North America Exterior: St. Thomas

Remember that harsh and cruel winter some of us living in, say, the vast majority of northern and central North America just went through?  Well it seems that your blogger was caught up in the house looking longingly at the outdoor world covered beneath so much snow that he up and ran outside the moment he saw the first signs of warmth rise to shoo away that mean polar persistent air mass.  April came to show us that our continent is brutally extreme when it comes to seasonal temperature shifts, and all of a sudden the southern Great Lakes were blessed with numbers like 70 rather than numbers like -12 which had been recorded only weeks before in mid-March.  I had intended to write a post about our Caribbean south lawn... er... water feature, but instead found myself playing in the dirt and writing for other blogs.  Have no fear, I came back, found that people were still reading this crazy thing, and decided to make a promised visit to a sample island in the Caribbean, namely St. Thomas.

Now yes, you might have noticed that while St. Thomas is indeed an overseas possession of the United States, you probably also noticed that it is far removed from anything resembling the 50 united colonies back on the mainland.  For starters, she does not even sit on the North American plate, but on the neighboring Caribbean plate.  Her culture is distinctly different, her time zone is a very un-continental/maritime Canadian Atlantic time, and she is way, way more tropical than even the toastiest parts of deep Texas and passably more tropical than rainy Southern Florida.  There is a distinct lack of big box stores here, frost and snow are imaginary concepts, and the island was pretty much still the sunniest and warmest part of Denmark (international version) until a 100 years ago; even Puerto Rico can claim closer heritage with the rest of the United States through colonial Spanish roots.  The island is and was hardly a resort masquerading as a country, however, as it became a going concern when the Danish discovered that using African slaves to ship sugar and rum around the world was profitable, a mercantile heritage which later transformed itself into a breeding ground for tourists and the jewelry industry. 

This has a lot to do with the lay of the land.  St. Thomas is a small place, all of maybe 15 miles across at the most, and quite a lot of it is vertical in nature.  She has beaches, but she also has cliffs and steep descents to the shoreline and is surrounded by incredible coral reefs.  Those looking for broad, level expanses of sand covered over by hundreds of Coconut Palms are probably actually imagining the coral islands of Grand Cayman, Cozumel, or the Bahamas.  That is not to say that the place is far from a dream tropical resort paradise, as the climate manages to stay pleasantly in the 80's with plentiful sunshine and sea breezes a majority of the time.  The backdrop of the vertical nature of the place certainly also adds to the postcard image:

That said, it also presents the average farmer with a bit more blessing than the coral islands.  The soil here is just a little bit more amiable to the ways of the plow, and while slaves made life lucrative for Danish plantation owners, the island was certainly under cultivation.  These days, a simple glance at the satellite map can show that the opposite has largely taken hold; much of the undeveloped landscape has returned to some semblance of the monsoonal forests and possibly savannas which covered much of the Virgin Islands.  Simply put, there is not a whole lot of room for the island's residents to keep the economy going on a subsistence basis or through the use and extraction of natural resources.  In contrast, continued links to the United States have allowed the island to look beyond immediate concerns through an expanded economy, much like the islands always have, at least since the triangular trade got the first bonds set in place.  True, the culture and government was Danish, but the economy surely passed a fair amount of trade to the much more proximate Americans.  Here, as on St. Croix, what does survive in the man-made world of previous eras does not look to far off from, say, a narrow street in colonial Philadelphia, Williamsburg, or Charleston.  The overhanging gables might seem a bit more New Denmark than New England, but then again New England is a far cry from the Carolinas. 

Back to natural things, the island is definitely not what one would call a rainforest, and gets about as much rainfall each year as we do here in Great Lakes country.  That said, despite the presence of cacti and the like, she is also hardly a desert, but something more like a wonderful place which is not too hot, not too dry, not too wet.  Much of what has started to re-vegetate consists largely of tropical forests with deciduous (in the dry season) trees:

This probably made the place very attractive, even to those with money primarily the goal of founding a colony.  Especially in Virgin Islands National Park on neighboring St. John, ruins of many Danish plantations can be found among the recovering vegetation.  Much like the colonial policy of taming the wilderness that took place in the Thirteen Colonies, the Danish colonial pattern was one of using as much of the land to full agricultural potential as possible, and so very little pre-settlement landscape remains in plain view.  That said, while the landscape of much of the Caribbean has been very much turned into an anthropomorphized ecosystem, small bits and pieces of the tropical wonderland that the first Spanish adventurers and colonists made their way to over 500 years ago can be found for those who come here not to shop but to find a place far away, yet ever more abundant with familiar mangroves, Coccothrinax palms of relation to those in the Everglades and Keys, yuccas, and Spanish Moss.  Then too one can find reminders of a world very much similar to that of the ante-bellum United States, albeit a bit further south, a world forever changed from when the First Born once lived here, who like the First Born peoples of the South, cannot really say much... like the original landscape they are long since gone. 

Expanding The Horizon

American Voyages is dedicated to the exploration of North America, which I have thus far defined as being anything a part of our continental plate and landmass, as well as attachments such as the parts of California not on our plate.  Under this definition, I also include Cuba and the Bahamas, which have at least enough common features in fauna, flora, and history to be considered North American.  Where do I draw the line elsewhere, however?  Do I exclude Guatemala and Belize simply because they have more in common with the rest of Central America than they do with Mexico?  Do I refuse to talk about any of the Caribbean, especially when it does have a significant link to our continent?  In general, I started up this blog to show people what they have in their backyard (and as a secondary goal, to dispel myths about Mexico), and the thought of getting just a bit more tropical than what Oaxaca or southern Florida has to offer starts to look more like promoting knowledge about what people have in mind for their next vacation.

Ah, but there are people who live and have lived on the many islands beyond the reach of Floridian or Yucatan beaches.  The history of the three major North American nations is very much connected to what was going on in the Caribbean.  Many of the colonials there set up domestic, semi-representative governments just like the colonials in the North American mainland did.  Alexander Hamilton, along with a great many other British colonists living in the "West Indies", either lived in the Thirteen Colonies/United States or had involvement in trade between the various colonies and Britain.  Much of this trade involved the movement of rum, sugar, spices, and the "commodity" needed to make it all possible, slaves.  In this regard some of those distant islands were not too distant in culture and climate from some of the American South.  Barbados, for one, is very keen on reminding people that much of their population was once in the supplicant position in this culture. 

Many American ports would also bear a bit of a visible connection with distant islands.  New Orleans and Charleston have in many ways seemed more connected with the life of the tropical mariner and chic associations with motherlands back in Europe.  Florida, of course, had for the longest time been the meeting place of the Spanish Caribbean with mainland North America, and still largely is, particularly in Miami.  In return, Cuba has always seemed like another world from the rest of the Caribbean, even after American cultural connections were shut down once Castro took power.  From another angle, Cuba and Mexico have often expressed love and affinity with one another, as if sitting at another table focused on one another and no one else in some grand Latin American ballroom.  The Caymans Bahamas, and Turks and Caicos these days find themselves being sent similar love letters from fellow Commonwealth member Canada; the banks and financial concerns on the islands certainly reflect this budding, if unconsummated relationship.  The story gets more fascinating further south.  So why not shake off the last of the winter blues and visit some of those lands across the Straits of Florida?  Our first destination will be St. Thomas of the U.S. Virgin Islands.