. Living exclusively on trade, with hundred per cent. profits customary from time immemorial, the wealthier class of the islanders have the cuteness of the shopkeeper developed to the nth degree, and they will not readily consent to competition by rank outsiders from the United States.

Among the things which the Danes left behind were their laws, and their own judge to administer them. True, Judge Thiele has become an American citizen, but it is a curious sight to see Americans-born brought into court by negro policemen, to be tried by a man who is still a foreigner in point of view and thinking processes in spite of being no longer officially a subject of the King of Denmark. There are those who claim he sides with the favorites of the old Government to the decided disadvantage of Americans, though there are more who speak well of him. It is enough to know that Americans are being tried in American territory under the Napoleonic code, in that laborious old-fashioned style by which the judge questions the witnesses, dictates their answers in his own more cultured words to a clerk, who writes them all down in laborious longhand in a great ledger, to be sure that a change should be made in the judiciary system of our Virgin Islands.

Having bought them, and being forced to support them for the rest of our natural existence, it might be of interest to make a brief inventory of our new possessions. The total area of the three islands, with their seventeen keys, only three or four of which are inhabited, is about 140 square miles. The census taken soon after the raising of the Stars and Stripes showed something over twenty-six thousand inhabitants, but several signs indicate that these are decreasing. The only real value of the Virgin group proper is the splendid harbor of St. Thomas. St. Croix, forty miles distant from it is considerably larger than all the rest of this group put together, more populous, more fertile, and could easily be made self-supporting governmentally, as it always has been privately, particularly with the introduction of an extensive system of irrigation.

* * * * *

A couple of trails zigzag up the reddish, dry hillside behind Charlotte Amalie, scattering along the way a few hovels. They really lead nowhere, however, for there is no other town than the capital on the island. The hurricane of 1916 blew down most of the farm-houses and many of the trees, and they were never rebuilt or replanted. Once heavily forested, later Nile-green with sugar-cane, St. Thomas is now brown, arid, and dreary, with scarcely a tenth of its acreage under even half-hearted cultivation. Being all “mountain,” fifteen hundred feet high in one spot, with buttresses running down to the sea in every direction, it can hardly be expected to compete with modern agricultural methods. Moreover, eight of its ten thousand inhabitants have been drawn into town by the higher wages of harbor work, and though there is now a scarcity of that, they still remain, to the detriment of what might be moderately productive plantations, forcing the island to draw its food from St. John, the British Virgins, or Porto Rico. A journey over the “mountain” brings little reward except some marvelous views and yet another proof of how primitive the human family may become.

A so-called road traverses the island from east to west. In company with a navy doctor I bumped by Ford along the eastern half of this to Water Bay. A cattle-raising estate called “Tatu,” with a three-story, red-roofed dwelling, was the only sign of industry along the route. Near the bay we overtook a man on his way—at nine o’clock in the morning—to dig a well for the estate owner, and soon talked him into rowing us across to St. John instead. For the wind was dead ahead, and the old sail in the bottom of his patched and weather-warped dory would have been far more hindrance than help in negotiating the stormy three-mile passage between the islands. Once landed, in Cruz Bay, we rented St. John’s only public means of conveyance,—two hard-gaited horses named “Bess” and “Candy Kid”—and rode out into the wilderness.

St. John is little more than that. Its twenty square miles have almost entirely gone back to forest, through which a few trails meander amid a silence as unbroken as that of Robinson Crusoe’s place of exile. There is not a wheeled vehicle on the island; one may ride for miles without meeting an inhabitant, and the very birds seem to have abandoned it for more progressive climes. Yet rusted iron kettles and the ruins of stone sugar-mills, scattered here and there in forest and scrub, show that the island was once a place of industry. Sugar and cotton plantations almost completely covered it when, in 1733, a slave rebellion started it on a decline that has never since ceased. The whites quelled the uprising, after a half hundred of them and four times as many blacks had lost their lives, but the negroes won in the end, for the last census showed but four white men on the island. To-day it has barely eight hundred inhabitants, of whom, unlike the other islands, the majority are men. A few mangoes and bananas, yams, okra, and a kind of tropical pumpkin keep its hut-dwellers alive. Here and there is a little patch of cane, from which rum was made before the Americans came to interfere with that; limes are cultivated rather languidly in a few hillside orchards, and the high ridge between Hope and Bordeaux is covered with bay-trees.

