The Complete History of St. Maarten / St. Martin

The island before anybody showed up

Start with the ground itself, before anyone was standing on it.

St. Maarten sits at the top of the Lesser Antilles, in the Leeward Islands, about 150 miles east of Puerto Rico. Geologically it belongs to the Anguilla Bank, a shallow underwater platform it shares with Anguilla and St. Barths. During the ice ages, when sea levels dropped, those three islands were one island. Anguilla, St. Barths, and St. Martin were literally connected.

The island is volcanic in origin, though the volcanoes went quiet a very long time ago. What's left is green rolling hills. Pic Paradis on the French side is the highest point at 424 meters. Mount Flagstaff, at 383 meters, sits right on the border between the two countries, which is fitting.

Two features of this landscape wrote the script for everything that came after.

Feature number one: the salt ponds. The Great Salt Pond behind Philipsburg, plus smaller ponds around the island, took seawater and concentrated it, naturally, into harvestable salt. We live in a world with refrigerators, so salt is just the thing on the table. For most of human history it was how you kept food from rotting, which made it both a survival tool and a currency. This island produced it for free, courtesy of the sun.

Feature number two: the dryness. St. Maarten sits in a rain shadow, so it gets less rain than most of its neighbors. That dryness made the salt ponds work beautifully. It also made large-scale agriculture harder, which shaped the plantation era and eventually pushed the island toward trade and tourism. The geography was setting the terms long before anyone arrived to live under them.

The first St. Martiners

One belief needs correcting right away, because it's everywhere: that the island's history starts with Columbus.

It doesn't. It starts at least five thousand years before he sailed past.

We know this because of decades of archaeology, especially by teams from Leiden University (the work of Corinne Hofman and Menno Hoogland in particular), French research units, and local institutions like the Sint Maarten Archaeological Center, SIMARC, led by Dr. Jay Haviser, and the Hope Estate Archaeological Association on the French side. Thanks to them, St. Martin has one of the best-documented pre-Columbian records in the entire northern Lesser Antilles. More than thirty pre-Columbian sites have been catalogued on this one small island.

Here are the three big chapters of that ancient story.

The Archaic Age: the original beach people (around 3300 BC to 500 BC)

The earliest evidence of humans on St. Martin comes from what archaeologists call Archaic Age sites, mostly on the French side. The famous one is Norman Estate, near Grand Case, dating to about 2000 BC. That was the first pre-ceramic site ever discovered on the island. Others include Etang Rouge and Baie Orientale, and some researchers push the earliest human presence back toward 3300 BC based on the wider regional record.

These were semi-nomadic hunter-fisher-gatherers who arrived by canoe, most likely island-hopping up from South America. They had no pottery and did no farming. What they had was skill, ocean knowledge, and a reef that fed them. Their sites are full of shell middens, which is the technical term for ancient piles of discarded shellfish, along with simple stone tools and the remains of reef fish, conch, and crab.

The most striking finding comes from those shellfish remains. Scientists studied them across eight excavated sites and found that these communities worked the reefs, mangroves, and lagoons expertly for thousands of years, adjusting as the climate and sea levels changed. That is not bare survival. It's deep, inherited knowledge of one specific place, held and passed down for millennia.

The Ceramic Age: the farmers and artists arrive (around 550 BC to 650 AD)

Around 550 BC, give or take, a completely different people arrived, and the island changed.

These were farmers and potters from the Orinoco River delta region of South America. Archaeologists call them the Saladoid culture, named after the Saladero site in Venezuela where their style was first identified. They came in big seagoing canoes. They grew cassava and other crops. They made beautiful painted ceramics, plus tools of stone, shell, and bone. This was a full civilization on the move.

Their main settlement on St. Martin was Hope Estate, up on a plateau overlooking the Grand Case plain, and its importance runs well past the island. It is one of the earliest Ceramic Age village sites in the entire Lesser Antilles, occupied in phases until around 650 AD. It even plays a starring role in a famous archaeological debate called the "La Hueca problem," about how the earliest ceramic traditions spread through the Caribbean. This little island is in the academic literature. Another early village sat at Anse des Pères.

These Arawakan-speaking communities are the people island history usually calls the Arawaks. They lived in villages of sturdy thatched houses built to handle hurricanes, three thousand years before anyone wrote a building code. They farmed, they fished, they traded stone, shell, and pottery across the island chain, and they had rich social and spiritual traditions, including the zemi worship found across the Taíno-Arawak world.

The Late Ceramic Age and the Kalinago (around 650 AD to 1500 AD)

From around the 7th century AD, new coastal villages appear at places like Pointe du Canonnier, Baie Orientale 2, and a big village site called BK76 that was occupied from roughly 700 to 1170 AD. There's even a late Arawak village near Baie Rouge dating all the way to about 1500 AD.

