The British Virgins: Yesterday’s Islands

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

The waters sparkle a glistening green. The beaches gleam a brilliant white. The faces shine black. The voices, the accents, are impeccably English. The attitudes are Spanish. "We do not follow a manana style here," an islander said sipping a pina colada as the orange sun dropped down behind Mount Sage National Park. "That word conveys too much of a sense of urgency!" And urgency is an unknown word in these unknown islands. Here is a pace, er, foreign to today’s tourist. The British Virgin Islands are a new world as strange to modern America as it was to Old Spain. Here are the islands that are different. Here are the islands of yesterday.

Residents of Road Town, the capital of the island of Tortola, consider its slow pace a priceless asset. They will not squander its resources -- its lifestyle. Tortola inhabitants view the islands more familiar to American tourists, the U. S. Virgins, as discovered, developed and destroyed -- a kind of Miami Beach East. "St. Thomas has suddenly become a suburb of the United States," says local attorney M. W. Todman. "Indeed, one of our problems is keeping the Americans at bay."

Mmmm. This may be a head-in-the-sand attitude, but there is a pride, of sorts, in these islands, a Caribbean conceit, that says, "We are different." They are different. They're a gentle, modest race whose shyness is sometimes mistaken for lack of interest in the visitor. Once their reserve is overcome, they are revealed as a relaxed, friendly people, still not too interested in the visitor.

But they have no sense of time. A vacation on Tortola is no place for those who are not at peace with themselves or the world. It's not the spot for people who need amusement palaces and neon lights. According to Bob Koeb, a transplanted Californian, "The biggest thing to do on Tortola is nothing, and a car gives you the freedom to do it. Rent a car. You'll never get lost. There's only one road."

But the islands are more a sailor's seventh heaven: They have high terrain so easily seen that navigation consists merely of pointing the bow; anchorages so abundant that almost any point of land heralds a perfect bay beyond; and seas so shallow, ocean currents so gentle and cooling winds so constant that mal de mer is rare, sunburn unusual and danger unknown.

The weather can almost always be depended on. Rain tends to come in squalls that are gone in 15 minutes; destructive storms tend to hit further north: The Virgin Islands have fewer hurricanes than Providence, Rhode Island. There is no fog. There are few bugs because the trade winds blow them offshore. The islands, many of then uninhabited and attainable only by yacht, offer solitude and a simplicity of living unknown to most younger Americans.

"We welcome visitors," says Todman, "but we don't want American residents. We're too small to cope with permanent American communities." We don’t think he would be our favorite native guest if we ever spent a longer time in Tortola. But since the islands have only 11,000 residents, it wouldn't take many cruise ships to alter the ratio of tourist to islander and destroy the ambience.

Fortunately, tourists tend to scatter over the 50 islands, rocks and cays, many with such strange names as Great Dog, Fallen Jerusalem, Pelican Island, Carrot Rock, Green Cay, Little Tobago and Prickly Pear. Tortola, the turtle dove, is the largest island despite its mere 21 square miles. Sir Francis Drake and Dr. John Hawkins established their headquarters here for their raids on Spanish galleons in the 16th century. Traces of island forts still exist.

On the other side of Tortola lies Norman Island. A seafaring uncle described the island so graphically to Robert Louis Stevenson that he was inspired to write his classic tale "Treasure Island" about it. When your boat anchors off Treasure Point, you swim in over the reef amongst pelicans dashing into the water in mad dives for their breakfast and your mind wanders; it seems easy to believe pirates could have been here before you.

Peter Island is adjacent -- its western harbor guarded by a white-roofed house built on a bluff in the 1930s by an Englishman. Guarded is the right word, since the islander would pepper offending boat sails with his .22 caliber rifle if he saw crews throw garbage into the harbor. The eastern harbor, Deadman's Bay, looks out on a small island, Dead Chest, to continue those terrible tales of pirates on the seven seas.

Teach, the pirate also called Blackbeard, evidently marooned some of his men on Dead Chest to teach them discipline or survival. They were given only a single cutlass and a bottle of rum. Legend has it that this is the origin of the song "Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum." Legend also has it that the 15 pirates killed each other.

A greater tragedy occurred farther to the east in 1867 on the rocks of Salt Island, when the Royal mail ship Rhone sank in a storm, taking 125 persons with her. The wreck lies only 30 feet of water and is a favorite diving site for scuba enthusiasts. In former times Salt island supplied salt to the British Navy's Caribbean fleet from its three salt ponds. Even today it pays its annual tithe to the queen -- one sack of salt.

Still farther off to the east rises Virgin Gorda, the fat virgin. Those peculiar titles were first given by Columbus. He named the scattered islands as a group in honor of St. Ursula and her 11,000 virgins who were murdered by the pagan Huns in the 13th century.

The Baths alone are worth a visit - a beach on Virgin Gorda of huge glacier-like boulders and underwater grottos. To the north is another island, Anegada, a low smudge on the horizon. It is the only coral island of the entire chain (the others being volcanic) and on old charts it was called "the drowned island." At its highest point, Anegada is only 28 feet above sea level. The most remote of the islands, Anegada has always been a source of confusion to ships' navigators who, like the old chart makers, were unaware a strong northwest current existed at this spot to bedevil their course. Three hundred ships have been wrecked on this sleepy island. A 1832 visitor once remarked, "The indolence of the inhabitants is only temporarily aroused by the cry, “A vessel on the reef!”

Off to the far west rises another cluster of islands with more folk tales. The smallest, Sandy Cay, is a tiny dream island, a pearl in the ocean with its natural botanical gardens, sweeping panoramic views and sparkling, mile-long, white beach -- usually deserted. Laurence Rockefeller bough Sandy Cay  and gave it to the british government with the condition it be kept in its native statet

Equally unaffected is the next island, -- Jost Van Dyke.

“Jost Van Dyke was named after a notorious Dutch pirate,” says Steve Thomas, a Iocal sea captain. "He terrorized the area, sacked the towns and raped the women.” Thomas strokes his beard beard, coughs apologetically, and continues, "Actually some people believe that Jost Van Dyke was a female pirate. If so, then she sacked the town and raped the men."

It's hard to believe violence of that kind. The mountain rises 1,070 feet above the beach and gives such a mellow vista of yesterday's islands that the only mood is serenity and the only message is welcome.