My World of Islands

by Leslie Thomas

  In those adventurous days trade, piracy, and war went hand in hand in the Caribbean. Off the neighbouring Dutch island of St Eustatius, the English Admiral Rodney captured 150 loaded ships, and a further forty out to sea. He sacked the bulging warehouses, and sent his booty, worth four million pounds, back to England. Within a day’s sailing of home the ships were captured off Brest and the loot reappropriated by the Dutch and the French.

  Gustavia managed to avoid such mishap, although hurricane and fire ravaged the town. The Swedes stayed for almost a hundred years before handing back the island to the French.

  It is astonishing to drive around St Barthélemy and to realise the complete Frenchness of it. The people are white-skinned with blue eyes, and the language is entirely Gallic. Only a few black families live there for slavery was never the terrible industry that cruelly prospered in other islands. At Corosol, a village by the sea, the older women still wear the calèche, the white pleated bonnet of northwestern France. They are very shy and run to hide at the sight of a stranger, particularly if he happens to have a camera, as I did. Their days in their tidy, hamlet village on its hill by the ocean are spent in making fine straw baskets and hats which they send to Gustavia for sale. The people of the rural places are quiet and devout. On the Eve of All Saints they light candles on the graves in the island cemeteries; it is a ghostly sight.

  The island has wonderful curly roads with ancient stone walls dividing the fields. There are steep – often hilarious – hills which joyfully give out onto vast white and blue panoramas of sea or bright green plains illuminated with sunshine. Houses are red-roofed and scattered among the greenery. The oldest homes are like red huts and are still to be seen, shyly concealed, in places close to the sea with a boat drawn against the shingle, a few chickens and goats about the door. What a place for a castaway.

  Gustavia is the best sight of all. An oblong inlet between green headlands with toothy off-shore islands, it comes into sight from the hill road, like a revelation. When I arrived it was late afternoon and the sun was going home. There was a warm yellow light on the sea and on the town. The many masts caught its final gleam and the hulls of the anchored vessels reflected the sunset from the water. The last of the original Swedish families here died about two years ago, but there are those who have arrived since, their names above bars and shops, doubtless thinking, on a winter’s day, how different the weather must be in their far homeland.

  Gustavia, being French, is a blessedly civilized place. On many occasions I have felt that although I enjoy being a traveller in out-of-the-way places, roughing it is something else. This explorer likes a glass of wine and a good dinner. Here there was choice enough and I found myself in the warm breeze of the evening in excellent French company sitting on a terrace high over the harbour.

  The place was called L’Hibiscus and was set just below an ancient wooden clock tower which chimed twice, five minutes before the hour and five minutes after. Steeples, red roofs and flowered streets led down towards Gustavia’s purple harbour. It was as comfortable an evening as you would wish to discover anywhere.

  Henri, who runs the place and was once an international soccer player, pretended he had not noticed the clock struck each hour twice. He certainly did not know the reason. As it struck seven once and then again, he shrugged a Gallic shrug and said, ‘That, monsieur, is just a crazy clock.’

  You feel that it will go on being a crazy clock for ever. Nobody is going to get around to putting it right. Not on St Barthélemy.

  SABA situated latitude 17°30′N and longitude 63°15′W; area 5 sq. m (13 sq. km); population approx. 1,000; The Netherlands. ST MAARTEN latitude 18°10′N and longitude 63°10′W; area 20 sq. m (52 sq. km); population approx. 4,500; France. ST BARTHÉLEMY latitude 17°55′N and longitude 62°50′W; area 37 sq. m (96 sq. km); population approx. 6,000; The Netherlands

  St Kitts and Nevis

  First of the Caribbees

  In the little isle of Nevis . . . I have remained a good time, to gather wood and water, to refresh my men and replenish stocks. Also to hang two mutineers. CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH of Virginia

  It was Sunday morning on St Kitts and in every hamlet along the coastal road the people were singing in church; Anglican, Wesleyan, Methodist, Catholic, all at the height of their voices and enthusiasm, through doors and windows (wide open as if they were singing too), so that the hymns sounded unbroken along the seashore. At Middle Island Village the church tower was toppled by an earthquake in 1974 and remains a ruin, but inside the congregation was letting fly with such verve that the stranger feared for the rest of the building.

