Jamestown was once the capital of Nevis, but it was smitten with cholera and then washed away by a tidal wave or an earthquake, no one seems quite sure. There are few remnants of its streets now. The new capital, Charlestown, was built not far away – a sunny little town with some lingering curiosities.
It was here that Alexander Hamilton, the poor boy who improved his lot so much that he became one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, was born in a house on the outskirts of the town. All that remains now are a few blocks of stone and a flight of spectral stone steps. Chickens pick their way around the yard.
Hamilton’s parents (who were not married) were a Scot, James Hamilton, and a Creole, Rachel Fawcett, a girl who had, at sixteen, been forced into marriage with a Dane. It was, curiously, to the Danish colony of St Croix, in what is now the US Virgin Islands, that Hamilton took his family after becoming an estate manager. Later he went to St Vincent and hardly saw his wife or son again. Rachel died and Alexander was raised by an aunt, worked in a shop on St Croix and, at fifteen, sailed for America where he became a leading rebel against the British and, after Independence, was made Secretary of the Treasury. After such a life he was killed, at fifty, on 11 July 1804, in a duel with Aarron Burr, the Vice President of the United States, at Weehawken, New Jersey.
Another of Charlestown’s curiosities is the courthouse which sits on the site of notorious slave auctions. Nineteen Negroes were publicly beaten here in 1810, giving impetus to the slave revolts that eventually resounded through the islands. The slave master on this occasion was one Edward Huggins. Famed as a builder (there is a building company called Huggins in Nevis today) his initials are to be seen over a door at Golden Rock, now a hotel, which he built in 1815. After the construction, Huggins’ thanks to his chief stonemason was to incarcerate the poor fellow in a sealed dungeon with a week’s food, and then to breezily set sail for England many weeks away. It is said that the hollow blows of the stonemason’s ghostly hammer can be heard even now.
In front of the courthouse is a brief triangle of garden, a memorial to the men of Nevis who left their warm unworldly island to die in the trenches of France in World War I. Instead of the traditional piece of artillery – and goodness knows such ordnance is common enough in the West Indies – there is a captured German machine gun, of the sort those brave and probably bewildered islanders had to face in that foreign field.
The third curiosity is the Jewish cemetery. There are also the remnants of a synagogue at the end of a path called the Jews Walk, although the building is now the Charlestown police station. These people had fled from Brazil and found themselves among the Caribbean islands, leaving their traces on several. At one time a fifth of the inhabitants of Nevis were Jews, working in the sugar plantations, and their resting places in the cemetery are marked by stones in Hebrew, Portuguese and English, some dating from 1684.
Nevis lies a little somnolently under its peak and the attendant puff of cloud. It is almost as if its early days in the frantic rush of the sugar trade have tired it. But its life is measured and pleasant, its people calm, kind and devout (there is a church with a black Christ crucified). It is not solely the natives who enjoy the island’s twentieth-century serenity. People from the outside world, from America and Europe, go to find tranquillity in Nevis.
At the airport, where I waited for Tony Meston to pick me up in the islander, were two frail and elderly Americans. They were talking to the airport staff. The old man looked very ill. He had lost an arm and his face was scarred and white, as if he had been in an accident. It was apparent to me that they loved each other dearly. Her arm was about his waist as he took faltering steps. I could see that here was a story, but I could not bring myself to disturb them. ‘Here comes the plane,’ she whispered to him as the islander hovered and came onto the runway. ‘Now we’ll go home.’ I worried how he would survive any sort of journey, but I need not have. As Tony taxied in she took the old man’s arm and led him out – to the exit. Back to the island.
ST KITTS situated latitude 17°18’N and longitude 62°48’W; area 65 sq. m (168 sq. km); population approx. 35,000; Britain. NEVIS latitude 17°10’N and longitude 62°35’W; area 36 sq. m (93 sq. km); population approx. 9,300; Britain
Antigua
A Tale of Nelson’s Bed
. . . port after stormy seas.
