PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN
Piracy was characteristic of the 
BVI region in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries. But stories of pirates
in the Virgin Islands tend
to be long on legend and short
on fact. Although never major 
pirate strongholds, several of the
Islands, including Jost Van Dyke,
Norman, Peter, Thatch [from Teach = "Blackbeard"] and Dead Chest
["yo ho ho and a bottle of rum"] 
have piracy-derived toponyms
which create a sense of place for
tourists. Norman Island, south of
Tortola, is said to have been the
setting for Robert Louis Stevenson's
Treasure Island and Treasure Isle
is the name of a major Road Town
hotel. In the late eighteenth century
wars with the United States and
Denmark led to an increase in
privateering and piracy against
ships of these nations. St. Thomas in the USVI was more of pirate base, or
at least place where pirates were 
sympathetically received, for a
number of years. This strained
relations between the British and
the Danes for some time.