Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
immediacy of the other Antilles. None of the menace, that, falling asleep at night in Guadeloupe, made
us feel like Princes in the Tower.
Unlike the steep and accidented charm of St. George's, the beauty of the capital of St. Kitts lies in its
level and graceful solidity; all, it must be understood, on a village scale, or, at the most, the scale of a
busy and populous little market town.
Two minutes' walk from the quay brought us into a square which was filled with great weeping trees
whose tasselled branches all swayed together with the least breath of wind. The fronts of noble Georgian
houses outlined this quadrangle, flanked by columned stone doorways surmounted by semi-circles and
triangles and tablets, and grooved pilasters which stayed the wooden upper storeys; buildings of great
dignity and grace, all of them weathered and time-nibbled to a state of infinite mellowness. In one corner
stood a Court House that serves as a chamber for the sessions for the Island Legislature as well as for the
administration of justice: a grand barrel-vaulted eighteenth-century room, built so long ago—a millennial
span for these cyclone-swept islands—that the shield which surmounted the throne between the prancing
supporters still quartered, with the leopards and the lion and the harp under a superimposed inescutcheon
of the House of Hanover, the lilies of France. I climbed a steep staircase into the Free Library of Basse-
terre, a room in which I was to spend many pleasant hours. The windows overlook the emplacement of
the old slave-market where the planters of St. Kitts appraised the dark and bewildered strangers, most of
them drawn, the islanders maintain, from the warrior tribes of Ashanti and Dahomey. This was the offi-
cial place of exchange, where the agents of the Royal Company that held the monopoly of the slave trade
contracted their business. More covert bargains were struck on the deserted beaches between the colon-
ists and the Interlopers who smuggled shiploads of slaves from the Guinea coasts without the sanction of
a royal warrant.
The library was a fascinating retreat. On the walls among the oil-paintings of periwigged notables
hung an old print illustrating the naval action between Hood and de Grasse in the Roads of Basseterre in
1782, three weeks before Rodney broke the frightening sequence of French triumphs in the Caribees by
his victory over de Grasse at the Battle of the Saints. Old swords and chests lay among cases of Carib axe-
heads, and the drawers were stuffed with old maps and seals, indentures and title deeds, and the shelves
were filled with an absorbing collection of old books on the islands, including, I discovered with delight,
Father Breton's French-Carib dictionary and the 1658 edition of de Rochefort.
Basseterre and the whole of St. Kitts have an undeniably patrician air, and there is nothing in the ar-
chitecture or the atmosphere of the place that hinders the evocation of its evaporated grandeur. Even in
Labat's time, when the island was shared by the English and the French, it was considered—possibly be-
cause it was the earliest island to be settled—the grandest in the archipelago. The inhabitants, he says, had
had more time to clean themselves up (
se décrasser
) and had become so polite and civil that one would
have difficulty in finding greater polish in the best towns of Europe. A proverb of the day stated that the
noblesse were to be found in St. Kitts, the bourgeois in Guadeloupe, soldiers in Martinique, and peasants
in Grenada. The early settlers were followed by members of great French families, and the children were
regularly sent back to Paris for their education. The same circumstances prevailed in the English part.
Labat mentions the Hamilton and the Codrington families (the latter, apart from their other estates, owned
the whole island of Barbuda). The names of Cotton, St. Clair, Boon, Napier, Reid, Wemyss and Berkeley,
most of which have now vanished from the island, constantly crop up in old papers and books and on
the monuments in the churches; and occasional French names, like Delisle, still survive. Staircases in the
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