Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
We made a tour of the banana plantation. The trees were just ripening to harvest, huge 'hands,' as they
are called, dangling from the trunk, terminating in great purple heart-shaped buds. These profitable plants
are one of the ugliest of trees. Their sagging, unwieldy branches are always battered and split, as though
they had been unpacked from crates; unpacked, damaged in transit and improperly assembled after being
torn from flower-pots in suburban greenhouses, and allowed like their fruit on the return journey, to reach
maturity on the way.
La Joséphine, another Créole estate to which Raoul escorted us, lay farther along the leeward coast of
the island than we had yet ventured. The road followed a serpentine course through the heavily forested
mornes
, crossing, every now and then, slender bridges that spanned gorges of great depth. These bridges
hung poised above the tops of great trees, and through the leaves and the tangled spiders' webs of para-
sites, glimpses appeared of streams rushing downhill in a doleful penumbra. Again, seen from on top this
time, the pale green parasols of tree-ferns appeared, fastidiously architectural and alien structures among
the huge arboreal bruisers of the forest.
The frequency of hurricanes seems almost entirely to have abolished any attempt at beautiful building
from the French islands. Most of the Créole families live in large wooden bungalows, or in modern flats
in the towns—but the garden of La Joséphine was enchanting. It was a wilderness of overgrown rose
trees, hibiscus, cassia and tall palmistes, dominated by a single araucaria. A little Créole cemetery, with
graves of Doroys, Hucs, le Dentus, and Médards de la Farce, mouldered on the edge of the banana plant-
ation.
Those Chinese hats the sailors wore on our abortive journey to the Désirade had intrigued us all. When
we asked about them, the sailors looked blank, and said, 'They come from the Saints.' It was true, for,
landing in the little port of Terre d'en Haut, we were surrounded by these spreading headgear, as by a
grove of mushrooms. Here, in the Saints themselves, we learnt that a Saintois sailor had 'brought one
back from Indo-China or Annam a number of years ago' (how long? I wondered) and the fashion had
caught on at once. The Saintois now wear nothing else. The basis of the hat is a circle of white linen, two
feet in diameter, tightly stretched across a radiating framework of split bamboo slats whose outer ends
are bent down and attached to a thin hoop of bamboo. The middle of the underside of this cart-wheel is
fastened to a shallow cylinder of bamboo, into which the head is inserted. Two tapes tie in a neat bow
under the chin to keep it from blowing away. It affords perfect shade, and is wonderfully light. The Sain-
tois call it '
chapeau annamite
' or
salaco
. It looks as curious in this part of the world as a deerstalker
would in Bali. Eccentricity is the predominating character of the islands of the Saints. There are eight
of them—Terre d'en Haut, Terre d'en Bas, Ilet à Cabrits, Grand Ilet, Paté, Les Persées, Redonde and la
Coche—lying about three leagues from the Guadeloupean village port of Trois Rivières, on the southern
bank of the Souffrière. Terre d'en Haut, the largest, is only about three miles long, the others diminish in
size till they are little more than projecting rocks or reefs. They are more arid and spare than Guadeloupe
and the rocks are overgrown with organ-cactus and prickly pear. The Trades drive their moisture unshed
across the low hills of the archipelago.
The little ship approaching Bourg des Saintes, the capital of Terre d'en Haut, sails under the lee of
a castle of cyclopean appearance called Fort Napoleon. It was built there on a promontory by slave-la-
bour out of huge hewn stones, by the Emperor's orders. During the late war it served as a concentration
camp and political prison for enemies of the Vichy régime. The rock sinks steeply to the sea, where a
phenomenon occurs that made us rub our eyes and look again; for a large white liner seemed to be sailing
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