Island Life and Color

We landed at St. Thomas in front of a little square overhung by palm and mango trees and shaded by lofty ferns, and were at once among a strange population. The children were all dressed in black, as nature made them, with eyes that shone like glass beads. Some of the native women were carrying trays of vegetables, fruit, bread, or small wares upon their heads; others were squatting upon their heels, while in front of them were little piles of sweet potatoes, peppers, limes, or a few sticks of sugar-cane; others were hawking strings of shells and shining beans called “Job’s tears.”

If one climbs to the hill above the town of Charlotte Amalie, he obtains a charming picture: high-colored villas form the foreground, the beautiful bay, with its ships and little islands, occupies the middle distance, while beyond, across the blue sea, are the shadowy forms of St. Croix and Porto Rico.

St. Croix is not so abrupt and severe as some of its associates, though it bears abundant evidences of volcanic origin. It consists of a multitude of little peaks and rounded hills, with ravines and valleys between them. The mountains, where uncultivated, are a bluish green, but where the sugar-cane is largely grown, the color of the country-side is so light and rich a green that it seems as if Spring had just spread her mantle over the land. The plantations climb the hills and crown many of them, and skirt precipices, and sweep their waves of golden-green down to kiss the white sea-waves. There are long avenues of cocoa palms, with trunks rising fifty feet like polished marble shafts, and then bursting out into a miracle of waving foliage and nests of green cocoanuts.

Frederiksted and Christiansted are generally called “West End” and “Basse (Low) End.” Our view of Frederiksted from the vessel had prepared us for a beautiful place. It has some buildings with arched fronts and many white and pink and yellow houses, half-hidden among the strange tamarind and palm and mango trees, but when we got ashore the vision vanished. The arcades were clumsy and crumbling, the streets unpaved and irregular, and the cabins where the negroes lived were far from picturesque. They are built of wood and usually consist of one or two rooms, in which a large family is huddled at night. The people spend most of the daytime out of doors, and meals are prepared in the open air. There is no glass in the windows, and wooden shutters serve to keep out the wind and rain.

Drives in the island of St. Croix over superb roads led us into valleys where there were tamarind trees, delicate-leaved as our locust, and giants called flamboyants, leafless but all aflame with scarlet flowers; and the silk cottonwood with enormous misshapen roots and long horizontal branches, on which grew a multitude of parasites and air plants. Here, too, was the curiously formed frangipani, with hooked or claw-like branches, and the banana tree, with clustering fruit and huge and cone-like blossom. Flowers of all colors and shapes, from the fragrant white jasmine to the yellow and red cacti, adorned the roadsides. Black pelicans floated on the sea, or sailed in long and continuous flight through the air; the groves were never without modest music from numbers of elegantly dressed birds, and innumerable brilliant butterflies harmonized in the beauty of their coloring with the superb flowers upon which they fed.

From “Cruising Among the Caribbees,” by Charles Augustus Stoddard.

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AUGUST 15th, 1918. VOLUME 6. NUMBER 13.

Entered as second-class matter, March 10, 1913, at the post office at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879. Copyright, 1918, by The Mentor Association, Inc.