Protestant Cay

In 1778 the Danes raised Fort Sophia Frederica on the cay — a battery of four cannon matched with Fort Louise Augusta across the harbor entrance to give Christiansted crossfire protection, completed by the following year and named for a Danish princess. In the nineteenth century, as the pilot's station, it carried the Creole name Loot's Kay — 'pilot's cay' — and the local chief pilot kept his residence there. The federal government reconstructed the residence as an officer's quarters in the 1930s, one of the island's New Deal listings. Somewhere in that sequence the island also held a small prison. Today it is the Hotel on the Cay, with the closest beach to downtown Christiansted, reached by a two-minute ferry that runs every ten minutes from the boardwalk.

The burial story is the island's disputed title deed. Local tradition, repeated by the historical society and by every hotel bartender asked, holds that the French administration (which ran St. Croix from 1650 to 1696) denied non-Catholic burial on the mainland and consigned the Protestant dead to the cay. No surviving grave register settles it; the Danish period, when Protestantism became the islands' principal faith, would have ended the practice in any case. What is certain is that the name stuck, the story stuck harder still, and a small graveyard ground on the island has been pointed out to hotel guests ever since.

The reports are the sort a small island produces: hotel staff and guests file figures near the old cemetery ground, footsteps in corridors, voices and sounds at night in a building that sits alone in a dark harbor. The cay's lore folds its prisoners and pilots into the same file — the island has housed, at various times, fort soldiers, convicts, aviators of the harbor pilot service, and honeymooners, and the reported presences are rarely assigned a name. All of it is anecdotal; none of it needed a larger island to grow on.

Protestant Cay remains the strangest commute in the archive: two minutes by ferry from the boardwalk to an island that is simultaneously a beach bar, a fort's footprint, a pilot's memory, and, the locals insist, a segregated cemetery for the Protestant dead of a Catholic colony. The resort guests swim over the graves, or near them, depending on which historian is asked. The ferry runs every ten minutes. The file keeps both distances.