Then, around 1300 to 1400 AD, the Kalinago (Europeans called them Caribs) moved up the island chain from South America and became the dominant people of the Lesser Antilles. The Kalinago world is what gave the island its remembered names: Soualiga, land of salt, and Oualichi, land of women.

One myth needs busting here, because it matters. You may have heard the old story about savage cannibal Caribs wiping out the peaceful Arawaks. Modern scholars don't accept it. There is real doubt that a single large Carib invasion of the northern Lesser Antilles ever happened, and the record looks more continuous and more complicated than the story allows. That caricature was written by the people doing the conquering, which is reason enough to be suspicious of it.

One fact here surprises almost everyone: there is no solid evidence that any Amerindian population was permanently living on St. Martin when Europeans first sailed past in the 1490s. The island may have been used seasonally, for salt and fishing, rather than settled full time. Either way, within a few decades of 1493, Spanish slave raids and European diseases devastated the indigenous peoples of the whole region.

The first St. Martiners live on in the archaeology, in the place names, and in the artifacts on display at the Marigot museum on the French side and through SIMARC's work on the Dutch side. Five thousand years of history, before a single European sail appeared on the horizon.

November 11, 1493. Christopher Columbus, second voyage, sailing through the northern Lesser Antilles. November 11 happens to be the feast day of Saint Martin of Tours, a 4th-century bishop famous for one thing: cutting his cloak in half to share it with a freezing beggar.

So the island that would one day be cut in half and shared between two nations took its name from the saint who cut something in half and shared it. As foreshadowing goes, that is hard to beat.

There is a complication, though. Naval historians, including the great Samuel Eliot Morison, concluded that the island Columbus actually named San Martín that day was probably Nevis. In the confusion of dozens of poorly charted little islands, Spanish mapmakers later slid the name over to this one. And Columbus never landed here. He never set foot on it.

Which leaves the island with a name given by mistake, honoring a saint who shared, bestowed by a man who never visited.

1584

130 years of being ignored

For the next 130 years or so, the island was Spanish on paper and ignored in practice. Spain was busy with gold, silver, and the big colonies. San Martín got the occasional passing ship, the occasional salt raid, and a whole lot of quiet. That neglect, the empty space on the Spanish map, is exactly what made everything that came next possible.

1640

The Dutch and the French move in

By the 1620s, northern European powers were slipping into every gap Spain left open in the Caribbean. And the Dutch had a very specific problem: they were fighting their Eighty Years' War of independence against Spain, they ran a massive herring industry and a global shipping empire, and both of those things ran on salt.

So when Dutch sailors looked at the Great Salt Pond, what they saw was a warehouse. Add the fact that the island sat conveniently between their colony of New Amsterdam (yes, today's New York) and Dutch holdings in Brazil, and the decision made itself.

Dutch settlers set up around Great Bay by 1631 and built Fort Amsterdam on the peninsula between Great Bay and Little Bay. It was the first Dutch military fort in the entire Caribbean, and it's still there. Around the same time, roughly 1629 to 1631, French settlers connected to the colonization push based on St. Kitts, under the broader movement led by Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc, started occupying the north of the island. Early Dutch life centered on the Cul-de-Sac valley; early French life centered on French Quarter.

Spain takes the island back (1633)

Spain eventually noticed that foreign Protestants were harvesting salt on Spanish-claimed soil, in the middle of a war. In 1633, a Spanish force under the Marquis of Cadereyta captured the island, kicked out the Dutch and French settlers, built what's now called the Old Spanish Fort at Point Blanche, and garrisoned Fort Amsterdam, turning it into Spain's most important stronghold east of Puerto Rico.

The day Peter Stuyvesant lost his leg (1644)

This is one of the best stories in the whole history, because it ties little St. Maarten to New York City permanently.

The Dutch West India Company wanted its salt island back. In March 1644, it sent Peter Stuyvesant, its regional director, with a fleet and reportedly around a thousand men. Stuyvesant landed his troops at Cay Bay, hauled cannons up the heights, and laid siege to the Spanish garrison, which was only about 120 men under Governor Diego Guajardo Fajardo, low on food and lower on morale.

It should have been easy. The Spanish refused to surrender anyway. And during the bombardment, a Spanish cannonball came screaming in and shattered Stuyvesant's right leg. They amputated it below the knee, right there on a ship. In April, after Spanish relief supplies snuck in from Puerto Rico, the Dutch gave up and sailed away.

