James Franklin Johnson

My name is James Franklin Johnson and I'm a terrestrial park ranger for the Saba Conservation Foundation. I've been here for 30 years working on all the hiking trails on Saba. We have 23 different hiking trails. All historical, been here from the very first people that settled the island. Been there for more than 300 years. They used these trails for agriculture, fishing, hunting.

Most of the trails were closed off for many years, like from 60 years back or more, when the farming started declining. I knew all the trails from when I was a teenager farming with my father, my uncle, my brother. I knew where they were and I started opening up all these trails, and Saba has become a world-class hiking destination. I love the North Coast trail. It has views everywhere you hike across the trail. The Santa Cruz Trail is more tropical than Mount Scenery and other trails, with more flora and fauna. When it comes to flora and fauna, Saba is number-one in the Dutch kingdom and the Dutch Antilles. When I'm doing guided hikes, you still see the old terrace walls right and left, especially if you're going to go to the top of the mountain. You start at Windwardside, and you'll see these old terrace walls have been sitting there for hundreds of years.

I goes back 8 generations on Saba. My family started living on the west side of the island since 1665. And the people who lived there were 10 families, 75 people. They abandoned their village in 1934. Erosion was breaking away close to settlement and the government at that time advised people to move from there. They were descended from pirates from the early 1600s. There was a pirate — apparently one of my ancestors — that did piracy at that time. When you go to Mary's Point there are seven historical displays, and the first one is about all the piracy that was going on around Saba, and especially in that area on the west side of the island. Saba is a great pirate island because it has a great wall around and there's only one spot you can enter. They called that place Palmettos Point when it was a pirate nest there in 1628–’29, something like that. They used to capture schooners and bring them to the Well's Bay, then capture the people, strip the whole schooner, and then rebuild it and sell it again.

At that time, a lot of farming was an everyday routine. At that time, 60–70 years ago, there wasn't much. You had to farm, otherwise you couldn't survive. There was a species of vegetable called tannia — some people call it taro, we call it tannia — plus other vegetables like dasheens, eddas, cassava, yams, sweet potatoes, white potatoes. All of those are root vegetables. At that time, schooners were coming in and bringing the seeds, and they would have everything. There were so many vegetables on the island that Saba sold to other islands. There was always food, fresh vegetables and grains, but now it's the opposite. Everything is coming from abroad. And we, everybody, I think should start farming again. My ancestors told me when they lived down in the village, Mary's Point, on the west side of the island, they used bush medicine for all different kinds of sickness. There were no doctors and nurses in those days. So there is bush medicine in Saba that helps cure many sicknesses. There are still locals on the island who know about it.

When they were building the road, the Dutch engineers came and said it was impossible to get a road across the island to Hell's Gate. I can remember my uncles building a part near Hell's Gate, it was on a cliffside. They had a four-foot iron bar and one would hold it with his arms to hold it steady and the other guy was hitting it with a 20-pound sledgehammer. And every time he hit it, he would turn the bar, and then he had a spoon on a stick which would scoop out the powder. They were getting almost four feet deep. And they’d put dynamite inside there with a cap and a battery, and then they would blow the side of the rock off and clear it. That's how the road got built across to Hell's Gate. Dutch engineers said it was impossible. The Sabans said, "It's going to happen." All of us build strong.

The first plane that landed on Saba was in 1959. I was eight years old and there was a dirt road there at that time leading to the airport. It was quite exciting to see a plane touchdown on Saba. And what I remember good about it, is that the area where they built the airport was a prickly pear cactus field. They used to make a drink or a liquor from it years ago. And apparently the cactus was lying all around the airport and they were dry, and when the plane landed there was cactus coming into people’s faces and I got the cactus on the side of me face there. So yeah, I remember that good.

I've been flying on airlines and I open up the map, and Saba is not there. It's too tiny. Not even a dot, like a pin, it's not even there. It’s one secret island in the Caribbean. It's the unspoiled queen. Saba boasts, right now, one of the quietest and safest places in the world.