These vary in size from mere saplings to trees twenty feet in height. The picking is best done in June, when men and boys break off the smaller branches and carry them to the distilleries. Here the leaves are cooked in sea water in immense brass decanters, from which the bay oil is drawn off, and the leaves tossed out, apparently unchanged except from green to a coppery brown. One hundred and thirty pounds of leaves are required to produce a quart of oil, which sells at present for six dollars, and has long had the reputation of being the best on the market. The bay-tree estates give occasional labor to the inhabitants, but their livelihood depends chiefly on their own little patches of tropical vegetables, their cattle, and their fishing. From the high points of the island one has an embracing view of the British Virgin Islands, separated from our own by only a few miles, and framed in the Caribbean like emeralds of fantastic shape in a setting of translucent blue.

There are no towns on St. John. The nearest semblance to them are a few scattered clusters of huts around the shores, where customs are as backward as those of Africa, or Haiti. A handful of these simple dwellings are rather picturesquely strewn up the steep fishhook-shaped peninsula that forms the eastern end of the island, connected to the rest by a narrow neck of land. Between this and what might be called the mainland is Coral Bay, a harbor of far greater depth than that of St. Thomas, and so much larger that, experts tell us, the construction of two break-waters would make it a safe anchorage for the largest navy in the world. But what, in the name of Neptune, would the world’s largest navy find to do there?

We met all the élite of St. John at the Moravian mission of Emmaus at the head of Coral Bay. The census showed the island inhabited by one Catholic, forty Lutherans, and the rest Moravians, hence there were few local celebrities missing at the annual “show” which happened to coincide with our visit. Negroes dressed in their most solemn garments, the men in staid black, the women in starched white, poured in on horseback and afoot from moonrise until the first of the doleful religious songs and the amusingly stupid dialogues began in the school chapel. There was the black government doctor, the negro owners of the two or three farms so large as to be locally known as “estates,” the island’s few school teachers—its policeman himself might have been there had I not deprived him of the use of his “Candy Kid.” To tell the truth they gave a rather good impression, decidedly a better one than the traveler-baiters of St. Thomas. They were almost English in their cold leisurely deportment, yet more volubly courteous, and with few exceptions they frankly looked down upon white men. Many of them had the outward indices of education, speaking with a chosen-worded formality that suggested a national convention of pedagogues; not a hint of hilarity enlivened their intercourse. Perhaps the most amusing part of all was the overdone company-manner in which they treated their wives, those same wives who no doubt would take up the chief family burdens again, once the night had separated the gathering into its natural component parts.

We found Carl Francis more nearly what it is to be hoped our new wards can all gradually be brought to resemble. A member of the Colonial Council, notorious throughout the colony as the man who dared tell the congressional committee in public session that the chief trouble with the Virgin Islands is the laziness of their inhabitants, he would outrank many a politician of our own land in public spirit, for all his ebony skin. He confirmed the famous statement above mentioned, but added that there were other things which St. John needed for its advancement. It needs a mail service, for instance, such as it had under the Danes, instead of being obliged to go to Charlotte Amalie to post or receive its letters. It needs more schools, so that its children shall not have to walk miles over the mountains morning and evening. It must have something in the nature of an agricultural bank to lend the inhabitants wherewithal to replant the old estates, if St. John is to regain under the American flag something of its eighteenth century prosperity.

* * * * *

If the _Virginia_ was unworthy of her calling, what shall I say of the _Creole_, which carried me from St. Thomas to St. Croix? A battered old sloop of a type so ancient that her massive wooden rail resembled that of a colonial veranda, barely fifty feet long, and nearly as wide, her bottom so covered with barnacles that she did little more than creep in the strongest breeze, she represented the last stage in ocean-going traffic. Not only were there no other whites on board, but not even a mulatto. The passenger-list was made up chiefly of a batch of criminals and insane who were being sent to their respective institutions in St. Croix. Most of them wore handcuffs and leg-irons, and the rattle of chains and the shrieks of their wearers suggested the slave-ships of olden days. One of the mad women screamed for unbroken hours in the lingo of the Dutch West Indies; another conducted single-handed an entire church service, hymns, sermon, prayers, and all.

