[Music] [Music] [Music] and welcome to another exciting season of Discovery now last season we rediscovered sank Croy I learned about its hidden treasures and untold stories and while I'm sure there's still plenty more to see and ReDiscover we decided to fly north across the waters to our sister islands of Saint Thomas and St John foreign [Music] season of rediscovery on the smaller of the two islands St John now right off the bat the natural beauty of the island jumps out at you and takes your breath away [Music] but St John is much more than just beaches and Scenic sites there's plenty of History culture and Wildlife to learn about so get ready to ReDiscover St John currently about 63 percent of the island is under the stewardship of the National Park Service the park was created here in 1956 to preserve unique cultural and Scenic historical aspects of Saint John [Music] the park contains officially 20 different trails and it turns out to be about 20 miles total so some are shorter than others the shortest trail that we have is about two tenths of a mile but the longest trail that we have is about two and a half and these are one-way mileages today we will explore one of these trails and learn about the history of the area known as cinnamon Bay [Music] cinnamon Bay is one of the largest beaches on the North Shore it's a site of the campground for the park it had historically been a sugar Plantation back in the early 1700s when they had started on St John but the campground's been there since the 1960s the park itself on St John gets roughly a million people a year it goes up and down a little bit over the years we've had as many as 1.2 we've had you know in recent years 800 000 or so and many of those visitors come to Cinnamon Bay where they meet interpretive Ranger Don near today Ranger Nair will be our tour guide taking me and a few others around this Historic Site hi hello I'm Janisha I'm done great pleased to meet you what are we doing today we're doing a little walk of uh this area right here at cinnamon Bay talking about the various people that have lived here over thousands of years and their cultures in history and we'll discuss some of the plant life as well and anything else that people would like to know about this part of St John right well let's get going all right [Music] welcome to the cinnamon bay walk my name is Don near and today we're going to look at some of the history of this site over many thousands of years we'll talk about the plants and the Animals as well as we walk around for the next 45 minutes but first of all as we sit here looking out over the waves crashing on Cinnamon Bay Beach we can imagine that we can see the ships of Christopher Columbus sailing by in 1493 on his second voyage as we think that he did go right down through this channel later named after English Explorer Sir Francis Drake Columbus however did not stop anywhere on Saint John nor at this beach but if he had he might have noticed that there were the remnants of huts here on this beach looking fairly similar to this round huts with conical roofs made out of the Native palm trees so this was a thriving Village of people known as tainos and they were here perhaps for a couple hundred years as part of a later group of people that lived on St John for thousands of years beginning as early as 700 BC so had Columbus landed here he would not have met these people because in fact we now know from archaeological evidence that they had left just prior to his Sailing by in 1493 probably chased off by a more hostile group in the region called The kareebs Who Lived further down the island chain in what is today Dominica Saint Vincent Guadalupe in those areas they would have come around the point there the peaceful farming fishing Taino people saw the war canoes different than their own they dropped everything more than likely and hightailed it over to Puerto Rico or Hispaniola the stronghold of their culture at that time this was a ceremonial Court for the chief that lived in this Village and all of the villages had achieved so this was a very prominent Village and once a year at least they had all the subjects from this Village bring before the chief who sat at one end of this rectangular Courtyard objects of sacrifice or perhaps a better word is just offerings to the many gods there might have been bowls of food statues called zenies or different objects which laid upon the ground were then smashed by the chief unfortunately for those that would follow the archaeologists and those of us that would like to see things intact but uh as an offering to all their various gods then the layer of offerings were covered up with dirt and over 500 years this was repeated here over and over and over and remarkably when they went into investigate this they found over 500 layers of perfectly preserved ceremonial offerings now that's in that's the thing armed with an overview of the Bay's history we follow our engineer to this section of the beach where we find this object I know you're probably thinking it's just a rock but actually it's much more hey that's what I get for wearing sneakers at the beach so you remember