EDMUND SPENSER
English Harbour, Antigua, is a fortunate anchorage, located almost privately from the open sea, with high headlands on either side. Even before Nelson’s days on the island the British knew they were secure here under the powerfully fortified heights. Standing above the harbour now, looking far down at it and then miles out into the Atlantic, it is easy to appreciate what a prize place it was. British guns pointed in all directions, the look-outs had a splendid horizon and Nelson, when ashore, could sleep soundly in his small bed. Antigua, as it happened, was unique in the Caribbean in those boisterous days. It was never attacked.
Today, walking around Nelson’s Dockyard at English Harbour, is to see something of what it was at the end of the eighteenth century. After years of disgraceful neglect, when it was reduced to rubble and weeds, it has been finely restored and is now working as a port and shipyard again.
It is one of the most satisying places in the West Indies. The serene Admiral’s Inn is constructed of stone and brick carried from England as ship’s ballast (how many useful things were transported as a make-weight in those days – tombstones, ironwork, paving, cobbles). The inn’s beams were once ships’ timbers, with the initials and private jokes of sailors long dead visible on them. After a night in a deeply beamed room, with three-foot thick walls, I sat on the terrace at breakfast and watched the many vessels lying in the waterway, with coloured birds in the foliage around me and an Antiguan girl arranging hibiscus in a vase. Considering it was January and I had flown from a London racked by stiff, cold winds, I began to feel extremely pleased.
The birds became, it is true, a minor annoyance. There were tiny bananaquits, finch-like fellows with yellow waistcoats and piercing squeaks, who sat in a line across the backs of neighbouring chairs and took it in turns to make fluttering forays on the butter, milk, sugar, or anything else that could be pecked, except the bread which they left alone. Bread is not very good in Antigua. When another even bigger marauder arrived, they would spit like cats at it. In the end, to gain some peace, I put my table napkin like a flag on top of the coffee pot and that caused some anxiety. I remembered how, years ago, being dive-bombed by gannets and skuas on the isle of Unst in the Shetlands, I walked around feeling very foolish, holding a stick with a handkerchief tied to it. Keeping this aloft, above my head, I must have appeared like the last surrendering soldier from World War II, but it was effective and there was no one in that remote place to laugh anyway.
Strolling in the early sun on Antigua I realized that the boats moored to the wharfs and anchored in the estuary were from the many places I had touched in my long journey around the earth’s islands. On their sterns they bore names like Jersey and Guernsey, Bermuda, Nantucket, and one from Capri. It was almost a reunion.
Along the shore West Indian children pretended that the great-armed capstans of Nelson’s day were carousels; the satisying sound of sawing wood came across the sunlight from the mast house where local men still make masts and spars; a stonemason was chipping at the last building in the process of restoration, keeping time with reggae music coming from one of the yachts offshore. Everywhere people seemed to be scraping hulls, painting boards, sewing sails. A pretty girl chopped rust from some ironwork, using a chipping hammer, the same implement I remember my father used for scaling ships’ boilers many years ago.
Everywhere the grey stone looked benign and warm. The boat crews said there had been an excess of rain over Christmas and the New Year but there were now only a few cartoon clouds in the sky. Pelicans creaked through the sky and frigate birds, like gigantic slow swallows, cruised. In the shade a group of taxi drivers listened to a cri
cket commentary and played Warri, a marvellously absorbing game performed with warri nuts and a board with a series of cups in it, beautifully worn with use. We conversed about the cricket and I asked them to explain the Warri game, which they courteously did, leaving me none the wiser. I asked about the earthquake that had struck Antigua in October 1974. The church at Libertia, a village in the centre of the island, still looks decidedly shaky as a result of the earth-tremor. ‘That was some excitement,’ recalled Winston Thomas, one of the drivers. ‘That quake came at six o’clock in the morning. Everybody got out of bed the same time that day.’
