Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Pugin, but by an unimaginative student who has succeeded all too well in bridling the extravagance of
his master. It stands on one side of a large central square whose tree-encompassed bandstand is the only
other detail that contrives to stick in the memory. The rest remains in the mind only as a mist of scorching
streets running down to the waterfront, where the funnels of steamers appear; for Castries is one of the
very few harbours in the Antilles where the water is deep enough for ships to drop anchor alongside the
wharf.
And yet, in spite of its ungrateful appearance and the swarms of beggars that torture you as you trudge
down those incandescent thoroughfares, it fails to leave a disagreeable impression. Perhaps because the
mental blur of recollection so quickly takes shape again at the ends of the town, and faithfully recalls
the beautiful wooded inlet that unwinds towards the sea, the reflected mops of palm leaves suspended on
long threads of trunk from green headlands, and the mountainsides that fall towards it from the inland
clouds. Also, perhaps, it was a change to hear everybody clucking away in Créole, and to see the pan-
niered skirts and spike-ended turbans once more, and to feel the livelier Afro-Gaulish ambience of the
French Antilles. St. Lucia was the last of the Antilles to fall from French into English hands, and the pre-
dominant patois, the surviving French traditions and an important French minority, stamp it as the most
French of the British West Indies. For Castries, if the names over the shops did not remind you that you
are in a British Crown Colony, might be a part of Fort de France.
Standing under an araucaria planted by the Prince of Wales in 1920 on the lawn of Government
House—a magnificently ugly edifice reared in late Victorian times—we were able to see the pale shape
of Martinique and the small, solider dome of Diamond Rock, where (it seemed such a long time ago
already) we had spent the day with Dr. Rose-Rosette. For we had nearly completed the circuit of these
southern islands.
The Caribs got rid of the first English settlers by the same stratagem which they used, according to
Père Labat, for overcoming parrots: they drove them out with red-pepper smoke. When, later on, Du-
parquet bought it, his lieutenant wisely married a Carib girl; but his peaceful reign was followed by the
murder of his three successors. Lord Willoughby of Parham, who also considered himself the owner of
St. Lucia, sent a party of settlers who captured the island in 1664; but three years later it was French
again. The Marshal d'Estrées had a grant from the French King, the Duke of Montagu from the English;
and so on, until the difference became a matter of conflict between the mother countries themselves. It
was mainly French, however, until its final cession. The English took it several times, but had to hand it
back at various treaties. Victor Hugues captured it during one of its British occupations, and the French
held it finally until one year before Waterloo. Since then it has remained British. All the familiar Carib-
bean figures played a part in its fortunes—Rodney, Abercromby, Jervis, Grey, d'Estaing, and de Bouillé;
and even the Duke of Kent, Queen Victoria's father, captured Morne Fortuné in 1794. It again fell to the
French, and Sir John Moore, the hero of Corunna, recaptured it next year at the head of a bayonet charge
of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers.
The extra decades (in relation to French suzerainty in the other Antilles which have since become
British) during which St. Lucia remained in French hands, and the large number of French landowners,
cousins of the squirearchy of Martinique, who stayed on afterwards, meant that Paris was still the chief
luminary to reflect its lustre on St. Lucian life, and, though the French land-owners are now in a minority,
they form a society of their own with a most definite feeling of tribal solidarity. The smart life of Castries
in the first forty years of the nineteenth century sounds extraordinarily sophisticated and lively. Mr. Stow,
the Administrator, lent me Father Pelletier's and Henry Breen's books on St. Lucia,
[4]
which I read with
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