James "Peddy" Johnson

My name is Peddy, James "Peddy" Johnson. I was born in 1944. My ancestors is Irish, and moved here in the 1700s from Ireland. They lived in a little village called Mary's Point — now it's a ruin, nobody lives there no more — and we live over in Zion's Hill. There's where my mother and father went to live, and I was born there. As a boy I had to walk up to school, because we only had two schools, one on the Windwardside and one in The Bottom. We didn't have no teachers who grew up on Saba or anywhere else, just the nuns from Holland. And then after school I had to work to help my mother, because those days, things were not too good, you know? Just my father working to support my seven sisters and one brother.

We only had trails here then. All the material and all the groceries came in by the harbor, Ladder Bay, and you had to bring all the groceries, all the materials, up the hill by hand and by donkeys and to each village. We gave Zion's Hill a nickname — we'd call it Hell's Gate. We said it was like hell when you was going all the way from the harbor to Hell's Gate with the bread, the groceries, and the material. The first Jeep came to Saba in 1947. The guys put two row boats together, put a big plank across it, rowed it out to the ship, hoisted up the car, and put it on the row boats.

I did construction. I helped the engineer who built the road here, Josephus Lambert Hassell. He did it by taking a correspondence course. I worked with him as a young boy to help measure the land. He’d put us in different areas with red-and-white sticks and he had this little spyglass. He'd look at you, tell you to move over, and then take the measurements like that. All by a correspondence course. After that was completed, I helped to build the road from lower Zion's Hill to the airport. Dutch engineers came here and they said that it was impossible for a road through these hills. You know, Holland is very flat. Josephus proved them wrong. We proved them wrong. It took 21 years from the harbor to the airport by using manpower. It was a lot of hard work. Everything was done by wheelbarrows and sledgehammers and dynamite — real hard work. The guys had to get up early in the morning to go to work, then walk back home, they were tough old guys. They used to make about three guilders a day. You’d work till Saturday 12 o'clock to take home $10.

I used to do all kinds of different work. Construction work, building homes, and I used to drive the ambulance. Then I used to work security at the airport, and then I went to taxi driving after I made 60. Now I'm 79. Taxi's my favorite, because you meet a lot of nice, friendly people and you get asked a lot of questions about the island and you can explain everything about the island. I used to take the divers to the harbor and take them back. They used to always call me and ask, "Steady Peddy, is it ready?"