The buildings of the dockyards have been excellently restored and put to everyday use, but it seems that some of the smaller relics have been left purposely lying around. The quay, the forecourts of the various establishments, and the small road that winds through the area, are littered with cannon and squat mortars, sitting like wide-mouthed frogs. Guns lie about, sitting up, pointing in a dozen directions, or are buried up to their waists and used as bollards for the mooring ropes of boats. The sturdy columns of what was once the main boathouse and sail-loft march in two ranks into the estuary. It was strange being there, so far from home and yet in such undoubtedly English surroundings. I used to live in Hampshire, near Buckler’s Hard, another of Nelson’s shipyards, with its reminders of the maritime pomp and greatness of the early 1800s. Nelson’s ships were built and repaired there too. For me, being at English Harbour was like being at the landfall of an historical voyage. As if to reinforce the reverie the yacht offshore, which had been playing West Indian music, now reverted stridently to ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.
The former Admiral’s quarters at the yard, a deliciously cool building, are now a museum. It has some fine model ships, the tracery of their masts and rigging making shadows on the floor, as the sun pours through the ranks of windows. There is a framed proclamation calling for the ‘ . . . royal tars of Old England, if you love your country and liberty, now is the time to show your love, repair all who have a good heart to love their King, country and religion, who hate the French and Damn the Pope, to Lieutenant W. J. Stephens at his rendezvous . . .’
Another enticement promises that those tars who join ship will be provided with ‘bountiful supply of clothing, grog flip and strong beer’, not to mention prize money enabling them to ‘spend their days in peace and plenty’. It ends with the exclamation ‘Huzzaa!’ as well it might.
Nelson arrived here as commander of HMS Boreas in 1784. There is a record in the museum of him commuting a death sentence on a seaman, William Clark, who was to be hanged from the yardarm for desertion. For his trouble Nelson was admonished by the Admiralty and told that only the sovereign had the power of pardon.
Also in the museum, discovered among the rubble of the old buildings, is a bed, a four-poster said to have been Nelson’s own. It had been well restored and placed in a room apart with a somewhat distraught lady figurehead standing outside the door. I mention it now because thereby, as they used to say, hangs a tale, which in good time I will recount.
From the airy summit of Shirley Heights it is easy to comprehend how Antigua remained impregnable when some of the islands in the West Indies changed hands so frequently that it is difficult to trace who occupied them and when. St Eustatius, now firmly Dutch, for example, had no fewer than twenty-two changes of flag in a few turbulent and, inevitably, bewildering years.
Fort Charlotte was the centre-point of the Shirley Heights fortifications, its brow looking over the ocean for many miles. A sentry would only have to turn about and march a few paces for a complete view of Falmouth and English Harbour; another turn would show him Indian Creek and the inlets along the southern coast. Standing there I had no difficulty in looking across miles of apple-green island to the opposite side where the waves of the Caribbean Sea were breaking. Today wandering around the stony ruins is like walking through the remnants of somewhere far more ancient. Arches that might have graced Rome stand against the thick growth of the Antiguan slopes. There are officers’ quarters, ammunition stores and gun positions, all now fallen in the sun and lying among peaceful shadows. The real story of Shirley Heights, however, lies in the small meadow-like cemetery where soldiers who died far from home are buried. I saw it from some distance away, a few railed tombs among the grass, and approaching it I found myself in a field that might have been England. The grass was deep and butterflies fluttered about. There were a few unofficial flowers, sweet-smelling weeds and a tangled hedge against a stone wall. Apart from the rusty-railed tombstones, only a handful, there was a plinth with a platoon of names engraved on it, now all but unreadable. The soldiers died not in war but of cholera, dysentery and some of rum-poisoning. The balmy island of today was then far from a health posting. One epitaph tells the poignant tale with stonemason’s economy: ‘Sacred to the memory of Harriet, the beloved wife of Sergeant Major T. W. Hipkin of Her Majesty’s Liverpool Regiment who fell victim to the withering effects of the climate on 28th January, 1851, aged 35 years. The last tribute of her sorrowing husband.’ A corner of a foreign field indeed.
