It was one of his family, Josephus Lambert Hassell, who was responsible for the building of that road. Before 1940 the only way from the wild landing beaches to the villages far up in the quiet mists was up hundreds of steps hewn into the rocks, wriggling up through boulders, ferns and forests. It took hours to travel the couple of miles from one settlement to the next and all goods and water (and sometimes boats) had to be borne on the heads of the people. Will Johnson, editor of the once-a-month Saba Herald and a member of the island’s second largest clan, remembers that his grandmother was fifty years old before she ever travelled from her home in Hell’s Gate to the main town, the Bottom, lying as its name suggests in the cup of a cooled volcanic crater. She could see no good reason for making the walk.
After Dutch experts had said that the building of a road was impossible because of the steepness of the terrain, Josephus Lambert Hassell sent to the United States for a correspondence course in civil engineering, read it thoroughly, and with his fellow islanders hacked out the highway over the mountains and over the next twenty years.
‘Today,’ said Wilf Hassell in his West Indian English, as we curled around the tight elbow bends, ‘you arrived at an important time. This morning they have begun a new road over the hills. The people still have to walk with their goods on their heads from that place. In a year they will be able to ride.’ And we both saluted a gang of men digging the first rocks out of the mountain.
Every turn, every gradient, every new angle of the road brought another amazing aspect of this vertical place into view. How they built the road, even in twenty years, could have been nothing short of remarkable, especially from instructions received by post. ‘Now,’ said Wilf as we backed tightly into a corner to let another car go down (the pleasant habit of everyone waving to everyone else on this road is disconcerting for a stranger), ‘these days we have more than 200 cars on Saba. The first came ashore in 1947 lashed to two rowing boats. The crews had to judge the waves and they came into the beach on a good roller. Then fifty men lifted the car, which was a jeep, ashore. That was a great day for this place.’
The jeep had scarcely a mile of road at its disposal, but it was growing daily. Then came the airstrip. It was a small tongue of land, a lip of lava from the ancient volcano, called the Flat. An intrepid pilot, a Monsieur de Haenow, mayor of the neighbouring French island of St Barthélemy, landed to much excitement. After that they built the harbour and the road to join the two.
Wild goats ran through the thick cover of growth over the rocksides. It was cool and misty, like a summer morning in Scotland. Little houses up there have chimneys and fireplaces and once, so several people told me proudly, hailstones fell. ‘Windwardside,’ announced Wilf stopping the car. I looked over a precipice onto a thick green valley that ascended beyond into frail clouds. The houses of the village, red-roofed, white-faced, hung onto the side of the mountain. A cock called across the valley and smoke curled from a chimney to join the clouds. It was a place apart.
The Dutch Antilles consist of the islands of Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire, which are called the Leeward Islands, and St Maarten (shared with the French), St Eustatius and Saba. During the roving days of the early sailing colonists, these islands saw many changes of flag as the English, the French, the Dutch, the Spaniards (and even the Russians) sent their ships into the Caribbean to see what could be gained. Sometimes islands were sighted, by men such as Columbus (who was first on the horizon during his second voyage of 1493), given a name and marked approximately on a map only to be rechristened by the next adventurer to heave to. This confusion is today made no easier by the fact that the Windward Islands of the Dutch Antilles lie almost in the lap of what the British still call the Leeward Islands – Antigua, St Kitts, Nevis and Anguilla. The Dutch Leewards, Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire, sit on the shoulder of South America, while the British-named Windwards are off the same coast a few miles southeast.
All this mattered little to the people of Saba, living in their rocky privacy. The origins of the people are a matter of nationalistic dispute but it seems that the Dutch who claimed the island never stayed for long. Soon the Shetland Islanders arrived, Presbyterians, it is said, fleeing from religious persecution, and settled here. By the beginning of the eighteenth century a Dutch missionary complained that no one could understand a word he was saying. The first Hassell arrived in 1672 from a family widespread in Jersey in the English Channel Islands. The Dutch have remained in possession, and the Princesses Irene and Margariet, Queen Beatrix’s sisters, were welcomed in 1962 when they were carried bodily ashore (clad in raincoats) from a pitching rowing boat in the days before the harbour was built. But there is little Dutch tradition about the strange, enclosed place. The five churches are Roman Catholic, Anglican and Wesleyan and the language is English.