  Old Town Road, a nearby wooden village, has the distinction of being the first settlement established by Europeans in all the Caribbean. Not that you would know it. The landing beach where Sir Thomas Warner and his colonists came ashore on 28 January 1623 is marked only by a public bathhouse and a rusty cinema, with a few rough boats drawn up on the scrubby beach. St Kitts may have been the Queen of the Caribbees at one time but no one shouts about it. The island which, some say, Columbus called after himself, is a brooding little place, half-overlooked. Some say they like it to be that way.

  Perhaps its image is not improved by the fact that the peak which dominates it is called Mount Misery. It looked indeed doleful from the plane, clouds like winding sheets threading the peaks, the sea wind-blown, the town of Basseterre lying beside an all but empty bay, a downcast January evening, 360 years to the day after Sir Thomas Warner’s arrival. It almost made me feel at home.

  The next morning was ragged with a sun looking like lemon curd pushing its way through skirts of lugubrious cloud. But below my room an apparently cheerful cage bird whistled one tune – ‘Colonel Bogey’ – and Radio Paradise brought reggae music to the room. Brown pelicans roamed the bay like lost dogs, every now and then belying their awkwardness by flopping down from twenty feet or so into the choppy water and emerging with a fish in their bill.

  The previous evening Big Mac had appeared with his band, a little knot of nondescript musicians playing quaint instruments, more or less together. They grouped tightly, pointing inwards like plotters. A tiny man squeaked on a penny whistle and a long fellow blew down what appeared to be a neon light tube, but turned out to be a roll of plastic, an instrument called a bass pipe, which makes a bass sound (and is rudely called an ass pipe). Big Mac plunked a minuscule ukulele at the front.

  ‘They’ve had offers from all over the world,’ muttered Tony Meston, a pilot with Leeward Islands Air Transport, keeping a serious face. Mac, a formidable black man, came by and they shook hands. ‘Have you told the Vienna Opera House that you can’t make it this year?’ asked the young Englishman. Mac shrugged. ‘We had no practice,’ he said.

  Meston is another islandman. He lives with his wife in Antigua and dreams of Bembridge, Isle of Wight. ‘It’s the long evenings in England in summer I miss most,’ he said, ‘sitting outside the pub.’ He was flying Britten-Norman Islanders and Tri-landers between the little Leeward Islands, a case of déjà vu for years previously he had worked for the company and had helped to build the aircraft he now pilots. The tough and tiny planes, which have carried me to many islands, are flown to the West Indies from the Isle of Wight via Scotland, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, down the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and then hop across the Caribbean to Antigua. ‘We’ve just had a new plane delivered with my name written on the side,’ he related with some pride. ‘It came from England, from the Isle of Wight, and they knew that I would be flying it so they painted my name on the door.’

  Big Mac returned and asked if we needed his services any further. I had no objection to the band playing but it turned out that he was also a taxi driver and that is what he meant. If nobody wanted to go anywhere then he was off to the Saturday night service at his church. He went. As he did so he called over his shoulder, ‘It was just a scratch band.’

  It occurs to me as very odd that Columbus should have named St Kitts after himself but thi
s is the generally accepted story. Certainly it was called St Christopher’s and truncated to its present form, but had the time come when Columbus thought he deserved some recognition for all his almost daily discoveries during 1492–3? Or was he running short of names?

  It is said he named the neighbouring St Barthélemy after his brother Bartholomew, but it’s the prefix of ‘Saint’ that worries me. Was Columbus looking forward to an even more illustrious future?

  No. I believe the other story. I believe he named it St Christopher’s because, when he peered at the highest peak, he saw that cloud cut it at the neck and it appeared to be carrying another small mountain on its shoulder – just as St Christopher had carried the infant Jesus in the story. I like that much better than the thought of Columbus mumbling, ‘It’s time I got some recognition for this job.’

