ST. JOHN’S, Antigua — Strung like beads along the northeast edge of the Caribbean, the Leeward Islands are tiny, remote and beautiful, with azure waters and ocean breezes drawing tourists from around the world.

The wild isolation that made St. Barts, St. Martin, Anguilla and the Virgin Islands vacation paradises has turned them into cutoff, chaotic nightmares in the wake of Hurricane Irma, which left 22 people dead, mostly in the Leeward Islands. Looting and lawlessness were reported Saturday by both French and Dutch authorities, who were sending in extra troops to restore order.

The Category 5 storm snapped the islands’ fragile links to the outside world with a direct hit early Wednesday, pounding their small airports, decapitating cellphone towers, filling harbors with overturned, crushed boats and leaving thousands of tourists and locals desperate to escape.

The situation worsened Saturday with the passage of Category 4 Hurricane Jose, which shuttered airports and halted emergency boat traffic through the weekend.

Looting, gunshots and a lack of clean drinking water were reported on the French Caribbean territory of St. Martin, home to five-star resorts and a multimillion estate owned by President Trump.

Federal officials deployed C-130s to evacuate U.S. citizens from the French Caribbean island of St. Martin to Puerto Rico. Nearly 160 were evacuated on Friday and approximately 700 more on Saturday.

The amphibious assault ship USS Wasp evacuated hospital patients from St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands to St. Croix and Puerto Rico.

The Norwegian Cruise Line turned a cruise ship into an ad-hoc rescue boat, sending a ship with 10 restaurants, a spa and a casino to evacuate 2,000 tourists from St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Norwegian Sky cruise ship was due to arrive Tuesday and take its charges to Miami.

Carol Basch, 53, of Savannah, Georgia, was among those evacuated to Puerto Rico on Saturday. Stuck in St. Martin when Irma hit, she huddled for four hours in a hotel bathroom with no tub to protect her. Surrounding herself with pillows, she prayed nonstop as she heard furniture being tossed around her room.

“Windows busted through,” she said, adding that one fell on her before she sought shelter inside the bathroom. “The storm kept going and going and going.”

She said locals had welcomed her into their house and gave her food and a sofa to sleep on.

More than 1,100 police, military officials and others were deployed to St. Martin and the nearby French Caribbean territory of St. Barts, where they used helicopters to identify the cars of people looting stores and homes. The island is divided between French St. Martin and Dutch Sint Maarten, where the Dutch government estimated Saturday that 70 percent of houses were badly damaged or destroyed, leaving much of the 40,000 population in public shelters as they braced for Jose.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said the situation remained “grim” on the island where widespread looting had broken out and a state of emergency was in force.

The islands’ woes increased as the airport on St. Barts was closed, and those in Anguilla and St. Martin were open only to the military, rescue crews and aid organizations. Others, including St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, banned flyovers.

As Jose neared, the last airplane flew in to St. Martin’s battered Grande-Case airport Friday carrying workers to help re-establish the island’s water supply and electricity.

A tanker with 350 tons of fresh water was also on its way.