How much the villages of this island have changed over the years I do not know but it can only have been a little. The wooden settlements dot the bright green plains of Antigua and sometimes sit among the loaf-shaped hills of its interior. In such a comparatively tight place surrounded by water it is amazing to hear that until a reservoir was constructed in those hills a few years ago there were children who had never seen a boat. It is probably true, for people still tend to walk familiar paths, living out their lives as their fathers and grandfathers have done since they were freed of slavery. I saw a note in a parish baptism register recording the end of that iniquitous era. From a Methodist church it noted, after years of entries which described a child’s parents as ‘slaves’, ‘Here endeth all registration in which distinction of civil status is specified, August 1st, 1834, being the glorious day of immediate and entire universal freedom for every human being in Antigua.’ What a day that must have been.
Driving through the villages towards St John’s, the capital of the island, it is apparent that no one is in a hurry. Weeds grow on the telegraph wires, strangely hanging there like bird’s nests. There is always time to sit and stare, or talk, or read the newspaper, or listen to music and the cricket on the radio.
I have mentioned cricket overmuch in my experiences of the West Indies but it is not just because it is the game of my heart, it is part of the life and soul of the British Islands. In St John’s the prison is located right next to the cricket ground where the big matches are played. Was that part of the punishment, I wondered, to be locked up and to hear the cries of the great crowd as sixes are struck or wickets taken? ‘Not at all,’ a St John’s man said. ‘When the big games are on, the prisoners, they sit up on the roof. It’s the best seat you can get, man!’
When A. G. MacDonnell wrote his famous and funny book England Their England he noted that there was a singular breed of man to be found in odd corners of the world, building machines or bridges or such things, or taking them apart – the British engineer.
Wally Smith, a cherubic man from the north of England whom I met in Antigua, was one of that breed. He had been an engineer in all sorts of places: in Africa, in South America, aboard merchant ships, returning home a couple of times a year to see his wife and play a few rounds of ‘civilized golf’. He was in Antigua ‘running in’ a new power station. He was a cheerful and (although perhaps he would hardly admit it himself) quietly poetic man. We were watching the pelicans patrolling the harbour at St John’s, when he said, ‘Saddest thing I’ve ever seen, I think, was in South America. Some freak thing had happened to the sea, the tides had got messed up or something, and suddenly there were no fish left in the pelicans’ feeding-grounds. The poor things ended up walking around the town, drooping and dusty like old, begging men, looking for scraps.’
Wally and I had partaken of a few cordials one evening and at two o’clock he dropped me off outside th
e Admiral’s Inn at English Harbour. He drove away and I climbed in through a tight little door into the hotel. All was silent and a shade ghostly. Lamps glimmered but there was no one around – nor was there a key in my pigeon hole behind the reception desk. I am often absent-minded to the point of eccentricity and I thought I must have left my key in my room which was in an annex on the waterfront. I walked across the moonlit grounds but my door was firmly locked. After going back to the lobby and failing to raise anybody who might help I went out into the dockyard again – and there saw before me the museum. And in the museum, as I had seen only that day, was a fine four-poster – Nelson’s bed!
If it had not been for the aforementioned cordials and the fact that I was desperately fatigued I might have thought twice, but I didn’t. Mooching around the side of the museum I perceived that the old shutters, held with a single swivelling bar of wood, could be opened quite easily by the insertion of a stick. It took only a minute – and there was the illustrious four-poster standing in the moonbeams. I climbed over the sill and carefully and quietly stretched myself on the counterpane and slept.
Nelson was a short man, for my feet dangled over the bottom, but it was not a bad night’s sleep in the circumstances. No ghosts walked. Or if they did they must have been disappointed because I did not wake up until the Caribbean birds were whooping and whistling in the trees.
ANTIGUA situated latitude 17°3’N and longitude 61°48′W; area 108 sq. m (280 sq. km); population approx. 73,000; Britain
My World of Islands Page 10
