In the hills these cautious few waited as the Spanish left and the English came. As the Dutch came, and the Portuguese, and the French. They waited as the island changed hands sixteen times in two hundred years, through the sugar boom and the slavery boom, which changed the island's color from white to black.

And slowly, as the island evolved into the mutual territory of the Dutch and the French, reigning over an African population, the handful of Carib Indians nurtured among the hills in the shadow of Devil's Mountain ventured one by one toward the shore and the towns where they found women among the black-skinned slaves and took them back to the hills.

Their children were strong and wise in the island ways. And after slavery was abolished from the island, they came out of hiding and married among the island's population, now grown into a race of its own with African and European blood and handsome features and strong bodies. The Caribs added their blood to the brew and mellowed it in the tropical sun and lived in peace with their new brothers for the rest of their days.

And so the fiercesome Carib Indians became extinct as a race. But they did not forget Devil's Mountain.

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, a prosperous cloth merchant from Holland sailed to Sint Maarten with a shipload of lumber and carpenters and European stonemasons to build a replica of a tenth-century castle on the mountain that stood between the French and Dutch borders. He chose the mountain because its ancient volcanic lip still protruded four feet high, making it a natural fortification, and because he didn't give a hang whether or not the French thought half the island was theirs. He was Dutch, the island was Dutch, and he would build his castle wherever he wanted. Besides, the French prefect accepted the Dutchman's gift of 1,000 guilders to leave him alone.