  Columbus’s interest in clouds is borne out on the next island of Nevis. He named it after las nieves, Spanish for ‘the snows’, because of the white vapour lying on its peaks.

  Mount Misery (no one remembers from where this doleful appellation came) was thus crowned when I made my Sunday journey around the coastal road of St Kitts. Like Tahiti, like Kauai, like many mountainous isles, the only road hems the sea. No one lives in the hills; nothing but goats and howling monkeys.

  After Sir Thomas Warner arrived in 1623 at the little beach and walked up the few yards to the site where the cinema now stands, St Kitts underwent the fluctuating invasions and possessions common to most of the Caribbean islands. (I had thought that the rusty gates outside the door of the picture palace, marked Circle Entrance, indicated that it was derelict. It was not. A film called The Professionals was showing, a title Sir Thomas would have approved since he was the classic professional colonist.)

  Sir Thomas may not have approved of the current somewhat rundown state of his own grave. Approached through a magnificent avenue of royal palms in the grounds of the earthquake-damaged church at Middle Island, he lies in rickety surroundings, the canopy over his tomb as decrepit as an old howdah, the marble stone cracked like a jigsaw and a luxuriant flowering weed growing from where his ancient head must be lying. Poor recognition, you might think, for a man described on the broken stone as ‘Lieutenant General of the Caribbees Islands’. He died on 10 March 1648, and the stone entreats the visitor to ‘first reed, then weep’. Well, it’s not quite that bad, but perhaps someone ought to tidy him up a little.

  The coastal villages are haphazard, wooden, with public bathhouses (few of the homes have running water) and the communal wells are inset with a mailbox so that you can post a letter and fill a pail at the same time. In Old Town Road there is a gully that drops through the village from the mountains to the sea. When the crater of Mount Misery floods (the island has eighty-two inches of rain a year) the torrent flows down the slopes and across the ramshackle street so that the people have to take to a bridge especially built for the purpose.

  If these places are primitive, and they are compared to, say, St Maarten or St Barthélemy, then at least the people lead their own lives and not some life imposed on them by the demands of the tourist. Just to be in the villages is to sense that life is very self-contained there, with its own relationships, jokes, sorrows and excitements. They love their churches (a poster proclaims, ‘Another Heaven-sent Gospel Meeting’), their music, their homes and families, their contests of village cricket, and the occasional bottle of Guinness. Halfway Tree Village is, however, noted for its moonshine rum. It’s called White Lightning.

  It was here that the French and the British frontier was fixed when the two jointly occupied St Kitts in the eighteenth century. At Bloody Point just along the coast they conspired together (a rare alliance) to ambush the original owners, the Carib Indians, and effectively wipe them out.

  Such alliances could scarcely be allowed to continue and the two occupants were soon at war again with the British numbering only 800, besieged in the great fortress of Brimstone Hill, with 8,000 Frenchmen trying to winkle them out. Looking at the size of the task even today is to realize that they probably thought it was much more difficult than it proved to be.

  Brimstone Hill has been called the Gibraltar of the West Indies, a magnificent defensive rock, dominating the coast and the hills. It rears out of the sky from the flat coastal plain and from the top it is not difficult to believe that you can see half the earth.

  It gained its name because of the sulphur fumes which seep through its crust from some place deep in the ground. The British, realizing that since they occupied St Kitts jointly with the French, who were never to be trusted (and more to the point outnumbered them), built the fortress into the rock and sat there watching their fellow occupants of the island moving about below. The building of the fortress started in 1690 and its construction took almost a century.

  Unfortunately human frailty often more than cancels out stone walls and when the attack on Brimstone Hill was finally mounted by the French on 11 January 1782, ten large guns with their ammunition, meant for the stronghold, were found conveniently waiting at the foot of the hill and were joyfully seized and used by the attackers. It is reputed that the non-delivery of the guns to the fort had much to do with a group of Englishmen sympathetic to the American rebels at that time waging the War of Independence against Britain. The French hardly needed encouragement. They had 8,000 troops against 800. The bastion which had taken just short of a century to build surrendered in a month.

