American Carib

 

   I am not a beach person. I burn easily and it's hard to read a book on the beach. What I really like is to sit in a comfortable chair and read a book. So it would make no sense for me to fly to a place like the Virgin Islands. But Teresa and I did fly to the Virgin Islands a few years ago to visit our son Ned who was working there on a boat.

    Back in those days, Ned worked summers on a boat that took tourists from Boston to Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod. The boats normally went into storage for the winter, but one winter the owner decided to send the boats to the Virgin Islands to shuttle passengers between the islands.

   The boat owner rented a house and a couple of vehicles for the crew on one of the islands for the season and Teresa and I decided to take a jaunt down there to look around. We flew in to Saint Thomas, one of the three American Virgin Islands, then met up with Ned and rode his boat over to Tortola one of the British Virgin Islands where the crew's house was located.

   I'm glad I went. Now I have a hint of what the Caribbean is about and I don't have to go back. I bring all this up because today is the day in 1900 when Congress announced the U.S. was going to buy the Danish Virgin Islands for seven million dollars. There are many vacation homes on the Virgin Islands nowadays that are worth seven million dollars or more.

   When slavery was abolished on the islands in 1848, the colony become an economic drag on Denmark. The U.S was thinking about building the Panama Canal and the islands would provide a strategic location to protect its interests. There was opposition to the sale among the Danish aristocracy, and the transfer didn't take place until 1917. The price had risen to twenty-five million dollars or about half a billion in today's money.

   Tourism is the main industry in the islands. Not to sound like a glump, but I try avoid places that exist solely for tourists: Las Vegas, Disney World, etc. The Minnesota State Fair is my only exception. I much prefer roaming around Roseau County, when I'm not sitting at home reading a book.

Surfin' the lib