Ayay

Ayay is a name associated with Saint Croix in the Virgin Islands, a fertile island south of the main chain. Indigenous communities inhabited its shores and river valleys before European arrival. In 1493 Columbus’s second voyage reached Salt River on the north coast, where an encounter with the islanders turned violent.

In 1733 the Danish West India and Guinea Company purchased Saint Croix from France. Danish rule brought a rapidly expanding plantation economy based on sugar and the forced labor of enslaved Africans brought across the Atlantic ocean. The island’s fields and harbor settlements became part of a commercial network linking the Caribbean to Europe and North America, while the people compelled to work them faced the harsh conditions of plantation slavery.

The later city of Saint Croix lies here.