United States Virgin Islands

The islands were home to Taíno and later Kalinago peoples. After brief attempts by several European powers, Denmark colonised them from the 1670s as the Danish West Indies, developing intensive sugar plantations — St Croix became a major producer — worked by enslaved Africans under one of the harshest regimes in the Caribbean. In 1733 enslaved people, many of them Akwamu from West Africa, seized St John and held it for around six months, one of the earliest and longest slave revolts in the Americas.

In 1848, a mass uprising at Frederiksted on St Croix, led by the man remembered as "General Buddhoe", forced the Danish governor to declare emancipation on the spot. Labour conditions afterwards remained oppressive, and the 1878 "Fireburn" revolt on St Croix — led by women remembered as the "Queens" — burned much of Frederiksted and the plantations.

The United States, worried about German U-boats gaining a Caribbean base in the First World War, bought the islands from Denmark in 1917 for 25 million dollars in gold; the handover is still marked as Transfer Day. The US Navy governed until 1931, and a series of Organic Acts brought US citizenship (1927/1932) and, eventually, an elected governor (from 1970) and a non-voting delegate to Congress; residents cannot vote for president. Hurricanes Irma and Maria, two Category 5 storms two weeks apart in September 2017, devastated all three islands, and recovery — of housing, schools, the hospital, and the power grid — has been slow.

Virgin Islands culture is Afro-Caribbean, shaped by the Danish colonial era, US influence, and migration from across the eastern Caribbean, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Quelbe (also called scratch or fungi music), played on homemade instruments, is the traditional string-band sound and the official music of the territory; bamboula drumming and dance carry older African roots.

Carnival is the great cultural event — on St Thomas around April and on St Croix over Christmas and the new year — with calypso competitions, "mocko jumbie" stilt dancers, costumed troupes, and street parades. Danish traces linger in place names, architecture (the yellow warehouses of Christiansted, the "step streets" of Charlotte Amalie), and the habit of driving on the left.

Church, family, the fish market, the "lime" (hanging out), and the annual Carnival build-up organise social life, and there is a strong local pride in Crucian (St Croix) versus "Thomian" identity.

About 87,000 people live in the USVI, the population having declined since 2010 through emigration to the US mainland, worsened by the 2017 hurricanes. St Thomas holds the capital, Charlotte Amalie, and the busiest cruise port; St Croix, the largest and flattest island, has the towns of Christiansted and Frederiksted; and St John, most of which is national park, is the smallest and least developed.

The economy is dominated by tourism — cruise calls, stopover visitors, and yachting — along with rum (Cruzan and a large Captain Morgan distillery on St Croix, the latter underwritten by federal excise rebates), and a big government sector with a serious public-pension shortfall. The huge St Croix oil refinery, once among the world's largest, closed in 2012, badly hurting that island's economy, and has since operated only intermittently as a terminal, with pollution incidents.

Daily life is American in its systems and Caribbean in its rhythm, tied to the cruise and ferry schedules, the beach, and the weather.

Virgin Islands cooking centres on fungi — a stiff cornmeal-and-okra polenta — served with stewed or "boil" fish, or with saltfish and dumb bread. Callaloo (a soupy dish of dasheen leaves), conch in butter sauce or as fritters, goat stew, and "seasoned rice" (rice cooked with pigeon peas and meat) are staples.

Street and market food includes pâté (a fried, filled turnover), johnnycakes (fried dough), and roasted or fried fish at the Frederiksted and Charlotte Amalie markets. Kallaloo and saltfish are the traditional Old Year's Night (New Year's Eve) dish, and maubi — a foamy drink brewed from tree bark, ginger, and sugar — is the local soft drink.

Cruzan rum and other local rums, Carib and Presidente beers, and fresh tropical juices are the usual drinks, along with the ubiquitous rum punch.

St John is largely Virgin Islands National Park, thanks to a 1950s land donation by Laurance Rockefeller: Trunk Bay with its underwater snorkelling trail, Cinnamon and Maho bays, the ruined Annaberg sugar mill, the petroglyphs on the Reef Bay trail, and a network of hiking paths through dry forest.

St Thomas centres on Charlotte Amalie — Fort Christian, the "99 Steps", Blackbeard's Castle, and the sand-floored St Thomas Synagogue, the second-oldest in the Western Hemisphere — with Magens Bay's long beach on the north shore and a gondola up to Paradise Point above the harbour. Water Island, a short ferry ride, is sometimes called the "fourth Virgin Island".

St Croix has the Danish colonial cores of Christiansted (Fort Christiansvaern and the yellow warehouse district, a national historic site) and Frederiksted (Fort Frederik, where emancipation was declared), the offshore Buck Island Reef National Monument with its barrier-reef snorkel trail, the rainforest and the Estate Whim plantation museum in the west, the rum distilleries, and Point Udall, the easternmost point of United States territory.