in the movie The Planet of the Apes when Charlton Heston is going down the beach and there's the the top of the Statue of Liberty this is what this kind of reminds me of this is actually as we can see a big trough laying on its side with steps going down and then it's sloped on the other side so what would be the purpose of a trough laying on its side on the beach well it used to be a cattle dip as we can see from the picture of what this used to be like when it was actually part of the beach the erosion has gone quite far back now but this was actually on solid land at one point and what they would do with the cows that grazed all around these hillsides back in the 1920s 30s 40s would be to lead or pull the cattle through various chemicals inside that trough to get rid of their ticks and fleas before they would hoist them out by a rope to a waiting sailboat and then in much the same way in which they took them off the boat in Saint Thomas they would hoist them up put them on the boat and take them to St Thomas or Puerto Rico where they were turned into steak or hamburger so this was part of that cattle ranching history here at cinnamon Bay and it's really hard to believe that virtually all the trees that we can see here now were gone during much of the 1900s and they've grown back very quickly [Music] what we have here is a plant that's quite common throughout the Virgin Islands it's the morinda citrifolia more commonly known as Noni the noni fruit it produces is used in traditional medicines by many different cultures however during the time of the tainos the fruit may have been a last resort meal growing commonly and Sandy open Sunny areas on beaches or wherever you have lots of sunlight and good drainage our trees known as starvation fruit the fruit which starts out growing on the tree looking like a blanched potato gets even wider and more soft over time and if you were to pick it up and smell it very carefully you would see why they call it starvation fruit smells like rotten cheese or smells terrible vomit or something and when they're squashed and laying around the birds will eat at the donkeys will eat it you could eat it but it wouldn't be very nutritious and it wouldn't be very enjoyable so you'd only eat it if you were starving actually the the fruit is supposedly quite good for you it's known as noni or Nani I don't know how you pronounce it n-o-n-i if you watch late night infomercials or go to health food stores you'll see it bottled up in its juice form they take the ripe smelly starvation fruit or Noni fruits and make a nice juice out of it and you drink it and it cures everything from hangnails to cancer supposedly it's a very medicinal herbal supplemental thing that is the number one crop in French Polynesia it's also a big crop now in Hawaii in different places and not so much here on St John although the leaf as we can see which is nice and Broad and and green is uh used as a local painkiller so if you were to fall down on the trip today and bruise your ankle or scrape your arm or something you'd take one of those leaves wilted over a candle or some other heat Source wrap it around that portion of you that hurts and supposedly it takes the pain away an old long-standing Bush remedy here on the island hence the name starvation fruit when you're hungry and you're starving do you ever eat that no no it's one of those horrible smells that you just stay away from [Music] here's another common species with a unique talent speaking of medicinal um practices here in the Virgin Islands you know they're they didn't have drugstores back in the 17 or 1800s and and even if they would have they wouldn't have had much in the way of what we considered to be modern medicines but there is a variety of illnesses or ailments that are somewhat uh alleviated and some of them do work by the leaves and bushes and and even animals that you would find in the park one of the more common ones animals that is is a non-slimy hard-bodied millipede locally called the gangalo and it came from Africa either as a stowaway or possibly on purpose because it does have a few medicinal properties now if you jostle it starts to smell doesn't it well oh you see no that's a poop that's okay it's one yeah scared I barely touching these at night when you're walking around your house or in the daytime with a little gentle jostling and coercion a fluid see I'm not really hurting this I'm just getting it to respond a fluid comes out of the body that looks and smells like Maybe no wait oh okay well oh really well like a rub like um like iodine actually that's the key word we're looking for and it's going to stay in my palm in much the same way now I'm careful not to get that on my arm or someplace because it is quite caustic this uh fluid you know in our homes here which are sometimes quite open and we have birds flying through and lizards crawling around on your lampshades and legs and everything we have gondolos crawling around at night uh they can get into your bed uh you're sleeping you don't know it you wake up with a dead Gondola in your in your sheets as you rolled over on one in the middle of the night and now