Stuyvesant recovered, got himself a wooden leg, and went on to become the famous governor of New Amsterdam, the city that became New York. So every time "Peg Leg Pete" Stuyvesant turns up in New York history, remember where the leg went. He left it in a fight over this island, which makes St. Maarten part of New York's origin story.

Spain walks away (1647 to 1648)

By the late 1640s the Eighty Years' War was ending, and Spain did the math: this little island barely paid for itself. The Spanish garrison pulled out in June 1647, and in early 1648 the Spanish came back briefly with Dutch and French laborers to demolish the fortifications before leaving for good.

Here island tradition hands us a beautiful detail. A handful of those laborers, the accounts say five Dutchmen, four Frenchmen, and one man of mixed African and European descent, hid until the Spanish ships disappeared over the horizon. Then the Dutchmen built a raft and made it to St. Eustatius. The Frenchmen reached St. Kitts. Both groups came back with friends to claim the island.

1648 was a hinge year for the whole Western world. The Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War and the Eighty Years' War, and Spain finally recognized Dutch independence. But on one small island in the Caribbean, 1648 produced something much smaller and much stranger: a shared home.

The bastion, looking toward Philipsburg1966

The plaque at the fort2025

The Spanish are gone. Dutch settlers rush back from Statia, French settlers rush back from St. Kitts, both want the island, and there are skirmishes and raids.

The reality underneath all that, though, was that the total settler population was tiny, probably a few hundred people. Neither side could throw the other off the island. Both were exhausted. Both still had a bigger enemy in Spain. And legend says a French naval squadron sitting offshore helped focus Dutch minds wonderfully.

So instead of fighting it out, they negotiated.

On March 23, 1648, on the hill known ever since as Mount Concordia, Mont des Accords, two local commanders sat down: Robert de Longvilliers for the King of France, and Martin Thomas for the States General of the Netherlands. They signed the Partition Treaty of 1648, known to history and to every St. Martin schoolchild as the Treaty of Concordia.

The deal: France kept the north and the coast facing Anguilla. The Dutch kept the south, including the fort. The French side ended up bigger, about 53 square kilometers to the Dutch side's 34.

The legend of the walking race

And yes, this is where the famous legend comes in. The story goes that a Frenchman and a Dutchman stood back to back and walked the coastline in opposite directions, with the border drawn wherever they met. The Frenchman, they say, was fueled by wine and moved briskly. The Dutchman preferred genever, Dutch gin, and took his time. It's almost certainly not true, and it is still the best border-origin story anyone has come up with. Just label it a legend, because that's what it is.

What actually mattered was the principles

What mattered more than the line on the map were the principles. People from both sides could move freely across the whole island. They'd share the natural resources, including the salt ponds (French-side residents kept the right to harvest and export salt from the Dutch side). They'd trade freely, hunt and fish anywhere, and defend each other against outside attack.

The Treaty of Concordia is one of the oldest treaties still in effect anywhere in the world. It survived every European war since. It survived Napoleon. It survived two World Wars. It survived the complete transformation of both parent countries. The exact boundary took time to settle (it got clarified over the following two centuries, especially in the early 1800s, and tiny adjustments continued into modern times, including a 2023 Franco-Dutch agreement that finally settled the Oyster Pond stretch). But the principle of 1648, one open island, one community, two flags, never broke.

In 1948, on the treaty's 300th anniversary, the Border Monument obelisk went up on the Marigot road, celebrating three centuries of peaceful coexistence. Drive past it and you're passing an agreement older than the United States by more than a century.

2008

Don't get it twisted, though. The treaty kept the French and Dutch of St. Martin at peace with each other. It could do nothing about Europe's wars.

Between 1648 and 1816, as France, the Netherlands, and Britain fought war after war after war, control of parts or all of this island changed hands roughly sixteen times. The island was occupied, raided, traded at peace conferences in Europe like a poker chip, and handed back again and again. Here are the highlights.

The chaotic early years (1650s to 1690s). French and Dutch control wobbled with the Anglo-Dutch Wars and the Franco-Dutch Wars. The British periodically drove out the French, while the Dutch mostly held their southern positions. Around 1690, Marigot got its start as a little fishing and trading village.

John Philips and the birth of Philipsburg (1730s)

The most consequential Dutch-side figure of the 18th century wasn't even Dutch. John Philips was a Scotsman in the service of the Dutch West India Company, and he served as commander of Dutch Sint Maarten from 1735 to 1746. He came in with a plan. He revived the salt industry. He pushed planters into sugar, coffee, and cotton. He opened land to investors. He welcomed English-speaking settlers, who arrived in numbers with enslaved people, and that wave permanently tilted the island's everyday language toward English. That is why St. Martiners speak English to this day.