Mount Scenery rises almost 3,000 feet into the West Indian sky, with the Bottom, a splendidly organized little town, sitting with aplomb in the crater of the old volcano. A Dutch government official arrived in the islands in the 1930s and proceeded to tell the population his version of their history. How their names were really Anglicized Dutch, how their traditions and their seamanship went back to their Netherlands forebears, how the Bottom was really the word Botte, used in Holland for a bowl. The Saba people listened in silence. They say they knew better. Today they tell you firmly that the Bottom means exactly what it says – the bottom of the volcano crater.
The Bottom, its red buildings spread out across one of the few non-vertical areas of Saba, is a misty, cosy place, with a self-contained life. It has modern schools, a radio station, churches, a fire station, a police house, a two-cell jail (with a roof for sunbathing), a hospital and old people’s home, the latter two conveniently joined together. There are stores in each of the island villages, two hotels and a Chinese restaurant.
Hell’s Gate rises neatly on another flank of the island and Booby Hill on yet another. On Booby Hill is the grave of one of the renowned Saban sea skippers, Captain Ernest Johnson (buried in his garden as most people on the island were since there is little room for a cemetery). In 1920 he was sailing from Boston harbour in the SS Atlantus when he saw through his binoculars a white shirt flying out at sea. On further investigation he found that the shirt was protruding from a hole in the stern plates of the United States submarine S-5, which had become disabled during a dive and was lying helpless below the sea. The shirt belonged to her captain.
The Saban mariner brought his ship close to and lassoed the submarine’s propellers. Then they hung on until help arrived. All thirty-eight officers and men of the S-5 were rescued through a hole cut in the exposed stern. Captain Johnson was presented with an engraved gold watch in appreciation by the rescued men. A wonderful capped and bearded figure, he loved to show it to visitors to his island house.
Before that time the sailors and schooners of Saba had become famous throughout the world. Anyone who lived on that place, under constant siege from the sea, was a born mariner. But they always returned to their island of orchids and breadfruit, mangoes, mists and whirling seabirds.
In the little museum Sherry Peterson (‘born a Hassell’) shows visitors around the house where her husband’s grandfather was born. The four-poster bed with its turned uprights, the kitchen stove with its iron implements, the fine needlework of the island women and photographs from the past, are all exhibited. ‘This one,’ she said, holding up a frame, ‘was taken outside the school at the beginning of the century.’ A smocked group of round-faced and content-looking children smiled for the photographer. She pointed to two. ‘Only this boy and this girl are still alive,’ she said. ‘They are over eighty, of course, and they have been in Saba all their lives.’
People do not, very often, leave from choice. The men went to sea, but Saba, even when it had no harbour, was their home port. Others went to work in the oil refineries in Curaçao and Aruba, and I first heard about the island from a Saban in Bermuda. They always yearn for home, though; they write poems and songs about it a
nd send them back to Saba with love.
At the airstrip once more, waiting to fly out to St Maarten, I sat among the parcels and passengers at what could easily have been a country railway station. Despite its grand title the Juancho E. Yrausquin Airport appears just like that: wooden seats, porter’s room, weighing scales, and a little undercover section of carved wooden beams. The airport manager wears a trilby hat and the people watch the aircraft come in with affection. ‘Here come that Charlie now,’ they exclaim in their strange Caribbean English. A few people left the little aircraft and I climbed aboard. The others had only come to watch or to load on packages. They waved as we took off and then went back, up the steep and amazing road, to their red-roofed homes in the island hills.