you have a nice big brown stain scar kind of like on the side of your skin which if it's been there all night long will leave a long lasting scar so you have to be careful of the fluid and not get it on the more tender parts of your it burns a little doesn't it a little bit on the more you know uh tender areas now this is going to leave a nice brown stain on my palm and let's like wash it off but in three or four days it'll be gone the same fluid however put on a toothache or a gum ache takes the pain away that's the old remedy so in lieu of modern day things you can buy in the drugstore this is what you used and I guess you probably really have to have a pretty bad toothache to try that but that's what they used it for and the other thing is local lore at least says that by looking at the gongolo I've noticed I'm closing my eyes eyeball the eyeball there's a fluid that is squirted from its eyes into yours I don't know if it's the same fluid or a different fluid as what's on my hand but when it goes into your eyes it temporarily makes you go blind just for three or four days but it could put a damper on your vacation or your your life so be careful of the gondola but other than that it's quite nice so remember don't look at the millipede directly in its eye oh yeah if you have a toothache go to the dentist another aspect of the both the colonial era when they had large beasts of burden to do all the work on the Hills here it's a trough not a dipping trough but a watering trough from the well which is now kept the water coming from these coastal areas is usually a mixture of salt water and fresh water so not a good idea to use it for drinking for humans probably it never was there are Springs though across the road where they would have gotten their supply of fresh water or as most of us do today they collected it off the roofs into cisterns either above ground or underground storage units to collect the water foreign so much in a short amount of time in fact we've only walked a few meters around the cinnamon Bay campsite we are now heading outside the campgrounds to learn about the ruins of what was once a Sugar Factory and great house but first a quick stop on the way to learn about this tree which was once very important this is a native tree that is quite uh noteworthy in that it is one of the hardest Woods known to man it is called the lignumvity meaning the tree of life because it has lots of medicinal properties but it has an extremely hard dense self-polishing wood if you were to cut this which would be very hard to do any exposed wood you could rub and it would bring out the natural oils from within the plant and so for that reason and because it's very very hard sinks in water years ago they used to use it for ball bearings in ships steam ships and not too long ago I mean back you know 100 years ago they were still using lignumvity if you go to Federal Court supposedly the judge will bang with the and both of those pieces are made out of lignum biting so it's a beautiful wood if you go to some of the ruins here old houses or factory sites all over these islands and you'll look and see the walls are crumbling but in the windows where the window jams and the door jambs were quite often they're still very good quality lignum body you know it's a little bit rotten by now 300 years later but still for all termites have virtually left it alone so you know the termites don't eat it the bugs don't eat it it doesn't rot it's a very good wood and you wouldn't really build too much out of it because nowadays you can't find too much of it it's one thing that the Spanish did come back to the Virgin Islands for when they were living in Puerto Rico and other bigger islands they never had anybody live here and eventually it paved the way for the Danes or the English to come in and take over but they did come back for things that were very valuable including lignum body which usually grows in a very fairly dry area on Saint John such as the Rams Head Peninsula out on the southern tip of Saint John where there's Cactus growing this is where lignan body likes to grow as well how large um they can get pretty big the biggest one I can think of on St John is right next to the post office in Cruise Bay they're quite typically multi-trunked you know there's never just one straight trunk that comes up and the one in Cruise Bay is no exception there's quite a few in Cruise Bay actually they have these three or four or five trunks all coming out and that one uh is quite large and here it is several hundred years old it's a quick fact lignum vidi are slow growing trees growing only a few feet each year we've now left the campgrounds and we're walking to the ruins of the Sugar Factory this Factory produced sugar up until the late 1800s [Music] now we're standing at the entrance of or the the beginning of the sugar manufacturing Factory here at uh cinnamon Bay and this was one of the first ones started again you know when they they got the land in 1717 it took about maybe eight nine years before they got all the buildings in place the trees cut down imagine cutting down trees that were as big as those rain trees