The Mentor: The Virgin Islands of the United States of America, Vol. 6, Num. 13, Serial No. 161, August 15, 1918 — A Reader’s Guide

A Landscape of Contrasts

Newman’s descriptive style is most vivid when he turns to the islands’ topography. St. Croix, he writes, “consists of a multitude of little peaks and rounded hills, with ravines and valleys between them.” The color palette is precise: uncultivated mountains are “a bluish green,” while sugar-cane fields glow with “so light and rich a green that it seems as if Spring had just spread her mantle over the land.” The prose becomes almost animated when describing plantations that “sweep their waves of golden-green down to kiss the white sea-waves.” Yet this lyricism is undercut by the author’s readiness to puncture romantic expectation. Upon landing at Frederiksted, the “vision vanished”: arcades were “clumsy and crumbling,” streets unpaved, and cabins “far from picturesque.” The shift from anticipation to disappointment is abrupt, and Newman does not soften it.

Voice and Colonial Framing

The narrator’s tone is consistently that of an outsider reporting on a foreign society. He notes that the Danes “were unable to teach them their language,” referring to the Black inhabitants, and that practically all speak English “with that peculiar drawl that has become familiar to us in Jamaica.” The phrase “us” aligns the reader with the author’s perspective, reinforcing a sense of distance. Newman’s characterization of the local population is reductive: “They are a simple, childlike people, with bodies of men and women but with the intellect of the average child.” Such statements reflect the racial attitudes of the era and are essential to understanding the text’s historical context. The narrative voice does not question these assumptions; it presents them as matter-of-fact, which gives the work a documentary quality tinged with condescension.

Pace Shifts and Anecdotal Interludes

The pacing of the text varies noticeably between descriptive passages and anecdotal asides. A long, measured account of Charlotte Amalie’s commerce—its free port history, the decline after duties were imposed—is followed by a sudden, almost folkloric story about a pirate’s wife who poisoned seven women. This “Island Bluebeard” tale is told with a light, narrative flair: “She did not kill her husband, instead she invited the women to an afternoon tea at her home and poisoned all seven.” The story ends with a rescue and a happily-ever-after, a sharp tonal shift from the preceding economic analysis. Similarly, the description of Louis Monsanto’s “graveyard of ships” on Krum Bay introduces a macabre detail—figureheads with “stories of thrilling escapes and tragic loss of life”—that breaks the rhythm of factual reporting. These interludes suggest that Newman, despite his documentary intent, was drawn to the islands’ lore and used it to vary the tempo of his account.

Newman’s narrative is best approached as a period document that reveals as much about the observer as about the observed. Readers attentive to shifts in register—from lyrical landscape to blunt social comment, from economic summary to anecdote—will find a text that resists easy categorization. The work’s value lies not in its completeness but in its candid, sometimes uncomfortable, reflection of early twentieth-century travel writing and American imperial attitudes.

Flipping through Newman’s 1918 Islands, I felt the same quiet ache of places shifting under observation—how a traveler’s eye both loves and distances. It reminded me, oddly, of a summer walk between old and new Westminsters, where history hums beneath ordinary streets. Something about that steady companionship of land and memory lingers: England and Canada A Summer Tour Between Old and New Westminster, with Historical Notes — Background and Themes. Just a feeling.