CHAPTER XIII_Roaming Through the West Indies

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.

[Illustration: The new church of Guayama, Porto Rico]

[Illustration: A Porto Rican ex-soldier working as road peon. He gathers

the grass with a wooden hook and cuts it with a small sickle]

[Illustration: Porto Rican tobacco fields]

[Illustration: Charlotte Amalie, capital of our Virgin Islands]

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.

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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?

[Illustration: A corner of Charlotte Amalie]

[Illustration: Picking sea island cotton, the second of St. Croix

products]

[Illustration: A familiar sight in St. Croix, the ruins of an old sugar

mill and the stone tower of its cane grinding windmill]

[Illustration: A cistern in which rain water is stored for drinking

purposes]

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