In 1733, a new settlement was laid out on the sandy strip between Great Bay and the Great Salt Pond. Philips built the first house there in 1735, and the town was named Philipsburg in his honor (formally renamed from "Nieuwe Durp" around 1738). Under his tenure, the island's population grew from roughly 500 to about 2,000. About 1,500 of those 2,000 people were enslaved. The prosperity had a price, and other people were paying it. Philips himself was controversial. At one point he was basically run off the island, and he stubbornly came back. He also finished a new fort at the end of 1737. The town still carries his name.

Front1966

Rear, stripped to the frame1966

Forts, plantations, and a British admiral

Forts going up everywhere. Fort Louis rose above Marigot under French administration (batteries around 1765, the full fort by 1789) to protect the port's warehouses. Fort Willem above Philipsburg was started by the British in 1801 and taken over by the Dutch in 1816. And in 1793, the Philipsburg Courthouse went up, still the most iconic building on the island.

The plantation peak (around 1790). The second half of the 1700s was the plantation heyday. By about 1790, St. Martin had some 92 estates, sugar leading the way, with cotton, tobacco, coffee, and indigo alongside. A Jewish merchant community flourished in Philipsburg during this era and built a synagogue, abandoned around 1800. Its ruins are still there, behind the Guavaberry Emporium on Front Street, and most people walk past without noticing.

Admiral Rodney arrives (1781). During the American Revolution, Dutch St. Eustatius got rich supplying the American rebels, and Britain was furious about it. In 1781, British Admiral George Rodney sacked Statia, then took Sint Maarten and Saba days later. Britain occupied the island again during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, including 1801 to 1802 and 1810 to 1816. A British warship that sank off the coast in 1801 later gave up cargo that's now displayed in the Sint Maarten Museum.

Admiral Rodney1780

Fort Louis, above Marigot2015

1816: the last handover

With the post-Napoleonic settlements, Britain handed the island back, and the French-Dutch division was confirmed for the last time. The border has not changed sovereignty since 1816, over two hundred years and counting. An 1839 Franco-Dutch agreement tidied up the boundary details.

One administrative note, because it matters later: back in 1763, the French side had been attached to the colony of Guadeloupe, an arrangement that would last, in one form or another, until 2007. The Dutch side was run within the Dutch West Indies, and in 1845 the Dutch Caribbean was organized as the colony of Curaçao and dependencies, six islands: Curaçao, Aruba, Bonaire, Sint Maarten, Sint Eustatius, and Saba.

This chapter is the moral center of the whole story, and it deserves to be treated that way rather than as a footnote.

For roughly two centuries, this island's economy, the plantations and above all the salt ponds, ran on the forced labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Those men, women, and children are the ancestors of most St. Martiners today. The island's culture, language, music, food, and family names all descend directly from them. So this part gets told with respect, and it gets told straight.

The system

The Spanish had brought small numbers of enslaved people in the early 1600s, but mass enslavement arrived with the plantation economy after 1648. Enslaved Africans grew the sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee, and indigo. They worked the boiling houses. And they did the most brutal job on the island: salt picking. Picture standing for hours in hypersaline brine under a Caribbean sun, breaking and gathering salt crystals that cut your skin and burned in every wound. That was the work.

The enslaved population came to far outnumber the free population. The estate names are still on the map: Belvedere, Diamond, Mary's Fancy, Golden Rock and Industry (which later became the Emilio Wilson Estate in Cul-de-Sac), Loterie Farm on the French slopes of Pic Paradis, Hope Estate, Mount Fortune. Those names are still road signs today.

Undated

The resistance

Enslaved St. Martiners resisted from the beginning. Work slowdowns. Escape into the hills and caves, so common that Dutch authorities passed anti-maroon legislation in 1790 just to deal with runaways. And escape across this island's uniquely porous border and across the water, to islands where freedom came earlier.

The salt ponds themselves became part of that. Enslaved and free workers labored side by side out there, and the ponds turned into an information exchange, where news of abolition in the British, French, Danish, and Swedish territories spread fast. The very site of the suffering doubled as the network.

The island's most beloved symbol of resistance is a woman: One Tété Lohkay. An enslaved woman who repeatedly escaped to the hills. When they caught her, they mutilated her, cutting off her breast as punishment. That's where her name comes from. According to tradition, she escaped again and kept resisting. Her statue stands today on the roundabout at the foot of Sucker Garden Road.

The scale of flight tells its own story. In 1840, the entire enslaved population of three plantations owned by a single Dutch proprietor fled together.

Freedom crossed the border before the law did

Geography and that old 1648 treaty then set up one of the most remarkable emancipation stories in the Americas.

Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in 1834, with full freedom by 1838. That put free soil, Anguilla, five miles away, within sight of the island's northern beaches. Sweden freed the enslaved of St. Barths in 1847. And then the big one: on April 27, 1848, revolutionary France, pushed by the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher, decreed the end of slavery in all French colonies. Emancipation was proclaimed on French St. Martin in May 1848, commemorated today on May 28.

On Dutch Sint Maarten, slavery was still legal. Which produced an absurdity: one island, one side free and one side enslaved, with an open border guaranteed by a two-hundred-year-old treaty running right through the middle.

The enslaved did the math immediately. The day after French emancipation was announced, all twenty-six enslaved people of the Diamond Estate plantation on the Dutch side walked across the border to the French plantation Mount Fortune, where they were recognized as free men and women. The Dutch commander, Johannes Willem van Romondt, wrote to his French counterpart demanding the runaways back. The French commander's reply was simple: anyone who reaches French territory is free.

That correspondence, known as the "Route to Freedom" documents, was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World International Register in 2017, which makes the island's freedom story officially part of the documentary memory of the world. The Diamond 26 are honored on Emancipation Day in Sint Maarten.

Fifteen years late

After that, the system was finished. Facing mass flight and the threat of revolt, Dutch-side slaveholders essentially gave up. From 1848 onward, slavery collapsed in practice on Sint Maarten. Owners released people and started paying wages, because enforcement had become impossible.

Legal abolition in the Dutch colonies, though, didn't come until July 1, 1863. Which means the people of Sint Maarten were legally freed a full fifteen years after they had, in large measure, freed themselves. That is the heart of this chapter. Freedom on this island was not handed down from Europe. The people here walked to it, fled to it, and claimed it years before any law said they could.

Today, Emancipation Day (July 1) on the Dutch side and Abolition Day (May 28) on the French side keep that memory alive, alongside the Salt Pickers monument at the Great Salt Pond and the Emancipation Monument. And after emancipation, as many planters packed up and left, formerly enslaved families were in some cases able to acquire land on or near the old estates. That's the origin of many of today's family lands and district communities.

The Convention, 1794circa 1794

Victor Schoelcher1885

This is the part of the story where everything goes wrong.

Emancipation coincided with, and sped up, economic collapse. Without forced labor, and with European beet sugar undercutting Caribbean cane on world markets, the plantations withered. Sugar was effectively dead by around 1875. Cotton hung on until the early 1930s. The island fell back on the one thing it always had: salt.

Salt seasoned three continents, then died

And for a while, salt boomed. Around 1850, production topped 330,000 barrels a year, and roughly a third of the island's population worked in the industry. St. Martin salt reached Boston, Brussels, and Brazil. Little Soualiga was seasoning food on three continents.

But the work was still grueling, poorly paid labor, now done by free St. Martiners, many of them women. The Salt Pickers monument honors them, and it should. Then refrigeration arrived. Industrial salt production elsewhere got cheaper. Shipping patterns changed. The trade stagnated after the 1920s, and in 1949, commercial salt harvesting on the Great Salt Pond ended for good. The thing that had drawn everyone to Soualiga for a thousand years was finished.

Back Street, Great Baycirca 1913

Front Street1915–1921

At the salt pansUndated

Great Bay from the air, the last year of salt1949

The exodus

St. Martiners did what Caribbean people have always done. They moved to where the work was. Waves of emigration: to the sugar estates of the Dominican Republic, to the United States, and above all, from the 1920s onward, to the oil refineries of Curaçao and especially Aruba, where the Lago refinery drew whole St. Martin families. The island's population, about 3,000 in 1914, dropped to roughly 2,000 by the 1940s.

Those who stayed lived by subsistence farming, fishing, livestock, boat-building, and remittances from family abroad. It was a poor island, and a tight one. Self-reliance, mutual aid, family unity across that border: the values that still define St. Martin identity came out of these years, not out of the prosperous ones. So did many of the island's deepest traditions, including the Ponum dance, string band music, johnnycakes and salt fish, and guavaberry liqueur at Christmas.

Two quick admin notes from this era. The French side, attached to Guadeloupe, was governed as a distant, often forgotten commune (though a 1935 decree formalized Dutch-side islanders' freedom to settle on the French side, an echo of Concordia). The Dutch side was governed from Curaçao.

Two decisions between 1939 and 1943 quietly rewrote this island's future, and neither one was made with that future in mind.

Decision one: free port status (1939). The Dutch side abolished all import and export duties, making Sint Maarten a duty-free port. At the time it was a modest move to help a depressed economy. In hindsight it was the foundation stone of the entire shopping-and-tourism economy, and nobody knew it yet.

