The island of Santa Cruz or Saint Croix (Holy Cross) was so named by
the Spanish and the French who occupied it at different periods until
the year 1733. As the Knights of Malta, under grant from Louis XIV,
were for a decade in possession of this isolated domain, the name
has interesting associations. Not long after St. Croix came under
control of Denmark there was born on the island of Nevis, fifty miles
away, the boy known to history as Alexander Hamilton, son of a Scotch
merchant and a cultured lady of Huguenot descent. At his mother’s death
the child was put in the care of relatives who lived on St. Croix.
Before he reached his teens he was apprenticed in Frederiksted as a
counting-house clerk to the firm of Nicholas Cruger. His youthful
letters of business and friendship are distinguished by mature
reasoning and elegant phrase. In November, 1769, when twelve years of
age, he wrote a boy friend expressing impatience with “the grovelling
condition of a clerk,” and avowed: “I would willingly risk my life,
though not my character, to exalt my station.” The date, August 31,
1772, is memorable in St. Croix for a furious hurricane that endured
a third of a day and made “the whole frame of nature seem as though
unhinged and tottering to its fall.” The young clerk described this
disastrous visitation in a letter addressed to his father on September
6th. “It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking
place,” he wrote. “The roaring of the sea and wind,--fiery meteors
flying about in the air,--the prodigious glare of almost perpetual
lightning,--the crash of falling houses, and the ear-piercing shrieks
of the distressed, were sufficient to strike astonishment into angels.
Misery in its most hideous shapes spread over the face of the country.”
This letter, appearing in a newspaper, aroused such interest in the
talents of the writer that a month later it was arranged for him to
sail for the American Colonies and there continue his interrupted
studies in a grammar-school near New York. Later, the youth entered
King’s College, now Columbia University. At seventeen, having already
allied himself with the interests of the Americans, he addressed with
ardor and inventive argument a great meeting of patriots assembled in
New York to act on the proposal to hold a general congress of colonial
representatives.
In Hamilton’s boyhood, St. Croix, a sugar-producing island, shared the
richest commerce of the West Indies. The first sugar plantations were
laid out about the middle of the eighteenth century; towns named for
Danish kings, Christian and Frederik, were plotted, and good roads
built. The south side of the island is level and well adapted for
agriculture. Here are many estates owned by corporations that operate
sugar factories.
As a resort, St. Croix has much to commend it. The climate is warm and
dry. The daily variation of extremes of temperature the year ’round is
moderate. The winter and early summer months are the most agreeable for
outdoor recreation. August and September are the hottest months, but
prostrations from heat rarely occur. In an average year, the maximum
temperature in summer is 92° F., and the minimum 74° F. The normal
maximum winter temperature (in January) is 83° F., and the minimum 65°
F. There is no malaria in either St. Croix or St. Thomas. The charming
scenery of St. Croix is disclosed by pleasant roads that wind among
the sugar plantations and up to the fields on the slopes, where a
high-grade sea island cotton is successfully grown.
An English physician, long resident in the islands, styles St. Croix,
“The Garden of the West Indies, on account of its superior cultivation,
its beautiful homes and its fertility.” He says, “Its scenery is
extremely varied. To the lovers of dark gloomy hills and large waste
lagoons, the eastern part of the island offers many attractions. A
rich, fruitful valley occupies the central and most southerly portion
of the island. A drive through this, upon the splendid road that runs
from Christiansted to Frederiksted, a distance of fifteen miles, will
amply reward anyone who cares for picturesque scenery. On each side
are cocoanut trees, sometimes varied by the areca palm. Between these
and behind them may be seen sugar-fields, perhaps full of undulating
cane ready for cutting. A manager’s house peeps out from a dark clump
of mango and tamarind trees. Hard by is the negro laborers’ village.
Cultivated to their very tops are many of the hills. A windmill here
and there, and a glimpse now and then of the sea, complete a landscape
not often seen outside of the tropics, and not often seen outside of
St. Croix.”
PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION
ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR. VOL. 6. No. 13. SERIAL No. 161
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION, INC.
[Illustration: PHOTOGRAPH BY E. M. NEWMAN