with a hand saw and getting rid of the roots and then for sugar growing there was one more big important step and that was to create level land on these hillsides and you do that by terracing so you had to make stone walls every 10 or 12 feet backfill against that and go up the sides of these mountains in huge concentric circles picture Saint John with virtually no trees but with giant stone walls everywhere with 10 12-foot sugar cane growing on those level areas a totally different site as what we would see today but the walls themselves were another huge undertaking that took a long time to to make Again by the enslaved Africans now this area where you see these free standing columns is where Factory workers dried the sugar cane stock all of the Sugar factories had one of these uh roofed columned structures used for drying of sugar cane stalks once they were crushed you know the sugar cane is fairly a hard material once they ground it up in the top of the horse well there's a structure you can see right there around big huge round flat area where the the rollers that were about uh three feet in diameter and maybe four feet long were spinning close together kind of like an old ringer washer you then feed the sugar cane stalks through these revolving rollers that gets caught in there gets crushed the juice runs by gravity as we'll see in a moment in the factory and then the dried sugar cane stalks dried here were used for the fires underneath the pots that the juice was then ladled into in the reduction process of turning that Sugar juice into a thick brown sugar called muscovado so you take sugar juice you reduce it you get sugar and this was a very efficient way in which to fuel the furnaces that we'll see as we walk through the Sugar Factory I noticed that it looks like it's a lot of coffee yes uh Native Stone from all over the island you know there's Rock everywhere also not so much in these columns but as we'll see in the building there's both the red and yellow brick brought over as ballast in the boats from Denmark and then Coral that was taken live right out of the ocean big huge giant maybe hundreds of years old Coral heads were extracted and then shaped into nice flat surfaces an excellent Building Material that's hard as concrete you can see a lot of it and you can imagine that if you counted every piece of coral that we found in this building here and the various other walls and then multiply that times roughly oh say about 60 which is the number of known sites that we know about on St John that were used for sugar cane and where these Coral blocks would have been used that's an awful lot of coral that was extracted from the living Coral Roots back in the 17 and 1800s if not for its use as a building material in all of these buildings in the 17 and 1800s we probably would have a lot more Coral all around St John today and throughout the Caribbean [Music] we're in the boiling room of the Sugar Factory here at cinnamon Bay there is a the missing bench as they called it on this side of the room where the cauldrons were embedded where the sugar juice was ladled one to the other and getting thicker to a desired consistency at the very end of the line where upon it would be taken off the heat and uh put on shallow trays over in this part of the room where it would crystallize and later on it was dripped barrels full of brown sugar that still had a fair amount of molasses in it would be put on top of a wooden grate above what we can see is a depression point in the bottom of or underneath a floor where as a hole was poked in the bottom of the barrels the excess juice would drip down and be collected for later use as rum or other products uh there's there's various storage buildings basically uh elsewhere here but there is a rum still and a cistern that you can see if you look that way with the chimney that's behind the palm tree and that was utilized for the making of rum and also Bay Rum from the bay room trees if if you're wondering what's the difference between the two here's a quick explanation the barium tree is a native tree that grows in the wild here in wetter spots like cinnamon Bay are up in higher elevations and the leaves were picked in the late 1800s up until about 1940 here on St John the oil was distilled out of the leaves it's a very fragrant oil that when mixed with rum or other alcoholic products formed Bay Rum not what you drink but what you apply to your skin as a cologne or toilet water or other uses and behind the factories are the ruins of an estate house there were few great houses on St John because incomes at that time were marginal at best many Estates employed overseers who lived in modest structures like this one believe it or not this house was last occupied in 1968. foreign [Music] the cinnamon Bay trim may have been short but the experience is one that will last a lifetime thanks to Don near and the National Park Service for their time and for making this experience a memorable one and thank you for watching so until next time make sure to cherish your home this beautiful island but most of all cherish each other [Music] foreign Bay a Rosewood Resort foreign