Yet the crew were at least grown men, and if they were monkey-like in their playful moods, they had real discipline and a sense of responsibility when the time came for it that was a welcome contrast to the surly indifference with which the boys on the _Virginia_ carried out their orders. The captain was a black man of the coast fisherman type, but the most entertaining part of the voyage was the unfailing “sir” with which the mate, a cadaverous old negro who wore a heavy wool skating-cap and a sort of trench-coat fit for the Arctic even at high noon, ended his careful repetition of the skipper’s every command. Moreover,—for we are all apt to judge things from our own petty personal-comfort angle—the captain and most of his men treated a white man as if he were of royal blood. Not only did he find me a canvas steamer-chair, but he refused any of the other passengers admittance to the three-berth cabin, lest they should “disturb de gen’le-man.” If only he had been able to adjourn the church service and the other uproar beyond the bulkhead, I might have had a real night’s sleep.

We left at five in the evening, and by sunrise had covered the forty miles,—though not, unfortunately, in the right direction. Had our destination been Frederiksted at the west end of the island, we should have landed early. But the _Creole’s_ contract calls for a service between St. Thomas and Christiansted, the two capitals of our Virgin group, and all day long we wallowed eastward under the lee of St. Croix’s mountainous northern coast, while “de lepards,” as the sane passengers called their unsound sisters below, shrieked their maudlin complaints and the church service began over and over again with a “Brethren, let us pray for her.”

Christiansted is prettily situated amid cocoanut-palms and sloping cane-fields at the back of a wide bay, but a long reef with an exceedingly narrow entrance gives it a poor harbor. Its white or cream-colored houses, with here and there a red roof, lend it a touch that is lacking in the half-dozen rather grim-faced villages and estates that may be seen scattered to right and left along the rugged coast. The town has wide, rather well-kept streets, many stone houses, an imposing government building, and climbs away up the stony slope behind as if it had once planned to grow, but had changed its mind. Old-fashioned chain pumps supply it with water, from wells rather than from cisterns; a big Catholic church is barely outrivaled in size by the Anglican; on the whole, it seems better swept than more populous Charlotte Amalie. Its people are simple-mannered, rather “gawky,” in fact, with a tendency to stare strangers out of countenance, and have a leisureliness that shows even in the long-drawn “Good ahftehnoon, sar,” with which they greet passers-by.

Christiansted, and all St. Croix, has a special grievance against the Americans. Under the Danes the governor spent half the year in this second capital. Now the ruler of the islands only occasionally runs over from St. Thomas in his private yacht, often returning the same day, and the Croixians feel slighted. When the admiral and his aides land, it is mildly like the arrival of royalty. A band or two and most of the population are drawn up in the sanded space facing the wharf, whence all proceed to a meeting of the Colonial Council in the old government building.

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.

* * * * *

I visited several schools in the Virgin Islands. When an American school director arrived early in 1918 he found no records either of schools, pupils, or parents. By dint of going out and hunting them up, he discovered nineteen educational buildings on the three islands. Ninety per cent. of the population can read and write after a fashion, but the majority usually have their letters written by the public scribe, of whom there is one in each of the three towns, in a set form that gives all epistles a strong family resemblance. The school system was honeycombed with all sorts of petty graft. A man who received three dollars a month for keeping a certain school clean had not seen the building in years. The town clock of Christiansted has not run for five years, yet another favored person received a monthly stipend for keeping it in order. The new director and his two American assistants have still to contend with many difficulties. There are no white teachers; those now employed were trained either in Denmark or in the Moravian schools, and the “English” of most of them almost deserves to be ranked as an independent dialect. The highest teacher’s salary is seventy-five, the average twenty-four dollars a month. Boys of sixteen, drawing the regal income of ten dollars monthly, conduct many of the classes. Those who served a certain number of years under the Danes receive a pension from the famous twenty-five millions. They are small pensions, like those that went to all the small government employees whom the Danes left behind, and those who still hold their places protest against telling their new employer how much they draw from Copenhagen, fancying it may result in a corresponding loss in the increase they fondly hope for under American rule. Lack of funds has forced the director to maintain many of the incompetents in office. One rural school we visited is still taught by the local butcher, whose inefficiency is on a par with his custom of neglecting his educational duties for his more natural calling. But as the island budget does not permit an increase of his monthly thirty-five dollars,—and in every case it is merely Danish, not American, dollars,—no more competent substitute has yet appeared to claim the butcher’s ferule.

