TAYLOR, Charles Edwin. An Island of the Sea. Descriptive of the Past and Present of St. Thomas, Danish West Indies. With a few short Stories about Bluebeard's and Blackbeard's Castles. St Thomas: 'Published by the author at Taylor's Bookstore'. 1895.
8vo. Original illustrated cloth with bevelled edges, palm tree and floral motifs gilt to upper board, patterned endpapers; spine ands and corners slightly bumped; pp. 120, [6 (local advertisements)], photographic plates; text a little toned, repaired marginal tear to rear flyleaf, a very good copy.
First edition, printed for the author – an English physician, violinist, dancer, bookseller, and printer – of this history of St Thomas from its Danish settlement in 1672 to the late nineteenth century, including local legends of Blackbeard, printed on St Thomas and distributed at his bookshop.
The island of St Thomas was sold for twenty-five million dollars in gold to the United States during the First World War, after fifty years of preliminary negotiations and draft treatises between the two nations. Charles Edwin Taylor (b. 1843), FRGS and member of the Colonial Council of the Danish Antilles, was unable to attend university in England due to changes in his family’s financial circumstances, and instead worked at a mercantile firm in Canada before travelling the United States, spending two years in Cuba, and finally settling in St Thomas, which then had a total population of approximately 15,000. After marrying a woman from St Croix, he set up as a bookseller and publisher and undertook ‘in connection with the editor of the St Thomae Tidende […] the publication of the St. Thomas Almanac and Commercial Advertiser – the first publication of the kind which had ever appeared in the Danish Antilles’ (Taylor, p. ix), produced his own wood engravings, and authored numerous works on the Danish West Indies. Whilst living on St Thomas, he trained as a physician and was a proponent of homeopathic and preventive medicine, known on the island for ignoring divisions of race and class in his medical practice. His articles on the therapeutics of electricity published in the Medical Tribune of New York. Convicted by the Danish King’s physician for illegally practicing on the island, he was briefly taken into custody before his patients paid his bail, left the island to become practise surgery in Chicago, and later returned.The final three leaves advertise local businesses on St Thomas, including wine and liquor dealers, ship brokers, hotels, soft drinks (from a company which allegedly supplied the warships of ten countries), earthenware, and Taylor’s own bookshop. A second edition of An Island of the Sea was published the following year.
OCLC finds a single copy in the UK, at the British Library.
On Taylor, see The Medical Advocate II (1885), p. 108; Taylor, Leaflets from the Danish West Indies (1888).
SKU: 2121137