Annals of the Big Island: An Unauthorized Portrait of the Island of St. Croix

By Robert Hoffman

Join author Robert Hoffman on a trip around the tropical United States island of St. Croix as he talks about its culture, history, peccadilloes and the pride of "da people dem." This 153-page book is a frank, funny and revealing look into one of the loveliest and most fascinating islands in the Caribbean Sea.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Hoffman
• Release date: Dec 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311526410

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St. Croix, USVI: Annals of the Big Island

An Unauthorized Portrait

Robert Hoffman

Copyright © 2022 by Robert Hoffman

All rights reserved

Published by Southern Cross Publications

2726 Gables Drive

Eustis, FL 32726

Library of Congress Control Number: TXu1-367-381

ISBN: 9780615408408

No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose without the written consent of the author, his heirs or estate.

Contents

Foreword

Part One:

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Part Two:

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part Three:

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part Four:

Chapter 11

Part Five:

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Part Six:

Chapter 14

Part Seven:

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Appendix

Bibliography

Foreword

Annals of the Big Island is a personal essay about St. Croix, not history, not travel, not politics – but dollops of all these and more. I use the word portrait in the subtitle because it is a subjective account, not exactly what it looks like to almost anyone else and not anything like what it looks to still others.

In the editing process, my wife opined that this book might basically appeal to, or be useful to, newcomers to the island, who could use a snapshot of its history and its inhabitants’ idiosyncrasies to feel more comfortable in their new surroundings. True.

But it is also required reading for at least some Crucians as well, several of whom are only dimly aware of the island’s past and even its current state of affairs. (They can skip the chapter on the local dialect. Or maybe not.) A V.I. senator born and raised on St. Croix, after looking at my book on Alexander Hamilton’s boyhood on the island, told me he was unaware that Hamilton grew up on St. Croix. In fact, I would guess he had only a faint idea of who precisely Hamilton was. Most Crucians grew up hearing tales of folk-hero exploits like those of Buddhoe, Queen Mary and D. Hamilton Jackson. But the remarkable Peter von Scholten and the canny governor Ralph Paiewonsky, among others (like Alexander Hamilton), don’t get into the local Valhalla, as a rule.

No blame. Growing up in Boston, I am extended family with Paul Revere, John Hancock, the Kennedy clan, the Minutemen and the town’s most memorable politician, James Michael Curley, who ran his campaign for a U.S. House seat from a jail cell. It wasn’t until far away at college did I learn much more about the place I came from, taught by an American history professor from Greece. I have ever since been more trustful of unlikely sources.

There was no attempt in writing this book to be exhaustive or even comprehensive in the subjects addressed. I’ll leave that to real historians, many of whom delight in the trivial and barely germane. I have tried, with measured success, to keep things to the point.

So, good morning and welcome to St. Croix.

Part One:

Under Seven Flags

1

They are of simple manners and trustworthy

and very liberal….

They show greater love for all others than themselves.

~ Christopher Columbus on the Caribbean Indians, 1492

Most archaeologists will tell you that the various peoples known as Indian – from Columbus’ reference to them as in Dio, Italian for in God, according to some scholars, since Columbus never thought he was anywhere near India – in the Western Hemisphere descended from root stock that walked across a presumed isthmus through the Bering Strait from Asia about 16,000 years ago. This theory makes some people uneasy since it presumes a party of Asians thought it a good idea to head off across hundreds of miles of tundra on the improbable belief they would ultimately get to Miami. Yet, despite plenty of evidence beyond mere common sense to the contrary, the story has little competition, save even more dubious theories of earlier Asian discoverers arriving by sea at San Francisco long before Columbus called, and is the ruling tale.

Some of those trekkers not only made it to what became Florida in, by anthropological standards, no time, a few went another thousand-plus miles south and scattered themselves across the Caribbean archipelago in rude boats via Central and South America.

The two major Indian nations in the Antilles were the Arawak (many of the sub-tribe Taino) and the scary Caribs, the latter according to convincing research displacing the Arawaks not by conquest but consumption. When Columbus, reviled in certain quarters for the advent of European civilization in the West Indies and by extension the entire hemisphere, stopped at St. Croix on his second voyage (of four) in November of 1493, his shore party stumbled into a Carib camp on the north shore of the island at an estuary now called Salt River. At the sight of seventeen Spanish caravels heaving to offshore, the Carib campers had run into the bush, leaving a few captive Tainos behind. These included caponized boys and a few young women, the latter serving as production centers for babies, an especially tender dish if not overcooked. (Barbecue is a Carib word.)

