and St. Thomas, although St. Croix is considerably larger in area. The capital is located in Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas.
The European discovery of the islands occurred when Columbus first sighted Santa Cruz, now known as St. Croix. Exploring further, he found the islands of St. Thomas, St. John, Tortola (part of what is now the British Virgin Islands), and others, and named them collectively Las Virgenes (a name that means the Virgins, supposedly for the 11,000 virgins of St. Ursula). In the 17th century, the islands became part of the colonial struggle waged by France, England, Spain, Holland, and, later, Denmark, with the islands’ sugar production the primary reason for controlling them. Denmark chartered the Danish West Indian Company and began colonizing St. Thomas (1671) and then St. John (1684). Denmark purchased St. Croix from France in 1733 and, except for a brief period of English occupation of St. Croix during the Napoleonic Wars, the islands remained under Danish control until 1917. As early as 1865, for strategic military reasons, the United States made overtures to acquire the islands. During World War I, fear that Germany might occupy the islands provided the final impetus for the United States to purchase the islands from Denmark, for $25 million on March 31, 1917. The islands were under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Navy until February 27, 1931, when an Executive order placed them under the supervision of the Department of the Interior. In 1927, Virgin Islanders were granted U.S. citizenship. Since 1970, they have elected their governor, lieutenant governor, and a 15-member legislature. Since 1973, the Virgin Islands have been represented in the U.S. House of Representatives by a nonvoting delegate (see parenthetical statement on page 7-14 in the “American Samoa” section). English is the language commonly spoken. The Danish government conducted 11 censuses from 1835 through 1911. In 1917, the Census Bureau took a special census of the Virgin Islands, but the islands were not included in the decennial and agriculture censuses until 1930, or in the economic censuses until 1958.
The only functioning governmental unit in the Virgin Islands is the territorial government. On October 11, 1993, Virgin Islanders had the opportunity
