The Saba Islander

SURVIVAL OF A PEOPLE

Survival of a people

St. Barth’s

By Will Johnson

 

 

 

I have written about the island of St. Barth’s in a different context some years ago. This was about personal experiences going there as a boy and witnessing the hardship and the struggle for survival on this now prosperous island.

I have been busy reading two interesting histories of St. Barth’s and the struggle for survival of its people. One book by Julianne Maher is: “The survival of People and languages. “Schooners, Goats and Cassava in St. Barthelemy, French West Indies.

In the preface is mentioned: “This is a human story, a story of people and languages and their unlikely survival. In 1648 on St. Barthelemy a small French contingent settled on arid, rocky terrain at the behest of the Governor of French St. Christopher (now St. Kitts). Six years later they were slaughtered by a group of passing Carib (Kalinago) .

In 1659, a new collection of French settlers, also from St. Kitts, had the courage to return to St. Barth’s and they stayed. These were the people who cleared the land, dug the wells, and farmed the resistant soil.

 

They withstood pirates and attacks by the English, recovered from devasting hurricanes and yellow fever, were sold to Sweden, and later redeemed. Virtually abandoned by the mother country, they were forced several times to leave the island, but they kept coming back. They were surrounded by tropical island paradises of sugar, coffee, bananas and rum; they lived on goats, yams and fish. As poor whites, they were looked down upon by blacks and wealthy whites alike. The economic situation of the island became so bleak that the majority of men sought work on other islands for months at a time. Periods of starvation haunted the population. But they survived. And now their home is a is a celebrity sanctuary, the most glamorous and luxurious vacation spot in the Caribbean. Each year, the island attracts thousands of tourists to its French ambiance, international glamour and spectacular beaches, but few tourists are aware of its complex linguistic environment and conflicted history. The residing mystery lies in the multiplicity of languages spoken there. Why would these survivors maintain their linguistic boundaries for 250 years?

The book also has some very interesting interviews with the old timers and we will quote from one in the introduction of the book. “A dry little tropical island of ten square miles with rocky and dramatic contours that jolt all your senses. Since the peaks are never more than 1000 feet and the rainfall intermittent (20-40) inches annually), there are neither springs nor rivers. Every house has its cistern. A vast shallow continental shelf surrounds St. Barth’s and the neighboring islands; the fish are abundant (Vernoux et al. 1988).

“We got bait in the roadstead at Gustavia, herring or sardines, or at certain beaches, Anse Colombier for example, sometimes you had to go as far as Fourchu to get bait. We didn’t use motors, we had sails. Once we got bait, we split up – we went off to where we thought the best fishing was. We followed the moon, especially the third day after the full moon, those are the best days. At the new moon, the fish don’t bite. Sometimes we had traps, especially if we had herring. But it’s not every day that the herring come in, sardines either. Sometimes we left the traps for three to five days. Other times we deep-sea fished for grouper. If we had some herring, they’re the best, we would get some snappers. No, we didn’t use a drag line – well we would troll, if you like, after we finished fishing while we were returning to the port. Sometimes we got other fish that way – mackerel, dolphin (dorade), tuna, flying fish. The best month for trolling is in May for dorade. Once, we were me, P. and E., we three; it was night. We took twenty-eight sharks while fishing for snapper, some big ones too. But we had to clean them, gut them, remove the heads, before selling them. It wasn’t often we got sharks. (Male in his 90’s, Colombier, Translated from Patios.)

 

“Another interviewee had the following to tell: ‘When I was young, there was no trade. The only thing was to go sailing or stay here and do-little carpentry jobs. There were no future really here. Most people leave to work. They exported pineapples but they didn’t have enough land to live by that stuff. Bananas need too much water. All had vegetables; we always eat from the ground here. Hats were exported, brooms, floor mats, schooners full. We catch a lot of fish. All night the women and the men would be corning (salting) the fish. In two days, they had it pack up in cases and shipped to Guadeloupe. Everybody had a share even if you didn’t pull (the seine). Sometimes they were embarrassed to have so many fish, they buried it. Oh, the fish we had – so much!”

Everything you read about St. Barth;s from those days was about the poverty.

Here is an article from Harry A. Franck, from 1920.

