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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