Then the Second World War arrived

Germany occupied the Netherlands in May 1940, and the Dutch Caribbean carried on under the Dutch government-in-exile. France fell weeks later, and French St. Martin came under Vichy-aligned administration, blockaded by the Allies. Early in the war, the French even briefly controlled the whole island for about ten days. Meanwhile, German U-boats were hunting ships all over the Caribbean, and the Allies needed airfields up and down the island chain.

Decision two: the airstrip (1943 to 1944)

In 1943, the Americans built a military airstrip on the flat land by Simpson Bay Lagoon, part of the Allied anti-submarine and air-ferry network. On March 4, 1944, Princess Juliana of the Netherlands officially opened it as a civilian airport, and it took her name.

Put that in perspective. For its entire history, this island's connection to the world had been the sea: slow, limited, at the mercy of wind and war. Then, almost overnight, because of submarines and a world war, St. Maarten got a runway. Wartime trade with the United States surged, English and American influence deepened, and the island was suddenly four flight-hours from the biggest consumer market on Earth.

Almost nobody realized it at the time, but that airstrip in the old salt flats was the single most important piece of infrastructure ever built on St. Martin. Everything modern about this island comes through that runway.

The receiving line1944

The monument, three years later1947

The takeoff

By 1950, everything the island needed was already in place: a duty-free port, an airport four hours from New York, thirty-seven beaches among the finest in the Caribbean, a multilingual population, and a postwar America falling in love with the tropics.

The Dutch side moved first. The Sea View hotel welcomed guests in 1947. The first major resort, Little Bay, opened in 1955. The first local radio station started broadcasting in 1959. Through the '60s and '70s, Caribair, Eastern, and Pan Am joined KLM and Air France on the tarmac. Banks arrived. Roads got paved. In 1964, the modern Princess Juliana International Airport terminal opened at its current Simpson Bay location. In 1966, Philipsburg itself was expanded by filling in part of the Great Salt Pond, so the town literally grew on top of the old salt economy.

The French side developed later, mainly from the 1970s, then exploded in the 1980s when French tax-incentive laws, defiscalization, set off a construction boom around Marigot, Grand Case, Orient Bay, and the Lowlands.

Claude Wathey: The Leader

You cannot tell the story of modern Sint Maarten without Claude Wathey (1926 to 1998). "The Old Man." "The Leader." Head of the Democratic Party, and from the 1950s into the early 1990s, the dominant political force on the Dutch side.

Wathey ran an aggressive open-for-business playbook: court foreign hotel and casino investment, expand the airport and the cruise facilities, build the roads, the utilities, the schools. By the numbers, the results were staggering. A sleepy island of a few thousand people became one of the busiest tourism destinations in the Eastern Caribbean, with Princess Juliana among the region's busiest airports and Philipsburg among its top cruise ports.

The other half of the record deserves the same directness. The growth came with weak planning and real environmental cost, and Wathey's era carried persistent allegations of cronyism and corruption. A 1978 Netherlands Antilles commission documented governance problems that went unaddressed. In 1990, prosecutors investigated alleged ties between the island government and Sicilian Mafia-linked investors. A 1991 audit called the island's administration ailing, and the Dutch imposed a period of higher supervision in the early '90s. Wathey himself was eventually convicted of perjury in a corruption-related trial.

And yet his name is on the legislative hall, the main square in Philipsburg, and the cruise pier. Most St. Martiners hold both truths at once: the man built the modern island, and the building came with a bill. Both things are true, and an honest history says both.

The island fills up

Tourism triggered one of the fastest population booms anywhere in the Caribbean. The Dutch side alone grew from roughly 5,000 to 7,000 people around 1970 to more than 30,000 by 1995, with the whole island passing 60,000 by the mid-'90s and sitting around 77,000 to 80,000 in recent years.

Workers came from everywhere. The English-speaking islands: Anguilla, St. Kitts and Nevis, Dominica. Haiti. The Dominican Republic. Curaçao and Aruba, including St. Martiners coming home. Plus communities from the United States, Europe, India, China, and the Middle East. Today, over a hundred nationalities live on this island, and on any given street you'll hear English (the true common tongue and the native language of St. Martiners), French, Dutch, Haitian and French Antillean Creole, Spanish, and Papiamento.

There's a hard fact sitting inside all that growth: native-born St. Martiners became a minority on their own island. It carries deep and continuing consequences for politics, culture, and identity, and any honest telling of the story has to name it.