‘The little Pebble’

 

St. Barthelemy [is]colloquially called ‘St. Bart’s’. The inhabitants are chiefly white, and among them one finds the physiognomy, traditions, and customs of their Norman ancestors. Yet though they speak French, it is only badly, the prevailing language being English, or at least the caricature of that tongue which many decades of isolation have developed…

…. of volcanic formation, the island suffers for the lack of trees and water, being forced to hoard its rainfall in large cisterns….. Gustavia, the capital, was once rich and prosperous, being a depot of French and British corsairs, who carried on trade with the Spanish colonies. There are still immense cellars built to hold the booty and merchandise, and zinc and lead mines that lie unexploited for lack of capital. To-day the inhabitants live for the most part in abject poverty, getting most of their sustenance from the neighboring islands and emigration to Guadeloupe, where they are noted for their excellency as servants, despite their unfamiliarity with the native ‘creole’.

I believe Harry must have only visited Gustavia and the book by Julian Maher gives a correct version of the language of the entire island.

As for the pirates, one of our Saba boys Hiram Beaks who coined the phrase “dead men tell no tales’ is listed in the old harbour records of St. Barth’s in one of the documents I have from Gosta Simmons who did extensive research on the old families which he was related to. Also, Pierre Tingbrand wrote a history of St. Barth’s in 1995, a copy of which I have in my book collection but cannot find it at the moment.

A French reporter Georges Bourdin who lived on St. Barth’s and died in 1977 a year before his book was published in French and English and very convenient to read did a lot of research on the history of the island. Several pages are dedicated to the ceremonies of the handing over of the island by Sweden after more than 75 years of ownership. A blow by blow description of the speeches and the raising of the French flag.

 

Jean Deveau (1972) did extensive research on the origin of the people of the island and concluded that they were from other parts of France and not only from Normandy. Some of the original names like Bernier, Greaux, Aubin are still present and prominent on the island today. For this article I will just give information on Commander Greaux ancestor of many prominent St. Bart’s people among them my friend of more than fifty years the well-known founder of Windward Islands Airways, George Greaux.

“Jacques Greaux appears in St. Christopher’s in 1671 and 1672 with his wife Marguerite Bardin, owning a piece of land 200 feet wide and 500 feet long. It was probably his son Jacques who was part of the contingent of thirty men sent by de Poincy to take possession of St. Barth’s in 1659. Ancestor of all the St. Barth’s Greaux, this Jacques appears on the 1681 Rolle des Habitants with his wife, four sons and a daughter, a cow, a calf but no slaves. With the multiplicity of spellings (Gruau, Gruault, Greau, Rualt, Reau, Gerault etc.) and no further archival references, tracing Jacques’ origins is difficult. However, Deveau finds the name to be rare in Normandy but very frequent still on the coast of the Vendee in western France between La Rochelle and Nantes; therefore, he locates the Greaux origins there. In 1724, Jacques Greaux is listed as the island’s Commander and by 1730 there are four married Greaux sons and four married Greaux daughters with a total of nineteen children. Thus, both the Berniers and the Greaux settled, thrived and became prominent citizens in St. Barth from 1681 onward.”

St. Barth’s also had slaves. Not on any large scale as the land was unsuitable for large plantations. In 1688 there were 348 whites and 68 enslaved Africans. In 1775 there were 419 whites and 335 slaves. The latter group for the most part lived in Gustavia. During the Swedish period many former merchants from St. Eustatius and also from Saba settled in Gustavia. The large trade brought with it the use of more slaves who worked unloading and loading cargo and stocking up warehouses. After slavery was abolished in 1848 by the French St. Barth’s was once again on the poor list.  Many of the enslaved Africans had been sold off to slave dealers from the United States. Also, since the slaves had no land or former big estates where they could settle, they moved on to larger French islands as well as to the United States. By the time I went to St. Barth’s on a sloop in 1960 there were only a handful of the descendants of slaves. Among whom was a Mr. Romney who had been fathered by a great uncle of mine who was a Captain. I never met him and only heard about this story when he had already passed on.

