When Christopher Columbus landed on the Virgin Islands during his second voyage to the Americas in 1493, he was not greeted by 20-something, bikinied New England girls handing out free samples of Cruzan Rum. Instead, the islands sent up sheer walls of vegetation, 10 or 15 feet high. In some places they even grew out over the water.
Columbus named them Islas de Santa Ursula y las Once Mil Virgenes—literally, the Islands of Saint Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins—for the hundreds of small cays and islands that dot the sea like barnacles on the bottom of a boat. The name, as hard to get through as the thickets on the coastline, was shortened to the Virgin Islands for the sake of fitting it on a map.
My class stayed for a week at Maho Bay, a bare-bones eco resort on St. John, presumably trying to work off some guilt for living in the largest country to have not yet signed onto the Kyoto Protocol. This is where I met Jonathan and Marie. Both from Palo Alto, CA, Jonathan worked as a psychiatrist and Marie as a nursing professor at Stanford. They were staying in the tent cabin directly across a boardwalk from me, the only tent cabin on the hillside not obscured by the jungle
vines and leaves that hung from the canopy.
The day we arrived at Maho they were sitting outside on their deck. Jonathan sat in a dingy white plastic lawn chair, strumming a dented guitar on his lap. A glass of tea and rum dripped with condensation at his feet. The wooden decking was newly slicked from a two-minute sprinkling of rain. Marie was reading a book beside Jonathan, her left leg over the right, her feet bouncing to the song Jonathan sang:
I’ve got a Marie who’s long and tall.
She sleeps in the cabin with her feet through the wall.
Hot tamales and they’re red hot,
Yes, she’s got ’em for sale.
I knew the song, but only because the Red Hot Chili Peppers covered the original by Robert Johnson.
“Well hello, hello! So you’re the guys who we’ll
be staying next to for the next week. I’m Jonathan,”
he said, pausing in the middle of the song, seeing
us clunk down the boardwalk with luggage in tow.
Jonathan didn’t seem to know what a shirt was. More often than not he’d be sitting on the deck, or down on the beach, or just walking about the camp, bare-chested, his bronze belly out in a full but modest swing. Not that I could blame him. I would have been shirtless too if it weren’t for my skin that sops up ultraviolet radiation and the years of acne scars on my back.
My two classmates and I introduced ourselves before settling into our tent cabin, which had gaps in the floor boards large enough to stick fingers through.
“Watch out for the lizards,” Marie said through the mesh wire screen of their cabin. “They’ll sneak through those cracks and into your bed and try to cozy up. When I found one I just about flipped the bed over.”
“Anything else I should try to watch out for?” I asked. “Venomous snakes?”
“Venomous snakes? Actually, no,” she said. Then she pointed to the dark green canopy above us, where a two-foot-long iguana with a ridge of spines along its back like exposed nails perched on a branch. “But those—those you should watch for. Had one drop onto the boardwalk right in front of me as I was coming back from the restrooms. They’re not supposed
to be mean, but they are real clumsy climbers.”
Jonathan put down his guitar and came out with his rum and tea in hand.
“Yeah, no venomous snakes,” he said. “But there are plenty of other things that won’t hesitate to get you. I mean, I don’t know why people decided to first come here. This place was a hellhole.”
He was right. There are small nuisances on the island, such as a breed of chiggers that will swell up your ankles. The result is scabs and blisters if you give into itching. But that’s far from the worst that the island had to offer to early colonists.
The manchineel, also called the death apple tree, must have taken early European explorers by a painful surprise. One of the most poisonous plants in the world, it produces fruit that looks like a crab apple, but about the size of a walnut. The first sailor who decided he was tired of eating maggot-ridden biscuits after three months at sea would develop blistering within his mouth, esophagus and stomach from eating the fruit. He would die shortly thereafter, either from choking on the blisters or from the swelling of blood within his stomach.
The Caribs already living on the island knew this well before the arrival of Europeans and were reputed to have tied their enemies to the bark of the tree where the toxic sap would leech out, blistering the victim’s back, slowly and excruciatingly killing him. What’s worse is that when it rains, the water mixes with the toxin secreted from the tree and leaves, making it dangerous to even stand under the tree during a storm.
These are the trees that form the walls of vegetation along the coastline, halting anyone who tries to penetrate the caustic thicket.
The incidence of disease on the island would have been enough to make a doctor lose faith in practicing medicine. Many of these scourges came with the Europeans but found ideal conditions on the Virgin Islands. The climate and dense vegetation created an island-sized petri dish. Smallpox, leprosy, yellow fever, typhoid, tuberculosis, malaria, dengue, and “yaws”—the already present local favorite among the Caribs—were the leading causes of death among both native peoples and Europeans arriving in the islands. Some of these diseases still vex many Caribbean nations, the Virgin Islands not excluded, with hepatitis spawning
in most sources of fresh water.
Centuries later, St. John has become reliant upon its tourism industry. Since the establishment of Virgin Islands National Park, the annual number of visitors to the island has increased tenfold to more than a million per year. The accompanying boon to the economy has increased the year-round population of St. John from less than 1,000 to more than 4,000. The tourism industry has allowed the U.S. Virgin Islands to prosper more than the majority of Caribbean nations, with
the per capita income of about $14,000 one of the highest in the Caribbean.
But 80 percent of the working population is employed in the service industry. The homogeny of the workforce is a ship on the verge of capsizing, a condition not without precedent on the island. After the collapse of the sugar industry beginning
in the late 19th century, the population of the island fell to just a few hundred. Residents sought economic refuge elsewhere. A lack of foresight crashed St. John’s economy and threatens it today.
The increase in tourism, including my class and me, justifies the construction of new resorts. But this construction is part of what’s tarnishing the natural beauty of the island and the coral reefs. When the main appeal of the island is its nature, what will there be to bring in tourists when it’s all gone?
The expansion of the tourism industry on St. John and the loss of natural areas has been gradual, the sort of slow-building impending disaster humanity often neglects. What if conservation efforts ramp up only after the walls of vegetation on the beachfronts are replaced by hotel high-rises? If tomorrow all of the trees were replaced by parking lots, if all of the wild-life was replaced by shopping carts, the destruction would be evident. But when a single tree is felled each day over the course of the next century, the effect may not be realized until the island resembles Iwo Jima.
