Historical Geography of St. Croix

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St. Croix lies about sixty-four degrees and forty-five minutes west of Greenwich and seventeen degrees and forty-five minutes north of the equator. The island is no more than twenty-three statute miles long and six miles wide and has an area of a little over eighty square miles. The terrain is rugged, though not extremely so. The highest point on the island, Mount Eagle, is 1,165 feet high. Most of the East End is quite hilly and steep, as is the North Side from Christiansted west. From the North Side hills a fairly even plain slopes down to the south coast: this was the prime sugar land on the island. The trade wind blows more or less along the length of the island, and the hills of the western part of the island receive a good deal more rain than the East End: annual rainfall is on the whole extremely variable, averaging perhaps forty inches a year. Fairly severe and extended drought has always been a problem.

Columbus is generally held to have landed at Salt River in 1493, on his second voyage. Beginning in 1625, English, Dutch, French, and Spanish settlements or forces succeeded one another or coexisted on the island. In 1651, the French established the colony that survived and at times thrived until 1695, when the island was abandoned and the colonists were moved to Saint Domingue. Forty miles north of St. Croix, Denmark had established a colony on St. Thomas in 1672. St. John, the next island down the Lesser Antilles, was occupied in 1718. St. Croix itself was purchased from France in 1733. The islands remained in Danish hands until 1917, when they were sold to the United States for twenty-five million dollars.

(From Daniel Price Hopkins, "The Danish cadastral survey of St. Croix, 1733-1754", unpublished dissertation, Louisiana State University, 1987)