During the first half of the last century Dutch Dominican priests took care of the Roman Catholic community on St. Barth’s.  The most famous of them was Father de Bruyn who had been appointed priest of Gustavia in October 1918. He was 29 years old. He had a solid education, was active and talented, and he had what we would call today “class’. He had good connections which seemed to point to a higher position but he didn’t complain – there were foot soldiers in the church as well as in the army.

Father de Bruyn was born September 12th, 1889 in Nijmegen, into a family that was rather highly placed on the social ladder, by birth. He was ordained on April 14, 1916. Dutch by birth, he adopted St. Barth’s as his second homeland and was very devoted to it.  He built churches, schools and even a hospital and introduced and expanded the hat

weaving industry. He deserves a separate history of his own.

By the nineteen nineties St. Barth’s had acquired such a name for itself with the international jet set including Kings and Queens, that a small cottage in the country will set you back between six and eight million dollars. A friend from the island once told me that it seemed like every billionaire on earth wanted to tell his friends “I have a property on St. Barth’s you know.”

In it all the St. Barth’s people have remained in charge and are still working hard. They have resisted the temptation to allow the billionaire class to erect large buildings or resorts. You can only build as high as a coconut tree.

And now on February 15, 2019 an article was published in de Volkskrant, by a certain Kees Broere who visited the island without knowing or caring how the people there survived. His only conclusions and for sensationalism were that the blacks had been deported to France and practically accused the French of having set up an apartheid system there and referred to St. Barth’s as a white blight in the Caribbean. He ignored the fact that Cuba, Puerto Rico and even Santo Domingo have millions of white people. We too on Saba have had bitter experiences with this sort of ‘journalism’ accusing us of inbreeding, whereas our survival has been by the old Captains and seamen bringing in their wives from Barbados and so on in former times and in recent years from all over the world.  Carry on St. Barth’s and don’t get hot headed by these sorts of people who envy the rest of the world. God bless you.

 

 

 

FROM THE JOURNAL OF M.D.TEENSTRA

FROM THE JOURNAL OF M.D.TEENSTRA

Excursions IN ST. MAARTEN

The Journal by engineer M.D. Teenstra who visited St. Martin, St. Eustatius and Saba in 1829 is much appreciated by those who do research into, and appreciate the rich history of our islands. Teenstra came to survey primarily the salt ponds and do a report on them. Much of the Dutch history of these islands was done by historians living in the 20^th century and some of them left much to be desired. They took over reports without question and speculated on aspects of history on their own. My biggest objection to some of their speculations is that they ignored oral history handed down to us by our ancestors who had lived here for centuries. Being illiterate in most cases they were dependent on the tales from their grandmother’s. Many of these tales I was able to verify in documentation which I found reference to in later years. Some of these like the first settlements on Saba I have been having trouble with as I know and can defend. In the case of Middle Island and Palmetto Point I know that they were settled first and by mostly Irishmen who were allowed by the Spanish Admiral Don Toledo to leave St. Kitts and move on in 1629. One of my ancestors James Horton Sr. Came from St. Eustatius shortly after 1780 and settled in Palmetto Point. When doing research on those two villages I was told by my people that the village was an important village at that time and was an old village.

When M.D. Teenstra visited Saba he met my great- great – grandfather Richard Johnson who was Commander at the time. Teenstra was one of the few historians who actually visited the islands and wrote about what he saw and the people he met. Other historians would pass by Saba especially, because of the then treacherous landings, and would speculate and quote from other’s who had done likewise. And so, I like Teenstra and feel like I am travelling along with him through the islands. He was describing damage done by the great hurricane of 1819. In this article he describes one of his excursions. He returned in 1834 to do more research.

“In order to acquaint the reader more in detail with things worth knowing, as revealed by the island to be described, the following is my brief summary, by way of excerpt from my travel-journal, of some excursions made during 1829.

On Thursday 29^th of January of said year I rode up the western mountain range in the company of Lieutenant Du Cloux, garrison commander, in order to inspect fortress ‘Willem’ and with the simultaneous view of surveying some heights and distances from that point, complying also with the wish of the Commander.

The very fortress is looking singularly decrepit; in between the battery-walls, tumbled down, merely a wooden shack is rising which would replace the blockhouse built in stone, blown down in 1819.