Brushing aside the bizarre sight of tall, white-skinned, round-eyed men wearing drapery on their bodies and carrying sticks, the Tainos ran into the arms of the Spaniards and were happy to clamber into their pulling boats and head out to the anchored fleet. But not before the incident that, by many accounts, marked the beginning of the end of the indigenes of the West Indies. A canoe carrying a half-dozen Carib men and two women suddenly emerged from the mangroves as the shore party was returning to the ships. The Spaniards moved to block the Indian canoe, which the Caribs took exception to and laid down a hail of arrows, killing one Spanish sailor. The Europeans turned their muskets on the canoe, fatally wounding one of the Caribs. The rest were easily captured. One of the Carib women, after some coaxing, was enamored of the ship’s archivist, a Señor de Cuneor, in his stateroom that very afternoon.

Columbus had to be astonished. His intercourse with the inhabitants – he did not call them natives – of the islands he came into contact with during his first voyage had been peaceful and even friendly. The admiral had written to Queen Isabella after the 1492 visit that the indios were harmless and often disarmingly generous in their dealings with the white men. But Columbus had not yet, apparently, run across any Caribs.

The Battle of Salt River has escaped its deserved status as a pivotal moment in the European conquest of the Western Hemisphere. It would have been a dull-witted inhabitant who could not see that the intruders with the big boats and fire sticks were about to do to the Amerindian world what Señor de Cuneor did to the Carib girl. It would just take a little longer.

In the early years of the 17th century, while the British were making camp in Jamestown and then Plymouth, the first white settlers were arriving in the Caribbean as well. These were mostly simple folk, not Sir Walter Raleigh looking for El Dorado or Balboa gaping at the Pacific Ocean from a hilltop in Darien. They were adventurers, dirt and livestock farmers, fishermen, exiled criminals, religious refugees, worn-out sailors and old soldiers. They did not come looking for gold or plunder; there was no gold and nothing to plunder. They certainly didn’t come for a holiday. They were simply a new iteration of the eternal human diaspora, people on the fly to places they know not of.

The religious refugees were usually Puritans or Huguenots or other condemned Protestants. Others were more interested in the picaresque than piety. From their cold, flinty European homelands they fled to the sultry West Indies, there to find sun, sand and eight types of deadly tropical fever to complement the lethal contagions they brought with them. More colonists died from mosquito bites in the West Indies than in the myriad European military battles waged on the Caribbean Sea put together.

As the white devils trickled in, the indios trickled out. The island-dwellers had nothing to counter firearms or smallpox or square-rigged men-of-war, and their retreat was usually ignominious and final. Some of the indigenes were essentially enslaved by the European settlers, although most got away. Today, there is probably not one pure Caribbean Indian alive, although a handful of Carib descendants (now of mixed race) keep the flame burning in Dominica, St. Vincent and Trinidad. Most Caribs, after having fruitlessly if furiously defended their various home islands, were exiled to Central America. The fashionable flapdoodle that the Europeans mercilessly killed Amerindians without reason or drove them into the sea is good conversation over Chardonnay and Brie, but it doesn’t ring the logic bell. The ghastly and bellicose Caribs might have been shown the gate, but most natives were useful as guides, slaves, amorous partners (who gave Europeans the charming souvenir of syphilis) and suppliers of local commodities. But over the years, at least on St. Croix, the indigenes gradually withered in number and died or drifted away, often fleeing to other islands where they could hide, for a while, at a safe distance from the encroaching Europeans. This is not to say the early Spanish invaders were nice, friendly visitors. They enslaved many of the Arawak nation and killed many more. Columbus died believing he had reached Japan or China, and he and his colleagues relentlessly searched for great deposits of gold to enrich the Spanish crown so it could eventually reclaim Jerusalem from Islam. It wasn’t until Amerigo Vespucci made his reputed journeys to the New World between 1497 and 1504 did it become obvious that it was indeed a New World. And it was a Spanish and Portuguese New World. The Indians were soon to become toast.

By 1645, two communities of Europeans had squatted on St. Croix. The Dutch planted themselves near what is today’s Christiansted, and an English town had been created further west. There could not have been many more than a few hundred occupants of either settlement. Both the Dutch and the British – the first two flags that make up the developing legend of St. Croix under seven flags – asserted sovereignty over the entire island, a surefire recipe for conflict. In the event, the governor of the English settlers, while dining at his Dutch counterpart’s home, somehow wound up dead, sparking open warfare, in which the Dutch leader was himself killed. The Dutch then picked a new chief, and the English invited him to present, so to speak, his credentials. When he got to the English side, the Brits hanged him in public. It is unlikely any Dutchman by then was looking to run for governor, and after a few more months of armed exchange, someone decided it would be prudent for the Dutch to set sail, which they did, for Sint Maarten or some other Dutch island.

In 1648 a Spanish fleet dropped anchor in the harbor and sent the British contingent packing (to what are now the British Virgin Islands). This led the Dutch who had fled to suppose the island could be re-colonized, since they concluded that the Spaniards would not have stayed on after cleansing it of Englishmen. This was a serious misstep. A Dutch contingent aboard two