The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1916-08-04

sunshine of the Caribbean the patent medicines of our New England land scape appear in lazy Spanish or rug ged Danish; on walls of old fortif1ca- tions against which the old Spanish conquistadores in armor or bushy- bearded pirates may have leaned is lifted the hopeful countenance of our benevolent Sunny Jim. Through windows, barred just as they were in the days when splendid viceroys used to come out from Spain, or horrifying buccaneer chieftains from the bosom of the Spanish Main, comes the brassy chorus of the American phonograph. | All in all, Charlotte Amalie is a frivolous little town, with a pretty tiled plaza, and monuments and beau | tiful trees, a town where, over his morning coffee the visitor may read the latest cable dispatches from 'the street, or about the race in the big leagues. In the cool of the evening he can play tennis with engaging young men who talk across the net as casually in Danish or Spanish as in | English, or he can stroll through the crowd in the plaza, with automobiles i twinkling around like firef1ies while the band plays. It seems almost as if the little city had 1t all arranged to make her charm more sure, hidden as she is behind seas and mountains | in, despite Danish ownership, a sort of Spanish coquetry.
 Mir. Blackboard.
 The three islands of St. Croix, St Thomas and St. John were discovered by Columbus in 1493 Since then Spanish, British, French, Dutch and finally, Danish flags have f1oated over some or all of them at various times
 but the most interesting and blood warming chapters of their history are connected with the tall tower that the visitor spies as he sails into the har- bor of Charlotte Amalie, and which is on the middle one of three hills near the town. Tradition tells us that this tower was long a pirates stronghold and that the redoubtable Blackboard | himself, he of the whiskers and sev- l enteen wives, once had a rendezvous there. For the waters surrounding all three of the islands were a favor ite haunt of pirates when those bold gentlemen of the seventeenth century were in their heyday, and even as late as the beginning of'the nineteenth cen
 tury the mariner who sailed along these shores was apt to regret doing so. Coral Bay, on the coast of St.
 John, was a favorite hiding place of the buccaneers, their presence there being proved to-day by the rusty can- non scattered around in the various old and tumble-down Notifications that skirt the beaches.
 Old, Bold, Henry Morgan. i Blackboard was at the height of his famous or infamous, notable or notor- ious, career early in the eighteenth century but fifty odd years before that
 he had had a predecessor who is since almost as renowned as Blackboard himself, for having made the neigh 1 borhood of Uncle Sam's new posses sions a place to be dreaded alike by ships of commerce and of war This was Sir Henry Morgan.
 ''Woe to the realms where he coasted
 for there
 Was shedding of blood and rending When he hoisted his standard black, Before him was battle, behind him was wrack,
 And he burned the churches, that heather Dane,
 To light his band to their barks | again."
 might well have been written of Mor- gan, except for the fact that he was | a Welshman and not a Dane, for in his day the present Danish West In- | dies boasted of churches, maidens and priests alike, scions of the noble hous- l es Of Spain. Morgan was a gentleman
 of title by favor of his gracious majes- lty, Charles II of England, and a kips