“ The building with an adjacent stone cistern, catching the water from a large paved stretch of the mountain-slope, would serve the purpose of barracks, , messroom for non-commissioned-officers, and arsenal, whilst further to the northern section you could find a gun-powder vault entrenched in the terrain, though a dank one out of the common. The batteries having been ravaged terribly during the 1819 hurricane as well, iron guns corroded heavily, its touch holes one little finger wide, and seven only of the fourteen guns available here have been mounted, since the former guns upon its moldered carriages have collapsed beneath its load. The rest would be adequate, nonetheless, for a crew consisting of 1 sergeant, 1 corporal and 8 soldiers.

“Dilapidated though the fortress may be, it would command a striking fine view of the surrounding mountains and valleys. Eastward you may look into a badly built Philipsburg, and to the left thereof large and small saltpans. To the right Great Bay and its roadstead where some schooners, sloops and boats of neighboring islands would be anchored at the time. Northward you will see the charming location of sugar cane fields and estates of romantic ‘Cul de Sac valley, furthermore the churchyard and some plantations of Little Bay at the foot of the mountain. To the West you would overlook a so-called ‘Flat Point’ , a low point sticking out with a large salt pan, whilst to the south you would detect the aperture of Great Bay battery Fort Amsterdam , Pointe Blanche etc. With an enchanting vista in the distance of the surrounding cliffs and islands.

“We are descending the steep mountain-road again, riding to the battery ‘New Amsterdam’ (Belair which is not in existence anymore) with eight guns, only one of which had been mounted: there are no houses or dwellings, the area is uninhabited. We found a few foundations of barracks and other buildings fallen down, a casemate filled up with debris and dirty water tanks, all of it grown over with bramble bush and cactus spines and thus causing little merriment or interest, when thus we hastened on.”

My six-year-old grandson[Jeremy] when asked where he lived, he said at Belair Fort. A little classmate thought he must have done something wrong to be living in a Fort and asked him why he was living there. Since there is the place where Governor Peter Stuyvesant lost his leg, I am still in the process of doing research on the event and that area of the island and my readers will be hearing from me on that one in a future article. For now, though we are travelling in the footsteps of Teenstra on his visit in 1829.

“I pass discreetly a visit to the kind gentleman Abraham Cannegieter, to the Mary’s Fancy estate in Cul de Sac and the estate “The Retreat” situated higher up, belonging to ex-Governor Mr. W.H. Rink, since such visits would not be of any interest to the reader. (* A pity he did not as I for one would be interested to read about such a visit).

“Still my only comment will be that “The Retreat” combined with “The Farm” estate are the most important plantations of the Dutch part at present, a tract of 333 acres with 152 slaves, to which must be added the cultivation of the opposite estate “The Retty’s” the buildings of which have been devastated during the 1819 hurricane.

In order not to miss anything of importance in St. Maarten I have originated a scheme of the sights I wanted going over. By travelling a considerable part of the world from East to West I decided now to follow the same direction, thus starting with the Eastern part of the island.”

And very interesting trips he made and described in his Journal. But for now, I want to share his take on the “Language, Manners and Customs”.

“In this Dutch colony there are only just four Dutchmen by birth, actually aged persons. The usage is English to such an extent that women, children, let alone domestic servants do not understand neither speak the Dutch language.

Consequently, all Creoles, in St. Eustatius and here, are anti-Dutch and English minded absolutely, following manners and customs of the latter nation.

Life is “English fashion” indeed, the patriotic manners, and customs of the fatherland being in ill repute with St. Maarten’s residents, just like Dutch products (though paying a tribute to butter, cheese and ham). It is not for me to decide whether such a feeling is founded or not though I wish to advance the English practice of sending their very best provisions and dry goods to the colonies. I fancy for good reason this is not always a custom in Holland, since occasionally goods, unsaleable in the fatherland, are considered fit enough for shipping to the colonies.

People used to eat twice a day, breakfast in the morning between 9 and 10 hours, feasting as a rule on shrimps, turtle and fried fish, and lunching between 4 and 5 o’clock when there is no mistaking the food to be served. It is fish, invariably and always, fish cooked, stewed, braised, fried etc., in a word prepared either way though all boiling down to one and the same, namely fish. Fish is the main course of every meal and any change of dish is just a variation of the theme. Toward dinner-time I often used to start humming a tune of my own after a popular Dutch song at the time.

