St.Maarten / St.Martin

One of the very famous stops of Caribbean cruise ship lines is St. Maarten / St. Martin, the smallest island in the world shared by 2 countries, French and Dutch. A Carribean world, with a European flavor. After we spent a day in that beautiful island and had a wonderful day, our cruise continued its journey through blue Caribbean waters. When we left the port, I was still wondering what is the history of this lovely island. I later decided to find out more about the island. This is what I found out:

In a region of the Amazon jungle known as the Orinoco river basin, It was from here that the island's first inhabitants, The Peace loving Arawaks, migrated from, island hopping through the Caribbean, living off the peaceful bounty of the ocean. They originally named the island Sualouiga, or land of salt, after the islands many salt pans.

The Arawaks didn't last long, as another Amazonian group followed them called the Caribs. The cannibalistic Caribs slowly fought the Arawaks off the island, only to fall to the Europeans, when Christopher Columbus sighted the island on November 11, 1493, the holy day of St. Martin of Tours. St. Martin of Tours lived from 330 to 397 and was a bishop, a missionary and father of monasticism in Gaul. From that day forward, the island would be known as St. Martin.

The Spanish, however, who were too obsessed with discovering South and Central America, ignored the Caribbean completely. It was virtually forgotten until the Dutch settlers began extracting salt from its salt ponds and exporting it back to the Netherlands in the 1620s. The Spanish soon realized its commercial possibilities and they fought off the Dutch in 1633 and built a fort to protect the island from invaders. The fort is still their today in a part of the south of the island known as Point Blanche.

In 1644, a Dutch commanded by Peter Stuyvesant attempted unsuccessfully to retake the island. Stuyvesant, who later became governor of New Amsterdam (Now known as New York), lost a leg to a Spanish cannonball during the fighting. Although Stuyvesant was buried in New York, his leg rests in a cemetery in Curaçao.

Events in Europe soon affected the island's future. With the end of the Eighty Years' War between Spain and the Netherlands, the Spanish no longer needed the island in the Caribbean. They left St. Maarten, and the island was soon invaded by both the French (who sailed over from St. Kitts) and the Dutch (from St. Eustatius). After some battles and hostility, the two powers divided the island with the Treaty of Mount Concordia in 1648, with twenty-one square miles for the French and sixteen for the Dutch. Although its historical truth is somewhat unknown, local legend states that a Dutchman and Frenchman stood back to back and walked in opposite directions around the shoreline, drawing the boundary from the spot where they met. As for why the French ended up with more land, the story notes the Dutchman's progress was slowed because he stopped at almost every bar on the way.

The neighbours did not live peacefully at first, and the territory changed hands sixteen times between 1648 and 1816. Nevertheless, the Dutch side of the island soon became an important trading center for salt, cotton, and tobacco. Wealth also arrived with the making of sugar plantations, worked by slave labor. When slavery was abolished in the mid-19th century, the plantations closed down and St. Maarten's prosperity ended.

Everything began to change in 1939, when all import and export taxes were stopped and the island became a free port. Princess Juliana International Airport opened in 1943, and four years later the island's first hotel, the Sea View, welcomed its first guests. In the next few decades, St. Maarten boomed as an international trading and tourism center. Today, Dutch St. Maarten has nearly 3,000 hotel rooms and is visited by hundreds of thousands of people each year. The French side had a much slower development until 1985 when French law gave tax incentives for French citizens and businesses to invest in the islands of the French West Indies, therefore making investment more profitable. The population on the French side increased by 12,000 from 1980 to 2000, making the population 30,000 on the French side in 2000.

About 19 percent of the island's population is native. Tourism has encouraged people who left the island decades ago to return, when others from some 80 different countries have also come. Today, most of the people who now call St. Maarten/St. Martin home speak English, French, Spanish and/or Dutch on the island