Martinique continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 55

we were later to understand in the Greater Antilles and Central America, is, with the huts of aboriginals,
the only really suitable architecture for the tropics.
The car was hidden in the shade on the outskirts of this village, and we wandered barefoot along a
wide beach shaded by coconut palms that stooped westward under the prevailing wind. Conch shells were
scattered on the sand, and dug-out canoes were drawn up in little congeries, and here and there lay those
giant wicker labyrinths that the Negroes use instead of nets for catching fish. A young Negro, black and
glistening in the sun, was lopping down a branch with his cutlass, which he proceeded to trim, in order
to replace the broken boom of his fishing boat. Then the jungle flowed right down to the water's edge.
We struggled through its green glooms on to a glittering patch of shore enclosed by the forest and the
glittering sea. A mile to the south lay the aim, or the excuse, for our journey: the Diamond Rock.
This island is a great block of stone about a mile in circumference. It rises perpendicularly out of the
water a dozen furlongs from the shore, and resembles the emerging head and neck of a vast St. Bernard
dog in profile. On the south-western skyline, only just detectable through the afternoon haze, hovered the
outline of the British Windward island of St. Lucia.
British naval records have much to say about the Diamond Rock. Admiral Hood, who knew these wa-
ters well from the days of the War of American Independence, was back again among the islands dur-
ing the Napoleonic Wars. Observing that large tonnages of French shipping were eluding him by sailing
between the Martinican mainland and the Diamond, he ordered the frigate Centaur to sail to the rock. A
hawser was rigged from the deck to the summit, on which five naval cannon were hoisted and placed at
strategic points along the bare rocky crest, so that their fire raked the narrow straits through which the
French ships were accustomed to ply. A party was landed, consisting of a naval lieutenant and a hundred
and twenty men and boys, with large supplies of powder, shot, victuals and water. Perched on their lonely
stronghold, which naval records thenceforward refer to as 'H.M.S. Diamond Rock,' 'they defied and har-
assed the French navy and merchant ships for seventeen consecutive months. Only when their powder
kegs were empty did they surrender, and then to a French squadron of two 75's, a frigate, a corvette, a
schooner and eleven gunboats which they had severely mauled before surrendering; wounding seventy
men and sinking three gunboats. Their own total losses were two men killed and one wounded.'
We lit a fire in a small clearing under the shade of an enormous fromager . We drank rum-punch and
cooked excellent steaks in a buccaneerish way over the embers of a camp-fire on the end of a cutlass. A
curious bone was discovered in the undergrowth that could only be, it was decided, the shoulder-blade of
a missionary abandoned here from some former banquet….Afterwards we lay for hours on the hot sand,
letting the sun sink through to our bones; then floated on the sea like bits of flotsam, utterly relaxed and
rising and then falling with the swell, poised spreadeagled a couple of yards above the sea's floor, where
our shadows repeated our lazy motions on the clear sand and shingle. A blue-green and transparent mat-
tress buoyed us up. Close to the shore we dived through the breaking waves, or feigned dead in order that
we might be flung, inert victims of an imaginary naval catastrophe, upon the shore; sucked back a few
inches, and then hoisted farther inland by another wave until we lay on the dry sand again, once more
comatose targets for the sun. Later the sky grew dark, and, opening our eyes, we saw a phalanx of black
clouds advancing from the south. They covered the whole sky and then, heralded only by a few isolated
drops, burst in a grey deluge. The Diamond Rock disappeared in an instant, and the contours of the trees
half a dozen yards away wavered and disintegrated in the downpour. We adopted our old Guadeloupean
stratagem of hiding in the sea, standing with our bodies encased in warmth and only our hair and cheeks
exposed to the cold falling arrows. The rain stopped with the abruptness of a tap being turned off, and