Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
efforts to restore its former prosperity, trade and commerce have steadily declined. The population today
is not much over a thousand souls. Like the king of Lundy Island, two adventurers in the eighteenth cen-
tury who made their fortunes on the island struck their own coinage, a few examples of which are still in
existence, The coins of the first, Herman Gossling, bear the legend 'God bless St. Eustatius and Guvn'
on one side, and on the other a little goose pecking among the reeds. The coinage of the second, Jenkins,
commemorates his way of life when he first arrived on the island, for on one side is stamped the image
of a man sleeping under a canoe on the beach.
By the time I had finished the topic and turned out the light, a storm had blown up. The wind was
screaming round the walls. Looking down into the darkness of the bay, I could see the sloop's lantern
tossing up and down, and wondered what sort of a time the Flemings and the fifty islanders were having.
Somewhere in the building a shutter creaked and slammed all night.
Costa, the most logical and unsuperstitious of mortals, appeared pale and haggard at the breakfast table,
worn out by haunting. Although he had locked the door after the first disturbance, ghosts had come into
his room and moved about, shifting the furniture, colliding into things, and even striking lights and chat-
tering among themselves, with the result that he had not had a moment's sleep.
It was a dismal day, and the sea was slate-coloured and turbulent. Leaden clouds covered the summit
of the Venusberg, hanging over Oranjestad little higher than a ceiling.
The Governor accompanied us out into the capital, a village of which every other house was a ruin,
except for a few shops, Government House, and the trim little fort with its sundial and cannon, and a
monument to commemorate the passage, in 1666, of Admiral de Ruyter. The hilly island is still as empty
of wheeled vehicles as it was when Columbus discovered it in 1493, and even islanders on foot were very
scarce in the streets. In the graveyard of the Dutch Reformed Church (which has fallen to an empty shell
of masonry) hurricane graves—those mausolea built like cisterns to resist the wildest cyclones: great
cubes of stone from the upper surfaces of which bulges a shallow barrel vault—mark the last resting-
places of forgotten Jonkheers and Mijnheers. At one end of the churchyard lies the tomb of Joseph Blake,
Esquire, born in the County of Galway in 1701. The synagogue of the Portuguese Jews from Brazil,
who once ran the trade of the island, is a wreck of overgrown archways of brick. On a windy hillside
beyond the Anglican cemetery outside the town lies the Sephardic Jewish burial-ground, where a dozen
tombstones cover the graves of Solomons, Levis, Pereiras and da Leons; Caribbean cousins of Spinoza.
They are broken, moss-covered slabs with epitaphs cut in Hebrew and Latin characters, and dates that
are reckoned from the Creation of the World; only, according to these inscriptions, 5,500 years earlier
than the digging of these graves in the eighteenth century. Neither Jews nor Anglicans are to be found
on the island today. The majority of the Statians are Wesleyan Methodists, and there are a few hundred
Catholics whose spiritual needs are supplied by a Dominican friar, of whom we caught a glimpse as he
mounted the cobbled main street. There is also a stubborn little kernel of Seventh Day Adventists, about
fifty strong.
The Governor accompanied us through the last wooden houses of the village. The dinghy, rowed by
Captain Fleming and Uncle Pete, was pulling towards the shore. Before saying goodbye, I asked the
Governor if people were ever bothered by ghosts in the island. 'No,' he said, after a pause, 'have you
seen any?' I said no, and rather cravenly let the subject drop. As we walked downhill, Mr. Voges regret-
ted that we could not stay longer to meet one or two old ladies living in farms near Oranjestad who are
the last representatives of the colonial families of St. Eustatius. But Captain Fleming was shouting that
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