Grogg (rum with water) is a favorite evening drink and the natives often indulge in drinking to excess, when the Creole, getting tipsy, is a dangerous and quarrelsome person.

As for being civilized I had better quote a passage from the report made by Mr. Cantzlaar in 1825, still holding good up till now, and stating: “If I understand the word civilization correctly, as for me an ever growing education, I must find fault with the present generation of St. Maarten conceiving too great a fallacy of themselves for us to try and use means of correction successfully even though it were different.”

“For all his self-conceit and lack of common sense the Creole, though penniless, has been gifted on the whole with a fair amount of self-love. Woe be to the man omitting to write the word ‘Esquire’ after the name on the address of a private letter, he might be blamed for an unforgiveable offense! Still I admit readily that some persons make an exception of the rule, what with being generous and hospitable to accommodate the stranger in the island as comfortable as possible. A sound practice it is to go to rest early and rise early again in the morning.

Manners, like in most colonies elsewhere, are not very commendable indeed though, so much for education, they would not utter an impudent word hurting feelings of the fair sex in their presence. Yet it would be desirable for the men to nurse and even temper if only for the sake of better manners.

Most of the women, like I said, are beauties whilst music and dancing are a passion with them. Not seldom indeed you would meet a slender waist, blue eyes and pretty brown hair, the women have a ready flow of words for all that, however marring their sharp accent at times. Our women are no doubt the prettiest of all our West Indian possessions, of all our colonies so to speak.

Abbot Raynal says that pregnant women would retire to nearby Anguilla to give birth their children in an English territory. Some women born in the island confided to me, however, she would rather marry a poor fisherman, a true Dutchman, than a Prince from England, feeling confident Dutch men would be holding women in far higher esteem than English men.

On his visit to St. Eustatius Teeenstra had this to say: ‘Although St. Eustatius,belongs to The Netherlands, the spirit there is completely ant-Dutch. Very truthfully Mr. C. de Jong tells us* The lifestyle of the inhabitants, in morals, manners, clothing, and household furnishings, is so completely English, that on the Dutch island St. Eustatius, only the flag is absent, to make it completely English.

The old fatherlands morals here are held in contempt. Honesty is a highly exceptional commodity, and even the best among the inhabitants, lose her, by a too far reaching lust for gain. It is so bad that in 1829 no Court Session could be held against public piracy, because the Judges themselves were guilty of taking part in this practice.”

Wel. Well. Not such a nice picture. One must remember that in 1829 the majority of the population were enslaved Africans with no voice in these matters. So, what he writes about are the “big shots “giving their opinion on relations with the so-called fatherland. And so, I will end here with stating that almost two hundred years later one can safely state “the more things change the more they remain the same.”

 

HOW THEY VIEWED US .

BY; WILL JOHNSON

I have had the privilege to have met a number of famous writers of the history of the West Indies. I remember sitting in the lobby of the Pegasus Hotel in 1976 in Kingston, Jamaica with the famous Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James. He was being honoured at the Carifesta event for his work as a writer. I took the opportunity to ask him a word of advice on a book I was planning to write. He was delighted to do so. I was honoured to be in his company and followed through on his advice.

Years later I was sitting in my living room doing some writing and I heard someone at the back door asking:” Is this the home of Will Johnson?” It turned out to be the historian Dr. Lennox Honeychurch of Dominica. He was on a cruise ship lecturing on the history of the West Indies. In later years I visited with him on Dominica and we stayed in touch.

Brian Dyde has been at my home a couple of times and we discussed his extensive studies of the history of the Leeward Islands. He has written a number of nice books on this part of the world. Brian Dyde has personal experience of the majority of the islands. He lived in Antigua, his wife’s homeland, from 1979 to 1987 and then in Montserrat until forced to leave because of volcanic activity in 1995. When not visiting the Caribbean, he and his wife took up residence in Wales.

The reason for this article is because of one of his books “Where the Sea had an ending.” The book is an original and very entertaining view of the Caribbean, written by a man who has known and loved the West Indies for nearly fifty years. In it, Brian Dyde draws on the words of numerous previous visitors to the region to prompt and illustrate his own reflections on many aspects of Caribbean life and history. The beguiling nature of the West Indies is seen though his eyes as well as those of dozens of other writers – including travelers, historians, soldiers, explorers and naturalists – who lived or visited here in the past.

