Hassel Island, St. Thomas Harbor

From the Paradise Point Skyride, you can see Hassel Island clearly — a green, elongated shape sitting in the middle of Charlotte Amalie Harbor, dividing the waterway between the main cruise ship piers to the east and the Crown Bay area to the west. Thousands of visitors look at it every day. Almost none of them cross to it.

Hassel Island is a roughly 135-acre national park island incorporated into Virgin Islands National Park in 1978. It has no resort, no restaurant, and no visitor center. What it has are ruins — military fortifications, a historic steam-powered marine railway, and the stone foundations of buildings that once made this island one of the most commercially active spots in the Danish West Indies.

Cowell Battery

The British occupied St. Thomas briefly in the early 19th century and left a military imprint. Cowell Battery, built around 1801 on the island's high southern ridge, was a fortification designed to command the western harbor entrance. The stone walls and gun platforms are still largely intact, overgrown with tropical vegetation. The views from the battery over the harbor and toward Water Island are some of the best elevated perspectives on Charlotte Amalie that exist — you're looking at the harbor from the one angle that the Skyride doesn't give you.

The Creque Marine Railway

The most historically significant structure on Hassel Island is the marine railway on the eastern shore, built in the 1860s by the Creque family as a commercial ship repair facility. Ships in need of hull maintenance — painting, caulking, copper sheathing — were hauled out of the water on a track system, rolled up the inclined railway, and held above the waterline while work was done below. The steam engine that powered the hauling mechanism is one of the few 19th-century marine railway engines remaining in the Caribbean. The engine house, the track foundations, and related structures are all visible.

The facility operated into the 20th century and represented a significant piece of the Caribbean's maritime economy. St. Thomas was a major provisioning and repair port for ships crossing the Atlantic, and the railway made that repair work practical for vessels that might otherwise have to sail to a drydock in a larger port city.

Getting There and Exploring

Water taxis from the Charlotte Amalie waterfront make the crossing in about 5 to 10 minutes. The island is not a day-tripper destination in the Trunk Bay sense — there are no beach facilities, no food, and no staff on site most of the time. The trails are rugged and overgrown in places. But for visitors with genuine interest in Caribbean maritime and military history, it is a remarkable site that most people on the island have never visited.