The country schools have few desks; the children sit on backless benches, their feet usually high off the floor. The tops of the desks are in many cases painted black and used as blackboards. A rusty tin cup was found doing service for all the thirsty; when the Americans attempted to improve this condition by introducing a long-handled dipper with an edge cut in repeated V shape, the teachers bent the sharp points back and returned to the old dip-your-hand-in method. Lessons are often done on slates or pieces of slate, which the teacher periodically sprinkles with water from a bay-rum bottle, then requires the sums to be erased in rhythmical unison. Formerly the teachers sat in the middle of one large room, surrounded by eight different grades, and the resultant hubbub may be imagined. The Americans put in partitions, and the uproar is now somewhat less incoherent. In some of the larger schools there were half-height partitions, with little sliding-doors, through which the principal could peer without leaving his central “office.” Loud protests have been heard because the Americans nailed these up, forcing upon the sedentary gentlemen in charge the exertion of walking around to the several doors. The teaching methods were, and in many cases still are, of that tropically medieval type in which the instructor asks long questions that require a single-word answer, even that being chiefly suggested by the questioner.

“What is the longest river in America? Now, then, Miss-Mis-sissi—”

The answer “pi!” by some unusually bright pupil, is followed by exclamations of praise from the teacher. Like most negroes, the Virgin Islanders have tolerable memories, but little ability to apply what they learn. Not the least of the difficulties confronting the new director was the reform of the Catholic schools, which had long put great emphasis on matters of religion and treated other subjects with scant attention. The attempt to better matters sent shrieks of protest to Washington, whence the director’s hands were more or less tied by misinformed coreligionists. Bit by bit the Virgin Island schools are being improved, however, a decree permitting superintendents to fine the parents of pupils absent without due cause, simply by sending a policeman to collect the sum assessed, without any troublesome process of law, having given a badly needed weapon against the once wide-spread inattendance. Parents who decline, or are unable to pay the fines, are required to work one day on the roads for every dollar unpaid.

There is no agriculture worth mentioning in St. Thomas and no employing class in St. John, hence labor troubles have been chiefly confined to St. Croix. The present leaders of the movement in the larger island are three negroes, all of them agitators of the more or less violent type, differing only in degree, and all more or less consciously doing their best to stir up those of their own color. The one considered the most radical is the least troublesome, as he can readily be bought off. Another, a man of some education, runs a newspaper advocating civil government,—that is, negro government,—preaching that the white man is the enemy of the black, that St. Croix belongs by right to the latter, and openly accusing the white officials of incompetency and dishonesty. In addition to this, he publishes secretly a scurrilous sheet that is doing much to inflame the primitive minds of the masses. The third announced in a public meeting that “if the governor don’t do what we want, we’ll take him out in the bay and send him back where he come from.”

“Since the Americans came, it is all for the niggers,” said an old English estate-owner. “The niggers even steal our fruit and vegetables, carrying them to town a bit at a time in their clothes, for the policemen are all friendly or related to them. Let those black agitators go on a bit longer, and we whites will have to leave the island.”

There are signs that the whites are in peril of losing the upper hand in the island, particularly with the methods of the present governor, who caters to the negroes with un-American eagerness. As an example, though his private yacht may be on the point of steaming from St. Thomas to St. Croix or vice versa, even American white women are left to the mercies of the filthy _Creole_, lest the local merchants complain that trade is being taken away from them. Yet native negro girls are readily carried back and forth, because they happen to be the daughters, relatives, or dependents of members of the colonial council, or of some other local officials of the islands we are paying taxes to support.

The negro newspaper man sees much “social injustice” in St. Croix, of which certainly a customary amount exists; but he seems incapable of noting the great disinclination to work and the fact that the “paltry dollar a day” buys scarcely one tenth the amount of labor which constitutes a day’s work in the white man’s countries with which he strives to compare his own. In 1916 he went to Denmark and raised funds to establish several labor-union estates on the island, where the negroes might raise cattle, cane, and the like, each to get permanent possession of the piece of land on which he was working as soon as he had paid off the mortgage. But the farms are already, after a bare two years in the hands of the union, largely overgrown with weeds, bush, and miserable shacks, and about the only result of the move has been the loss of more land to world production, and the infliction of the sponsor with an exaggerated self-importance that has made him lose the one virtue of the Virgin-Islander—his courtesy.