There is a story that when the Dutch and the French arrived simultaneously on the island they now call St Maarten, or St Martin, they decided to divide it peaceably – thus it was arranged that a Frenchman and a Dutchman would walk around the coast in opposite directions until they came face to face. All the land within the area walked by the Frenchman would belong to his country and all that circumnavigated by the Dutchman to the Netherlands. They set off, the Frenchman decently supplied with wine and the Dutchman with gin, and eventually met. The Frenchman had covered a greater area, but the Dutchman had found the best harbour and the more accessible countryside with valuable salt ponds. So the island was divided, roughly two-thirds to France and one-third to the Netherlands. It remains today the smallest territory in the world governed by two nations, something that used to be called a condominium until that word came to mean an American apartment and was hideously shortened to ‘condo’.
The Princess Juliana Airport is on the Dutch side, however, and the Dutch capital is called Philipsburg; the French capital is Marigot. Despite the two nationalities the people speak mainly English and the local patois called Papiamento, which is a mix of Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, English and the odd African phrase.
It’s a prosperous little place, enjoying its good fortune as a free port and its fine natural accessories, lakes, salt flats, white-sand bays and a brilliant sea, with loaf-shaped mountains looking down on the commercial activity with ancient calm. Its restaurants and shops, in both the small capitals, are a relief after some I had experienced on other Caribbean islands.
There is an inlet called Cay Bay where the great Dutch adventurer Peter Stuyvesant lost his leg in a brush with the Spanish. This was in 1644 when there were strange bedfellows in the Caribbean as the maritime nations decimated the poor Carib Indians and battled each other to seize the best islands. Sometimes nations that were at war in Europe would temporarily ally themselves to fight another foe in the West Indies. On Palm Sunday, 1644, the Dutch, the French (and, it is thought, the English from St Kitts to the south), sailed into the anchorage at Cay Bay under the command of Stuyvesant in his ship the Blauwe Haan – ‘the Blue Cockerel’. There was no resistance from the Spanish and, after consolidating his positions, Stuyvesant wrote a letter to the occupying commander calling on him to surrender. He then, unwisely, underlined the threat by walking out to the limit of his fortifications and, with his own hands, placed a Dutch banner on his forward battery. The Spaniards fired a single shot hitting the brave Dutchman in the leg. The limb was amputated and thrown into the sea.
All this was before Peter Stuyvesant became governor of the Dutch colony, New Amsterdam, now New York. He died there in 1672 and is buried in St Mark’s Church in the Bowery. (His age is given incorrectly in his epitaph. He was sixty at his death, not eighty as stated on the tombstone.)
Over the years the Dutch and the French have rarely quarrelled in their small island. Once when the countries were at war in Europe, an ‘army’ of sixteen Dutchmen conquered the French side but French sovereignty was later restored. The Dutch side of the island is busier with Philipsburg, three streets wide, stretched along a narrow neck of land between two bulky shoulders. I stayed at the Pasanggrahan, once the seaside guesthouse of the Dutch Governor. A portrait of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands hangs in the reception hall. The streets in the town all have Dutch names although few people speak the language. The voices all around are English-American and patois. Here, as in many of the West Indian islands, there was once a Jewish colony. The Jews who lived here had probably fled from Brazil. Their tombstones, brought from Europe as ballast in ships, with their Hebrew inscriptions, are to be seen on many of the islands (particularly in Nevis and in the Dutch island of St Eustatius). In Philipsburg are remains of what is thought to be a 300-year-old synagogue – to find it you have to look on the vacant land behind the West Indian Tavern.
The bay off Philipsburg was full of idle white hulls, with a cruise liner lying like a shadow on the misty skyline. Japanese and Korean fishermen work their boats out of the bay here. There is a modern fish factory with ancient cannon and anchors set among its refrigeration plant. Beside the port a silver tank reflects the sun. I took it to be for fuel storage. I was wrong. It was for rum.
The island has a spine of smooth green hills, rounded like men’s heads, running beside its salt lakes (an important industry), its bays and its pastures. Most of the farming land is on the French side. Immediately you cross the ‘border’ – the sign says, ‘Bienvenue Partie Française’ but there are no frontier guards or customs officials – you find yourself in a gentler more pastoral setting. The next sign to this welcome, in English, says uncompromisingly ‘Keep Your Goats Out’.
