We wondered how they were going to know that everyone showed up for the Immigration check, as required, but somehow they managed to do so. At the end, we were sitting on the tender waiting for the last straggler to report. The last straggler -- the one that held us up the longest -- was Norway 042. Then it was on to St. Thomas.
St. Thomas has no agriculture and no industry. The island's entire population of 50,000 is supported solely and exclusively, either directly or indirectly by, tourism. I don't know how -- shopping is expensive there, and the one beach -- Magen's Bay -- is nothing special. While eating lunch at Magen's Bay, a wild iguana climbed a tree and perched over Judi's head. There were also lot's of brazen thief birds -- you had to watch your food every second, or they'd be helping themselves. The bar there serves a very generously sized drink for only $3.75 -- I recommend it.
I did learn something about the history of St. Thomas on this trip, which was interesting. When the Europeans colonized the Carribean, they came looking for two things: Precious ores they could mine, and agriculture (sugar cane, etc.). St. Thomas had nothing to mine, and no source of fresh water, which ruled out agriculture. So it was considered worthless, and passed over by the early occupiers. The Danes came late to colonize the New World, and by the time they got here, all the good islands were taken. So they were left with what no one else wanted: St. Thomas. Thinking about what they could do with this worthless piece of real estate, they realized the island had one thing going for it: A good, defendable harbor. So they created a "free port" -- a port where any ship, from any country, could dock, and trade with any other ship at any time. The endless squabbling between the European powers often meant that ships from one country couldn't trade directly with the colonies of another country. So if they needed the goods, ships from the two countries could trade via the free port of St. Thomas. And these traders needed warehousing and financing, so Danes set themselves up as middlemen and bankers, taking a cut of the profit on the way. This was a fabulously successful idea, and made the Danes rich.
Many of these old warehouses still stand, and are the shops of today. It's fascinating to try to look past the merchandise and the shops to see the buildings underneath.
Slavery has an interesting history on St. Thomas, too. The Danes had made numerous promises to free their slaves, but never carried through on those promises. In the 1740's the slaves got fed up. They went to the island's governor and demanded freedom, or else they'd burn down the city. So the governor emancipated the slaves. When the Danish king heard about it, he was furious, and recalled the governor, who was tried for treason, convicted, and spent the rest of his life disgraced and under house arrest. However, no one ever bothered to reverse the emancipation, so the slaves remained free, and began at an early time to integrate into the culture and business of the island.
Finally, one of our tour guides was talking about the high cost of living on the island. Milk, he explained, could cost $5.00 a gallon (which shocked some of our tourists). But, he explained, rum was very cheap -- a few dollars a liter. So they used rum in place of milk. "It's great over Cheerios," he said!