On the other hand, the employing class is by no means immune to criticism. The larger sugar companies were paying cane-growers from six to seven cents Danish for sugar at the same time that they were selling it for from twelve to fourteen cents in American money. The diligent Yankee who controls the lighterage, wharfage, and many other monopolies at “West End,” as well as sharing with the newspaper man the political control of the island, cannot be acquitted of the native charge of exorbitance. A Danish company whose profits in 1919 were more than a million sent all its gains to Copenhagen, instead of helping to stabilize the exchange by depositing them in New York.

Among the troubles of St. Croix is the problem of what to do with the “immigration fund.” Sugar production requires much labor; ever since slavery was abolished St. Croix has been constantly faced with the difficulty of getting enough of it. A large percentage of the negroes would rather become public charges than work more than a few days a week. In 1854 the planters voluntarily assessed themselves ten cents an acre to establish an immigration fund, the Government making up the deficit. Laborers were brought from the other West Indian islands, particularly from Barbados. Therein lies another grievance of the planters, who assert that though Barbados implored the Government of St. Croix to relieve the former island of some of its over-population, when the request was granted, the Barbadian authorities emptied the jails and sent out all their riffraff. With the establishment of American rule, it became illegal to bring in contract labor, and though the immigration fund now consists of more than seventy thousand dollars, it is impossible to use it as originally intended. Does the money belong to the planters, to the United States, or to the Danish Government? The Croixians are still heatedly debating the question, and at the same time are complaining of the scarcity and high price of willing labor.

* * * * *

Politically, St. Thomas and St. John, with their numerous neighboring keys and islets, constitute one municipality, and St. Croix another. Under the Danes the executive power was vested in a colonial governor appointed by the crown; the legislative authority being held by a colonial council in each municipality, some of the members likewise crown appointments, some elected. With an American admiral as governor, and naval officers as secretaries and heads of departments, this system has continued, and will continue until our busy Congress finds time to establish another form of government. Though the navy men explain to them that they are virtually under a civil government without the necessity of supporting it themselves, the natives are not satisfied. Among other things the labor leader elected to the colonial council of St. Croix demands the jury trial and “suffrage based on manhood.” The vote is at present extended to males over twenty-five having a personal income of three hundred dollars a year or owning property yielding five dollars a month. Moreover—and this, I believe, is more than we demand even in the United States—the voters must be of “unblemished character.” Thus the Danes sought to insure the ballot only to men of responsibility and there was good reason for the limitation. To the casual observer it seems that the growing tendency to give the natives the universal franchise should be combated, unless the islands are to become Haitian.

Last year one of the agitators went to the United States on the hopeful mission of getting all the offices filled by natives—that is, negroes. Luckily, his demands were not granted. Civil service already applies; there is nothing to prevent a native from holding any but the higher offices if he is fitted for the task; but native ability is not yet high enough, nor insular morals stanch enough, to give any hope that a native government would work efficiently without white supervision.

There is more justice in the plea for a homestead act that will turn the uncultivated land over to the people, though even that should be framed with care. One of the chief troubles with nearly all the West Indies is the ease with which lazy negroes may squat on public land. The islanders have one real kick, however, on the state of their postal service. Under the Danes there were mail-carriers in the towns, there were country post-offices, and a certain amount of rural delivery; all school-teachers sold stamps, and mail was sent by any safe conveyance that appeared. To-day there are only three post-offices and no mail delivery, the country people must carry their own letters to and from one of the three towns, those living on St. John being obliged to bring and fetch theirs from Charlotte Amalie, and though a dozen steamers may make the crossing during the week, the mails must wait for the languid and uncertain _Virginia_ or _Creole_. There are only four postal employees in St. Thomas, in addition to the postmaster, a deserving Democrat from Virginia who, in the local parlance, “does nothing but play tennis and crank a motor-boat.” When one of the mail-schooners comes in, the population crowds into the post-office in quest of its mail, disrupting the service, each hopeful citizen coming back again every half-hour or so until he finds that the expected letter has not come. Yet carriers were paid only thirty-five dollars Danish under the Danes, and three or four of them obviated all this chaotic confusion.