Philipsburg1966

Front Street1966

The Salt Pond, fifteen years after the last harvest1964

Fort Amsterdam and Little Bay1964

The paperwork was changing too

While the hotels went up, the constitutional ground was shifting. On the Dutch side: in 1954, the Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands (the Statuut) made the Netherlands Antilles an autonomous country within the Kingdom, with Sint Maarten grouped in the Windward Islands territory with Saba and Statia. In 1983, Sint Maarten became a separate island territory with its own island council. In 1986, Aruba walked out of the Antilles for separate status, and Sint Maarten watched very closely. By 1989, Wathey was openly advocating separation, even independence.

On the French side: St. Martin remained a commune of Guadeloupe, which became a full French overseas department in 1946, administered from Basse-Terre, hundreds of kilometers away. That remoteness bred a frustration that would eventually boil over into change.

While the cranes and the storms were doing their thing, both sides of the island were quietly renegotiating their relationships with Europe. This chapter has some government structure in it, and it's where the modern island gets its shape.

The storms that framed the decade

First, the weather, because it never stops being part of this story. On St. Martin, a hurricane is not an interruption to history. It's one of the forces that makes it, as real as any empire. The island sits square in the Atlantic hurricane belt, and every generation of St. Martiners has a defining storm.

Hurricane Donna, September 1960. Devastated the island (and flattened neighboring Anguilla) in an era with no building codes and barely any emergency infrastructure. Recovery took years and pushed more emigration.

Hurricane Luis, September 5 and 6, 1995. The worst since Donna. A Category 4 monster that crawled past the island, battering it with sustained winds around 135 mph for roughly 24 hours straight. Luis wrecked the marinas and Simpson Bay Lagoon (hundreds of boats destroyed), damaged or destroyed a huge share of homes and hotels, and killed more than a dozen people island-wide. Then Hurricane Marilyn came through within days. The rebuild after Luis reshaped the island's modern hotel stock.

Hurricane Lenny, November 1999. Came in on a freak west-to-east track, the wrong-way hurricane, and dumped catastrophic rain and flooding.

Add Bertha (1996), Georges (1998), José (1999), Omar (2008), Earl (2010), and Gonzalo (2014) to the ledger.

The culture reflects all of it: the shutter rituals, the cisterns, the shared vocabulary of preparation, and a collective identity organized around rebuilding. "Build back better" was a lived St. Martin ethic long before it became anybody's slogan.

The Dutch side: the long road to country status

Sint Maarten had long been frustrated inside the Netherlands Antilles, a five-island federation (after Aruba left in 1986) dominated politically by Curaçao. A 1994 referendum didn't yet show a majority for separation. But on June 23, 2000, a new referendum delivered a clear verdict: roughly 69 percent voted for status aparte, meaning Sint Maarten as an autonomous country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Then came years of negotiation: a Round Table agreement in 2005, a planned 2008 transition that slipped. And finally, the date every St. Martiner knows: October 10, 2010. Ten-ten-ten. The Netherlands Antilles was dissolved, and Sint Maarten became a constituent country of the Kingdom, constitutionally equal to the Netherlands, Aruba, and Curaçao. Its own constitution (adopted unanimously by the island council in July 2010). Its own 15-seat Parliament. A governor representing the Dutch monarch (Eugene Holiday was the first). Full autonomy in internal affairs, with the Kingdom handling defense and foreign relations. Bonaire, Statia, and Saba took a different road, becoming special municipalities of the Netherlands. October 10 is now Constitution Day, celebrated every year. (And a long-promised piece of the deal, a new joint currency called the Caribbean guilder, finally replaced the old Netherlands Antillean guilder in circulation on March 31, 2025, fifteen years later.)

The flag, and the courthouse on itAdopted 1985

Eugene Holiday, first Governor2015

The French side: breaking up with Guadeloupe

French St. Martiners had their own grievances with being ruled from Guadeloupe, and France's 2003 constitutional reform opened a door. On December 7, 2003, in a referendum, 76 percent of French-side voters said yes to separating from Guadeloupe and becoming a separate overseas collectivity under Article 74 of the French Constitution. The Collectivity of Saint-Martin was formally born on February 22, 2007, with its institutions running from July 2007: its own elected Territorial Council and President, and expanded local powers over taxation, urban planning, tourism, and more, while remaining part of France and, importantly, remaining an outermost region of the European Union, using the euro.

Which gives us one of the island's best quirks. The French side is in the European Union. The Dutch side is only an EU overseas territory. So on one 34-square-mile island, the euro, the guilder, and the ever-present US dollar all circulate at the same time.

And the border is still just a monument

A 1994 Franco-Dutch treaty on border controls (in force from 2007) set up cooperation on immigration at the airports, though implementation dragged for years. In 2023, France and the Netherlands finally settled the last ambiguous stretch of the land border at Oyster Pond, a dispute that had flared after Irma. And through all of it, the daily reality of Concordia holds: tens of thousands of people cross that open border every single day, most without even noticing. Welcome signs, the 1948 obelisk, and 375-plus years of trust.