Based on this book I thought to write some articles by famous people who had visited these islands in the past and what they thought about us.

“ The Island of St. Martin….was originally settled by Englishmen, and tho’ belonging, at the commencement of the French Revolution, to the French and Dutch jointly the inhabitants were, and still continue to be nearly all English …The Dutch and French are extremely few, and of these that have attained to any consideration, it has been by intermarriage and the facilities of the Revolution.

An Island thus inhabited by Englishmen could never have been expected to escape the horrors of the Revolution and it is scarcely necessary to add that it was almost ruined. The Dutch Government yielding the Island entirely to the Fraternity of French Republicans in 1795, more than one third of the sugar estates were immediately sequestered as belonging to Englishmen, everything British, or that wore the semblance of being such, was in direct contravention of the most sacred engagements swept away at this melancholy period…

A portion of the Report on the Population, Culture, Revenue, etc., of the late French part of the island, 1815.

“What an afternoon it was when we sighted the most northern group of the lovely Caribees! I shall never forget it. Reader, I shall not try (it would be utterly useless, so far beyond the power of words) to describe the glory of it. Even now, long afterward, to think of it awakens memories of sensuous delight; it seems as if, eons ago, I had lived with the lotus-eaters – had visited the land where it is always afternoon.

To the south, in striking contrast to the low, uninteresting, level plain of Anguilla, St. Martin towers above the sea in picturesque grandeur. We passed within five miles of the leeward coast, upon which the sunlight of afternoon shone, glorifying the western shore. The mountains and savannas presented an exquisite landscape of rare colour, flecked by shadows of drifting clouds, the sombre tints of forests and darkened valley all showing like an embroidered pattern of oriental carpeting.

Fertile meadows and plantations spread over the hill-sides between the sea-shore and the dense forests on the mountain-steeps; here and there villages, isolated dwellings, and hamlets of white-walled farm buildings, roofed with red tiles, appeared among groves of palms and fruit-bearing trees. On the sea, between the steamer’s wake and rugged cliffs overhanging a long margin of breakers, the sails of fishing-boats glistened in the sunlight as the steady northeast trade-wind wafted them far out from shore. We were loath to hasten past so lovely a picture, but comforted ourselves with the thought that on our return homeward, we might perhaps feast our eyes with one more view of St. Martin, our first love.”

From the book ‘Down the Islands’ by William Agnew Paton. 1890.

 

The following comments are from Sir Reginald St –Johnston, 1936.Private tutor to the last Emperor of China.

“….. the captain thought the weather so bad that it might be advisable to put into the Dutch island of St. Martin’s for the night….

The Dutch Lieutenant-Governor [Johan Diederick Meiners] very kindly invited us ashore to dine… and we were most hospitably entertained at one of the longest dinners I have ever faced. Course after course came on, and out of politeness I did not like to refuse, but I felt almost too heavy to rise from the table at the end of it.

 

But all the same we spent a very pleasant evening afterwards with his family circle and some other friends whom he had asked in, singing choruses of all the latest English songs. The Dutch in these islands are nearly all old settled families, and from close association and intermarriage with neighboring English islands their customary language has now become English…

I should have mentioned that earlier in the afternoon when we first went ashore the Governor had as a preliminary produced glass of a rather sweet champagne which he insisted on our drinking with him, after which he had taken us around in his car to see the sights of Philippsville [sic], the capital. This did not take long, and then he said: ‘Shall we now call upon the Governor of French St. Martin’s? ‘….

I was delighted at the opportunity, and after he had spoken on the telephone to his fellow potentate, we started across the island for the short run of four or five miles to Marigot, the French capital. About halfway, on a lonely part of the road, was a Dutch sentry, complete with a coloured striped sentry box, and a little further on a French one, similarly housed. It looked rather like a scene in a toy theater, especially as there was a comical looking palm tree between them, with a donkey and a pig, each tethered to a rope, contentedly lying under it. The contrast in the two halves of this small island was at the time very marked, as the Dutch capital and roads were very clean and well kept, whereas the corresponding French part was not; but in fairness I must say that I have heard there had been a vast improvement in French St. Martin’s in the last year or two.