There are meadows here, deep and cool like the pastoral lands of France, the Normandy Bocage perhaps, trees in clumps, streams and low farmhouses. The first village into the French sector is called Orleans. At Cul de Sac, a serene vale ending at the sea, there used to be thriving sugar, tobacco and indigo plantations. Now everything is green and quiet. The village school has the word Ecole fashioned in sea-shells on its wall.
It was a sweet day, fine sun, roaming white clouds like islands themselves and, as I drove, segments of the ever-blue sea showing between the hills. Two islets lay offshore, Flat Island and Penal Isle, now both uninhabited but for sheep and goats. Black boulders and black cattle, so similar in size it was difficult to tell them apart, stood in the fields by the sea. Turning inland the hills and then the mountains fold against each other. For such a small island St Maarten looks to have a large interior.
In Marigot, the French capital, an appealing, wooden place, with balconies and unofficial pavements, with a restaurant every few yards, I saw some Black West Indians listening ardently to a cricket commentary from distant Barbados. They said they were from Antigua and cricket, despite the French and the Dutch, was their game. When they could gather two teams they arranged matches in the countryside – exiles enjoying a taste of old times. Baseball and softball are the usual summer games, imported with the American tourists, and soccer is played. The two segments of the island had just played an ‘international’ match and had drawn one goal each.
But the ‘money’ sport is cock-fighting. It is legal and popular in St Maarten. I watched a farmer with two of his fighting cocks, pampering them like pets, and at La Savannah, just beyond Marigot, I saw the dusty arena where the men in the cock-fighting season gather to watch the bloody matches.
St Maarten or St Martin is flourishing. A staple industry of the island has always included smuggling and it remains increasingly so today, including the trafficking of drugs. There are Mercedes and Mustang convertibles in the streets, the shops are resplendent with goods, and the sun shines on some of the finest beaches and most lofty scenery in the Caribbean.
Evening came down with much exaggeration – soft light, a finger of wind on the water, boats nudging each other in the swell, music drifting. I looked out to sea, and thought that still perhaps, somewhere out there, were the bones of Peter Stuyvesant’s leg.
The small French colony of St Barthélémy is one of the most delicious islands in the whole of the West Indies. To reach it is another adventure in a bouncing aircraft but it’s worth every air pocket and every bruise (I
failed to tighten my seat belt sufficiently and received a lump on my head to prove it). From St Maarten it is a flight of only a few minutes, but on the approach to St Bart’s, as the isle is known, the pilot seems to take utter leave of his senses and aims the nose of the aircraft at an escarpment of rocks. Nervous shouts rise from passengers who have never before made the flight, increasing as the plane abruptly rears and leaps across the top of the plateau like a hunter over a fence. Then in front of you the runway rolls out like a white carpet to the sea. The French call it the Aérodrome la Tourmente, and it is well named.
Once there, however, all is delight. Two little huts, one labelled ‘Immigration’ and the other ‘Merchandises’, make up the airport buildings. A wind-split tricolour flies above them and the luggage is conveyed on a squeaky handcart officially marked ‘Air Guadeloupe’. After St Maarten everything is blessedly small-town. Around the airfield the island hills rise green and sunny and there is the inevitable floating aroma of French cooking.
St Barthélemy was first seen by Columbus and named after his brother. It has the curious history (although, in the Caribbean, not so curious) of having its main town named after a King of Sweden, and streets with names like the rue de la République and the rue Général de Gaulle (sometimes with the old Swedish name attached), and the exquisite harbour called the Port de Plaisance.
The island was one of Sweden’s rare ventures in colonialism in the eighteenth century, when the capital was named Gustavia. The people, however, were French colonists from Britanny and Normandy, and were astonished to hear one day that they had been traded to Sweden by Louis XVI in exchange for berthing and warehouse facilities in the Swedish port of Göteborg. The Swedes renamed the capital (previously Carenage) after the King, declared it a free port and proceeded to make their fortunes.
My World of Islands Page 8