This one doesn't need dressing up, and out of respect for the people who lived it, it won't get any.

On the morning of September 6, 2017, Hurricane Irma made landfall on St. Martin at peak intensity. Category 5. Sustained winds of 180 mph. At that moment, the strongest storm ever recorded in the open Atlantic, and the first Category 5 landfall in the recorded history of the northern Leeward Islands. The eye passed directly over the island.

Irma, two days after St. Martin8 September 2017

Katia, Irma and José8 September 2017

The destruction

The destruction was near total. Roughly 70 to 90 percent of buildings island-wide were damaged, with about a third destroyed on the Dutch side. On the French side, the figure often cited reached 95 percent of structures damaged. Princess Juliana's terminal was gutted, jet bridges snapped like twigs. Marigot, Grand Case, Philipsburg, Maho, devastated. The storm killed 11 people on the French side and 4 on the Dutch side, injured dozens, and displaced thousands. Damage on the Dutch side alone was estimated at roughly $1.4 billion, plus comparable economic losses. That is more than a full year of the country's GDP, gone in a morning. Days of chaos and looting followed before French and Dutch military and police restored order, and while all that was happening, Hurricanes José and then Maria threatened within the same two weeks. King Willem-Alexander was on the ground within days. President Macron came to the French side.

7 September 2017

The island got up

And then came the part of the story to remember most: the island got up.

The recovery defined the decade that followed. The Netherlands committed 550 million euros, most of it channeled through a World Bank-managed trust fund, the Sint Maarten Reconstruction, Recovery and Resilience Trust Fund. France mounted its own major reconstruction program in the north, with a dedicated interministerial delegate. Cruise tourism came roaring back, over a million cruise passengers again in 2018, barely a year later. Hotels rebuilt in phases, with about 70 percent of the room inventory back by 2019. And the long airport terminal reconstruction, $92 million from the Trust Fund plus a $50 million European Investment Bank loan, reached its finish line on November 14, 2024, when Princess Beatrix inaugurated the completed terminal. That was almost exactly 80 years after her mother, Princess Juliana, opened the original airfield. Mother opened it, daughter reopened it.

And in the middle of all this rebuilding, the COVID-19 pandemic (2020 to 2021) hammered the tourism economy and added Dutch liquidity support, with conditions plenty of people contested, to the story. Through every bit of it, the heaviest load of the rebuilding was carried by the same people who always carry it: St. Martiners themselves, on the island and across the diaspora.

Debris at the roadside, two months later23 November 2017

Dutch marines during the relief operation17 September 2017

Which brings the story to the present.

On the Dutch side

Sint Maarten's young democracy has been turbulent. Frequent government changes since 2010, a pattern of coalition collapses that critics tie to the small 15-seat parliament and members crossing the floor. The January 2024 elections produced a four-party coalition under Prime Minister Dr. Luc Mercelina of the URSM. That government collapsed within weeks, snap elections followed in August 2024, and Mercelina came back with a second government. The Caribbean guilder entered circulation on March 31, 2025. The economy remains overwhelmingly tourism-driven: hotels, restaurants, and related services make up around 45 percent of GDP, roughly 80 percent of the workforce is connected to the sector, and cruise arrivals dominate visitor numbers. The live debates are the real ones: diversification, cost of living, integrity in governance, and that perennial St. Martin question, eventual full independence.

On the French side

The Collectivity has been led since the 2022 elections by a Territorial Council majority under President Louis Mussington of the RSM. The north wrestles with post-Irma reconstruction, high youth unemployment, and a structural mismatch that everything above explains: a French administrative system laid over an English-speaking Caribbean society. Saint-Martin shares a deputy in the French National Assembly with St. Barths (Frantz Gumbs, elected 2024) and elects a senator (Annick Pétrus).

And across both sides

There's a visible movement advocating the eventual reunification of the island, symbolized by a shared Unity Flag. It remains aspirational, because it would mean unwinding arrangements with two European states and the 1648 treaty itself. But practical unity grows every year regardless: joint disaster planning, shared institutions like an airport staffed by people from both sides, and the one holiday both sides celebrate together, St. Martin Day, November 11, honoring the spirit of Concordia and something every St. Martiner already knows: one island, one people. That feeling has a soundtrack, O Sweet Saint Martin Land, a 1958 song both sides sing as the island's own even though neither country makes it official.

The boardwalk, Philipsburg2025

Marigot, from Fort Louis2019

The island from the water2019