Pub crawling can be undertaken by the accomplished American drinker. Some seven thousand pubs (public houses) await the intrepid. Many are loaded with history, some with Dickensian characters. Some offer the ploughman’s lunch, usually consisting of bread and butter, moist cheddar cheese, tomato, lettuce, pickled onion or chutney. Some offer cold meat pies. Anglophiles on a budget swear by them. The London residents become affixed and affiliated with a favorite pub and seldom venture abroad. It has been said that if home is the Englishman’s castle, the pub is his Vatican.
The pub often sports an outgoing lady of ample proportions who jollies the customers and keeps them interested for hours on end. These barmaids will have nothing to do with diets and usually are of an age that none of the customers think of them as daughters.
Statia began as a tobacco colony, but, by mid-century, Statians had expanded plantation production to include sugar and then cotton, coffee, ginger, and indigo.
Manchester Subway Map In 1662 there were 1,174 inhabitants (71 percent of whom were slaves), a figure that increased again by half by 1741. As well as shipping its own produce, Statia increasingly traded in the products of neighboring islands, often illegally, and began to refine muscavado sugar from other islands. Bolstered by very low customs duties, and as Statia’s soil fertility declined, multinational commerce by the eighteenth century had surpassed local agriculture in importance.
Sheltered but without a good harbor, Lower Town lacked conventional wharfs, and most goods were offloaded at anchor onto small boats and brought to the beach. This labor occupied the island’s slave majority, who were less necessary for the dwindling plantations. By the 1770s, nearly six hundred warehouses lined the beach, and a remarkable average of 2,700 ships came to the port yearly, peaking at 3,551 ships in 1779. Business was so brisk that goods were piled in the open outside the full storerooms, and Statia was known as the Golden Rock, the busy town being described as a great fair.