Roughly speaking, the St. Thomas division does not want civil government, feeling it cannot pay for it, and St. Croix does, though her colonial council has asked that no change be made for the present and has implied that it expects the expense of government to be chiefly maintained by congressional appropriation even after the change is made. But this same body demands full jurisdiction over all taxation, the one thing it is least competent to handle properly, for it would result in the powerful and influential and their friends escaping their just share of the burden. There are queer quirks in the taxation system left by the Danes. Buildings, for instance, are taxed by the ell, or two square feet, with the result that old tumble-downs often pay more than smaller modern and useful structures. There is a tax on wheels, so that the largest automobile pays five dollars a year, as does the poor man’s donkey-cart. Moreover, this money does not go to the maintenance of roads, but into the colonial treasury, as does every other cent of revenue. Under the Danes, even with lottery taxes yielding a hundred thousand dollars a year, and a large income from liquor taxes, the islands were never self-supporting. Our income tax in place of these amounts to little, especially as many find ways to get out of paying it. The public revenues of the islands are barely a quarter million a year. We contribute an equal amount directly, and three hundred thousand dollars a year in navy salaries besides, for the governor and his assistants get no other recompense than their regular pay as naval officers. There are a few persons, not Virgin-Islanders of course, who advocate annexing the group to Porto Rico. Theoretically, this plan would greatly simplify matters; in practice there would be certain decided objections to it, though the scheme might be feasible if worked out with care. Two things are indispensable, however, that during the life of the present generation the islands be given no more autonomy than they have at present, and above all that they be taxed by disinterested outsiders.

A new code of laws, based on those of Alaska and reputed to contain all the latest improvements in government, has recently been drawn up for the Virgin Islands. Unfortunately, the colonial council can reject that code if they see fit; that is another weakness in the treaty. Already they have marked for the pruning-knife every clause designed to improve the insular morals. The marriage ceremony, for instance, has never been taken very seriously by the natives. Unions by mutual consent are so numerous that our census-takers were forced to include a fifth class in their returns—the “consentually married.” Illegitimacy runs close to eighty per cent., far out-distancing even Porto Rico. In fact, the mass of the islanders have no morality whatever in that particular matter. Girls of fourteen not only have children, but boast of it. The Danes are largely to blame for this state of affairs, for there were few of them who did not leave “gutter children” behind, though it must be admitted that our own marines and sailors are not setting a much better example. The negro, being imitative, is particularly quick to copy any easy-going ways of his superiors; hence there is almost a complete absence of public sentiment against such unions among the blacks. Formerly a special excuse was found in the high cost of legal and church marriages, the fees for which were virtually prohibitive to the poorer classes. To-day they are only nominal, and many an old couple has been married in the presence of their grandchildren. The Danish laws compel the father to contribute two dollars a month to the support of his illegal children, but though the man seldom denies his possible parentage, the woman has frequently no unquestionable proof of it. The new code would force men to marry the mothers of their children.

“But how can we do that?” cried a member of the colonial council, often referred to as “the best native on the island,” yet who makes no secret of having his progeny scattered far and wide. “Most of us are married already; besides, we would have to legalize polygamy to carry out this proposed law. We are quite willing to continue the two dollars a month to our outside children, but how can we marry their mothers? They are not even of our own class!”

Illegitimacy gives rise to another problem. By the Danish laws still in force every minor must have a guardian, and that guardian cannot be a woman, even though she be the mother. Her older brother, her father, or some more distant relative, slightly interested in his task, commonly becomes the legal sponsor for her fatherless offspring. The duties of a guardian are, succinctly, to “take charge of the minor’s property,” with the resultant abuse to be expected. Policemen are now and then appointed the legal guardians of a dozen or more young rascals, and it goes without saying that they do not lie awake nights worrying about the moral and material advancement of their wards.

Another clause that is not likely to escape the blue pencil of the councils is that giving the authorities the right to search the persons and carts of those carrying produce and to demand proof of its legal possession. Yet without some such law there is slight hope of stamping out the wide-spread larceny of growing crops.

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