Click image for larger.The plaque says it all. I never thought I'd be saying Thanks to the Daughters of the American Revolution -- as a little schoolkid we used to be marched into DAR Constitution Hall for young people's symphony concerts, and as a not-so-little kid I marched myself into Constitution Hall to see Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention -- but Thanks, Daughters! (Zappa himself was scrupulously drug-free, but a giant cloud of marijuana smoke hovered over that concert.)
Actually, the plaque doesn't say it all. If you want All, read one of Barbara Tuchman's last books, "The First Salute," which has so much more to say about the dreadful, even Biblical consequences of the Governor's decision to salute our infant Navy's warship, which had sailed to Sint Eustatius to buy guns, shot and powder to be used in our infant Rebellion against the forces of His Majesty George III, bent on hanging our Founding Fathers as criminals, terrorists and traitors. (The Brits did indeed catch and hang several signers of the Declaration of Independence, and throughout the war described the rebels as criminals, traitors and terrorists.)
Our hotel on the shore, the Old Gin House, is a quiet, comfortable, dreamy recycled cotton gin from Statia's great days as the world's busiest merchant port -- one site says 3000 ships a year sailing in and out and bringing and buying this and that. It lies at the foot of a steep, high cliff, and from the Old Gin House you can look up and see the flag of the Netherlands Antilles flying above the restored Fort Oranje, from which the First Salute was fired. The cobblestones of the sleepy, lovely, friendly capital of the island, Oranjestad, begin just outside Fort Oranje's gates.
There is a deep, built-in sadness to getting up the cliff and down the cliff, from Oranjestad to the shore where Statia made its fortune. If you don't want to pay the $3 taxi ride up a nearby road, you can walk the Slave Path, the twisting, steep, wide cobblestone path the slaves built and on which African slaves were forced to haul the harbor goods up the cliff to Oranjestad. One of the commodities that made Statia rich was human beings. Slavery ended on Statia six months after Abraham Lincoln ended slavery in the United States.
Today the Slave Path is a physical ordeal and a bit of a treat for tourists, and (according to a young American medical student who was huffing and puffing up and down) the only safe, car-free jogging and exercise path on the island. I am proud to say I can still make it down the path -- by no means an easy or safe gravity-assisted feat -- but perhaps my days of climbing up the Slave Path are behind me; it's the $3 taxi ride for me.
The great commercial harbor and its warehouses are in ruins now, destroyed in 1781 by the gunpowder and cannon of a punitive expedition commanded by British Admiral George Brydges Rodney, 1st Baron Rodney (1719 – 1792). To this day the descendants of Statia's 18th-century residents, slave and free alike, pronounce the name "Rodney" with a grimace and hiss, the way moderns pronounce "Hitler." It was a brutal and cruel attack and occupation that harmed and punished civilian men, women and children dreadfully as it extincted Statia's prosperity. Though the British have ranked Rodney with their great Naval heroes like Nelson, his treatment and exile of Statia's Jews was condemned in a speech in the Commons by Edmund Burke.
Don't weep for modern Statia. Rather, buy yourself a week at the Old Gin House. Deep in the brutal New England winter, we've found ourselves muttering about moving to Statia, if they'll let us bring our cats. The island is spared the invasions of giant cruise liners; one must fly on a 20-seat STOL (Short TakeOff Landing) Twin Otter from the nearby and much larger (and cruise ship plagued) Sint Maarten. There's a thrilling treat to this flight which WinAir thoughtfully throws in for free: a touchdown and takeoff on the world's shortest commercial airstrip, on the nearby island Saba.
Statia's modern prosperity depends on its oil refinery and shipping facility, and though it welcomes us warmly, doesn't seem overmuch to depend on the tourist trade, though it's a world-class SCUBA coral reef diving site.
The main store for buying t-shirts and tourist tchatchke is Oranjestad's general store, Mazinga, more for townies than for tourists. (But they do sell quite lovely t-shirts, and sunscreen, and smokes, postcards, soda and juice, beer and wine, the daily Sint Maarten paper ...) Just down the street from Superburger, across the street from the ATM (which will speak to you in the creole language Papiamentu), and in sight of Synagoglaan, the alleyway that leads to the stately brick ruins of Honen Dalim synagogue -- where worship died forever when Rodney destroyed the harbor and led the island's Jews away in chains. Turn left from Mazinga's to start walking up the hill to the extinct (we all hope) volcano The Quill, now an exquisite rain forest park free of motor vehicles.
The other ATM is at Franklin Delano Roosevelt Airport, your basic airstrip with windsock, where your transaction is observed with mild curiosity by the airport's resident goats, donkeys and chickens. My guess is it got its name from a refueling stopover during FDR's diplomatic trip to Trinidad ...
When Roosevelt came to the Land of the Hummingbird
Shouts of welcome were heard
His visit to the island is meant to be
An epoch in local history
Definitely marking the new era
Keeping Trinidad in America
With Mister Cordell Hull in attendance
They took part in a peace conference
To stop war and atrocity
And make the world safe for Democracy
No wonder everybody was glad
To welcome Roosevelt to Trinidad
Throughout the island morning is announced merrily by roosters, around 05:30. S.W.M.B.O. apparently hit one outside the hotel bathroom window with a bar of soap, and he withdrew his services as our alarm clock.
As a 17th and 18th-century military fort, Fort Oranje was a marvel of military engineering, its cannon overlooking the harbor and defending Oranjestad and the island. But the Dutch were short on ships and soldiers against Rodney's overwhelming expedition, and had to surrender.
It was usually an easy calculation in those days to determine if a siege against fortifications would succeed or fail -- availability of food, access to fresh water, numbers of soldiers, numbers and range of cannon. The most common outcome was a prompt surrender if the situation was computed as hopeless, and rescue and reinforcements were unlikely.
Surrender was a blessing. The epic, long sieges of the Age of Cannon were horrors of warfare, nightmares of thirst and starvation. The Dutch city Leiden withstood a long, terrible siege -- May to October 1574 -- against the Spanish Army trying to crush the Dutch struggle for independence. William the Silent, Prince of Orange, offered Leiden the standard tax-free years as a reward for the misery they chose courageously to endure, but Leiden's city fathers asked instead for a charter to build a university, which was founded in 1575. The University of Leiden became and remains one of the world's greatest centers of science and learning. It's just a short bus ride from Spinoza's cottage in Rijnsburg.
No comments:
Post a Comment