Coral Bay, St. John, is twice as deep as the hill-bound harbor of St. Thomas, and is large enough to shelter at one time four or five hundred vessels. It is actually a better haven than that of St. Thomas, but the latter is closer to the trade routes. Before the World War it was not unusual for two hundred ships to call in one year at the port of Charlotte Amalie. PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR. VOL. 6. No. 13. SERIAL No. 161 COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION, INC. [Illustration: PHOTOGRAPH BY E. M. NEWMAN STREET IN FREDERIKSTED. ST. CROIX. VIRGIN ISLANDS] _THE VIRGIN ISLANDS_ _St. Croix_ FIVE The island of Santa Cruz or Saint Croix (Holy Cross) was so named by the Spanish and the French who occupied it at different periods until the year 1733. As the Knights of Malta, under grant from Louis XIV, were for a decade in possession of this isolated domain, the name has interesting associations. Not long after St. Croix came under control of Denmark there was born on the island of Nevis, fifty miles away, the boy known to history as Alexander Hamilton, son of a Scotch merchant and a cultured lady of Huguenot descent. At his mother’s death the child was put in the care of relatives who lived on St. Croix. Before he reached his teens he was apprenticed in Frederiksted as a counting-house clerk to the firm of Nicholas Cruger. His youthful letters of business and friendship are distinguished by mature reasoning and elegant phrase. In November, 1769, when twelve years of age, he wrote a boy friend expressing impatience with “the grovelling condition of a clerk,” and avowed: “I would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station.” The date, August 31, 1772, is memorable in St. Croix for a furious hurricane that endured a third of a day and made “the whole frame of nature seem as though unhinged and tottering to its fall.” The young clerk described this disastrous visitation in a letter addressed to his father on September 6th. “It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place,” he wrote. “The roaring of the sea and wind,--fiery meteors flying about in the air,--the prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning,--the crash of falling houses, and the ear-piercing shrieks of the distressed, were sufficient to strike astonishment into angels. Misery in its most hideous shapes spread over the face of the country.” This letter, appearing in a newspaper, aroused such interest in the talents of the writer that a month later it was arranged for him to sail for the American Colonies and there continue his interrupted studies in a grammar-school near New York. Later, the youth entered King’s College, now Columbia University. At seventeen, having already allied himself with the interests of the Americans, he addressed with ardor and inventive argument a great meeting of patriots assembled in