 

Arrived at Marigot we duly paid our call on Msr Fleming, who despite his English name was a Frenchman and [who] produced glasses of a rather sweet champagne! This was somewhat embarrassing, as it was only half an hour since the previous round, but we nobly did our duty.

On being taken round Marigot the impression we gained was of a small sleepy French town, with grass growing among the stone pavements and very few people moving about. In one shady street we saw a whole row of game-cocks, fighting birds, each tied well away from each other by one leg. I was subsequently told that that the inhabitants made their living principally by breeding these for export to the Spanish Islands; and also, by a ‘rake-off” on liquor brought to this duty-free port and then re-exported to an ‘unknown destination.’ At that time prohibition reigned in the USA and also in the American colonies of St. Thomas and Porto Rico. “

…Another visitor had this to say. She had been on St. Martin in 1942 during the war and fell in love with the island. I will only go to her visit which took place around 1975.

“Money, not war, destroyed the old life of the islands. War only fed in the first big dose of money. I am thankful that I knew the sleepy lovely little islands all through the Caribbean before the dollars poured over them. At first the wintering wealthy arrived, then the reduced-rate summer tourists. Now they’re coining money everywhere the year round. It’s a success story; it’s Progress,

St. Martin, which I loved first and most is a thriving blighted area. A great runway on the Dutch side receives jets. Philipsburg and Marigot are boom towns. Handsome houses of foreigners dot the hills. There are grand hotels and crummy motels, casinos and boutiques, supermarkets and launderettes, snack bars and robber restaurants, throngs of visitors and plentiful muck on the beaches. And the island, once a green bouquet of trees, looks bald. Progress uses space and is more valuable than trees.

 

It is ridiculous to repine for a past simplicity and quiet and loveliness when I can live where I choose while the islanders are anchored where they are, and probably mad about Progress. Seeing them, I don’t believe that they profit from its advertised benefits. They used to be short of cash but never hungry, never crowded or hurried. They worked when they had to and not a minute more. Free of nuisance government, they lived in a close community, as content as mortals can possibly be. If they wanted adventure or consumer goods, they went off as sailors or emigrated for dollars but all of them returned to visit or drowse through old age, and knew they could return to what they had left: home didn’t change, home was safe. Now they work for the foreigners on their islands and though they have more money than ever before they feel poor by contrast and they are no longer the sure, idle, chatty, easy people I remember. In another ten years they may be as bitter as the blacks in Harlem.

Between planes, this winter, I hired a glittering Mercedes taxi at Phillipsburg airport because the owner-driver had grey hair and would have known St. Martin before it turned into a gold mine. He had driven visitors from the North so long that he sounded American. ‘Well, Madam, everybody’s got good work and lotsa’ money, see all these new little houses the people built for themselves? Got everything they want inside, fine things. Got money in the bank. Everybody’s doing very well on St. Martin. But the old harmony is gone, it’s gone for good.’

The Caribbean has become a resort and is a world lost. This cuts me deeply in my feelings, as Mr Ma would say, because I loved that world, its looks, its climate, its aimless harmless life, and it was the best anywhere for a solitary swimmer. I don’t like resorts and I can’t afford them.”

From the book “Travels with myself and Another” by Martha Gellhorn. The “Another” was her husband Ernest Hemingway.

The below stanzas are from a poem by a Saba born poetess .

“Ah me! Ah me! That I could go

Where palm fronds clash and trade winds blow,

For these are the things I used to know

So far away and so long ago.

 

The red-roofed house, by the tall palm tree,

In the long ago, was sweet home to me.

I think of it now as a haven of rest

Where I wish I could go as a bird to its nest.

But the years that are flown have made the wish vain,

I could only return to sorrow and pain.

Beatrice Pfaffhauser

 

And will end this with two stanzas from one of the poems by Charles Borromeo Hodge, a proud native son of the soil.

“And while machines your innards grind

I’ll glare with unconcealed disgust,

At those who dared be so unkind

To smite your crown into the dust.

 

“Perhaps we dreamers, all too true,

Are doting fools of sentiment,

But all my joys, however few

Were from your sunny bosom lent.

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