description: Robert Lorin Merwin left his native Connecticut in 1886 at the age of 23 to seek his fortunes as a businessman on the Caribbean island of St. Croix in the then Danish West Indies, present-day U.S. Virgin Islands. He landed a job with one of the most prestigious firms on the island and set about making a name for himself. He married Harriett Armstrong, a young woman from one of the island’s more prominent families and in a short time went into business on his own. The young businessman kept a diary of his experiences and impressions of his first year of island life, recording the sights, sounds, observations and experiences over a period of almost 12 months, starting with the first entry on January 1, 1886. Interwoven among those events in the diary entries is a moving love story. Above all, the narrative provides a fascinating picture of life in a West Indian sugar- and rum-producing island at a time when life was quite different from the St. Croix of today, at the beginning of the 21st Century In addition to providing the reader the reader with a vivid picture of island’s economic and social life at the end of the 19th century, it serves admirably, moreover, as an appropriate foundation stone for the history of one of the island’s foremost families.
language: English
title: Yankee trader: The Diary of Robert Lorin Merwin, St. Croix, Danish West Indies 1886
titlecomplete: Yankee trader: The Diary of Robert Lorin Merwin, St. Croix, Danish West Indies 1886
publisher: Antilles Press