  The real sacking of Brimstone Hill took place many years later, however, after the British had returned and eventually decided that the stronghold was untenable. The redoubt was simply abandoned and became the prey of vandals and predators. Stone, windows and wood were carried away. So were the guns. A great many ornamental cannons and mortars decorating parks and gardens throughout the Caribbean (and the United States) once had their sights looking out from Brimstone Hill.

  Today, however, the great hump has been well restored. From its battlements it looks impregnable. History, and treachery, proved that it was not.

  One of the world’s shorter scheduled air routes is the six-minute flight from St Kitts to its abutting small island of Nevis. Tony Meston flew the islander down the long peninsula below the main island and across the strait to Nevis (pronounced ‘Nee-vis’), forming the dot of the exclamation mark it makes with St Kitts.

  The sun was bright, but the wind continued brisk along the coast, although not strongly enough to disturb the tranquillity of clouds on the hills of Nevis, the clouds that gave it its name. There were goats and donkeys grazing just off the runway as the plane touched down at the wayside airport. This was another island Horatio Nelson visited, a place where he discovered fresh water and romance. Nelson’s Spring is still bubbling beside the road. It was here, while stationed in Antigua, that he brought his ship to shore and here that he met and married Frances Nisbet, the young widow who lived in a great lonely house on the Montpelier Sugar Plantation.

  Fig Tree Church, where they married, stands beside the road now, its nave and churchyard engraved with history, and a notice which welcomes the Tourist With A Clean Smile. Inside, to the left of the door, is the register which Horatio and Fanny signed. Its faded inscription reads, ‘1787. March 11th. Horatio Nelson of His Majesty’s ship Boreas to Frances Herbert Nisbet, Widow.’ It was a sailor’s marriage, as history now knows, giving poor Fanny little happiness. Emma Hamilton was not far over the next horizon.

  A mile away at the beautifully named Morningstar Plantation there is a collection of Nelsonia, including a letter written by him, left-handed after he had lost his right. There is also a faded print of the sad Fanny Nisbet and a gruesome little coffin, one of those sold as souvenirs in London after Nelson’s death at Trafalgar. Perhaps the most touching exhibit, however, is a grandfather clock which was stopped at a quarter to three on 22 February 1966 – the moment Queen Elizabeth II of England stepped through the door. Florence Abrahams stopped it as a unique and nostalgic memento. Mrs Abrahams later died on a visit to Eng
land to seek more Nelson relics for her collection.

  Once there was a battle at the estate – poetically called the battle of Morningstar – when 2,000 French troops came ashore to be faced by fifty nervous Nevis militia. It did not last long.

  Most of the great sugar plantations, with their round mill houses and their chimneys still standing, like thin ghosts, have been turned into private homes or hotels. The Bath Hotel, however, where thermal springs caused Captain John Smith, on his way to found the Jamestown colony in America, to record that his crew found a ‘great poole, where in bathing themselves they found much ease’, is no more. The building stands deserted, half derelict, its healing water bubbling unattended, unused.

  At the Zetland Plantation I met Richard and Maureen Lupinacci, from a town called King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, acquaintances of Allan Grant, a friend in England who was the expert and commercial brain behind the growth of the philatelic business in St Kitts and Nevis, whose stamps are much prized by collectors. The Lupinaccis had fashioned a delightful resort hotel from the old plantation, with the mill and the odds and ends of the sugar machinery still in situ. It was the name that interested me. Zetland is the most northerly county in Britain – the Shetland Islands. Did people from that remote northern place come here as they did to Saba, only a few miles across the Caribbean, to win the freedom to worship as they pleased? It’s a tempting thought.

  There is no sugar harvest in Nevis now. The island grows coconuts, cotton and breadfruit – which was brought originally from the South Seas. Captain Bligh was on his way to the West Indies with a cargo when the crew of the Bounty mutinied. Ginger is grown at a village called Gingerland. The island is a velvet green with flowers lining the roads and the hutted villages where people sit and stare or wave as an occasional car goes by. In the fields there are cattle, each beast with its own attendant white egret, sitting beside it or on its back, picking away the ticks – a good arrangement from the point of view of bird, beast and man.