A Thousand Miles from Anywhere

by Sandra Clayton

  Customs and Immigration is at the commercial dock. To get there we traipse the length of the seafront, about a mile and a half. It is not an inspiring walk. The area is industrial and litter-strewn and traffic hurtles past us at frenetic speed. All except the lorries. They travel slowly because they are so overloaded. They also have men draped over them, who appear to be there in place of ropes, to hold the load on, although they can barely cope when the vehicles take the road’s corners. If men really are cheaper than ropes, I wonder if when the trucks reach the place where they are unloaded, these men will be used in place of forklift trucks as well.

  A cane train runs parallel with the road, a diesel pulling two grubby tanks on two wagons, with men draped over them. I find myself wondering what services they will be required to perform when the train reaches its destination.

  At Customs and Immigration there are two men at neighbouring desks, each one with just a stapler on it, and a conversation going on between them which we have to wait for some time to end before one of them addresses us. We decide we have seen enough of St Kitts and will clear out at the same time as clearing in so as to save another long, dispiriting walk here. We will thus be due to leave the island the day after tomorrow.

  We set off on the long trek back to the marina, eyed balefully by two young bulls chained up in a cane field. On the way, we take a walk through the town. Independence Square and the Circus are filled with competing election speeches. There are loudspeaker vans marked Labour and Political Action Movement and posters everywhere, some of them claiming, ‘One good term deserves another’.

  In town we buy bread from a bakery which radiates an overpoweringly sweet smell of boiled sugar, and then head for the supermarket. In front of it a hen, with two tiny chicks in tow, grazes among the parked cars and generally behaves as if the street is entirely her own territory.

  The most dominant creature in all these islands has to be the chicken: the cockerels strutting their stuff and chivvying the hens; the hens scratching for delicacies for their tiny following offspring. They are everywhere – in gardens, on pavements, trolling across in front of the supermarket’s sliding doors, browsing under parked cars then, as the cars are driven away from the kerb, stepping out from among the wheels in a slightly ruffled huff. And you can forget about roosters heralding the dawn. They herald every minute of the day and sometimes the night as well, in endless competition with one another. Across harbours, hills and valleys their boastful crowing must make life very easy for any passing mongoose.

  We are at the supermarket checkout and the first of our few items are rolling down the conveyor belt towards the middle-aged woman standing ready to bag them when the street door opens and a boy of eight or nine comes and stands quietly beside her. It seems that he should be bagging our groceries not her and she snaps at him that he is late. He lowers his head deferentially and offers his apology. With the speed of a lizard’s tongue her hand shoots out and lands an almighty slap across his small face. He slowly raises his head and, by virtue of our relative positions at the checkout, for a moment his eyes look straight into mine before he turns them towards the woman. They sparkle with a mixture of pain, humiliation and something else. A look which says that wasn’t fair and I’ll never forgive you. I turn my head towards the woman, too. She glares at me defiantly for a second and then turns away.

  By the time we get back to the marina the Security Team has gone home for the day. My ribs are not ungrateful and I manage perfectly well without them. After all, I did train for this type of manoeuvre at Nevis’s dinghy dock. In the anchorage we have been joined by Europa, a four-masted cruise ship. During the evening it entertains its clients with a steel band that periodically loses the battle with the loud speaker vans still blazing out their political messages on the coast road. In the rare moments of quiet the local dogs bark. Yet I sleep so soundly that I miss the 6.30am news.

  Over breakfast we watch six local fishermen in an open boat cast a large circular, weighted net of very fine mesh out across the water. They raise it slowly while drawing it closed, to trap as many fish as possible inside. As the circle becomes smaller the surface water becomes agitated as frantic fish of all sizes make a desperate bid for freedom.

  Faced with the prospect of heaving ourselves up and down the marina’s concrete dock again, we ponder whether we can be bothered to make our planned trip to Brimstone Hill Fort. In the end we make the effort. Without the two men on the marina wharf to help me I scale it with my ribs, and even the skin on my knees intact. We pay another US$5 at the marina office to tie up our dinghy and go in search of the newest-looking bus we can find that goes to Brimstone Hill Fort.

  ‘Top of the hill or the bottom?’ asks the driver.

  ‘What’s the difference?’ we ask.

  ‘Ten EC dollars up the hill.’ We pay it.

  The laidback, sultry rhythms booming through the bus speakers are strangely at odds with what turns out to be another white knuckle ride, although we do slow down a bit going through the villages. This seems to be so that the driver can engage in meaningful eye contact with nubile young women on verandas and balconies or shout greetings to pretty young mothers with tiny infants in tow. The island, meanwhile, turns out to be far more attractive than its capital suggests.

  The driver finally stops his bus on a steep incline saying, ‘It’s just ahead now,’ but when we turn the bend in the road below which he dropped us off we find that we still have a long walk to the top. Nevertheless, it is cool and shady under the tall trees, the sides of the road are lush with a very attractive type of tradescantia that is green on top and deep purple underneath, while the newly-mown grass all around us smells absolutely divine.

  Brimstone Hill is the result of a tumultuous upheaval in the landscape caused by volcanic eruption. It thrust an enormous shaft of volcanic rock – known then as brimstone, a word meaning burned stone – up from the bowels of the earth to a height of nearly 800 feet.

  It was upon this massive and atypical promontory that the British began building Brimstone Hill Fort in the 1690s. Or, more accurately, British military engineers designed it but like so much else in the Caribbean the fort was built and maintained by African slaves. It is a dreadful irony that the hell-on-earth created for Africans by the dominant European nations of the time should take place on idyllic islands named for Christian saints dedicated to love and self-sacrifice.

  St Christopher, the original name of St Kitts, was the first Caribbean island to be settled by the English and the French together, and they shared it between 1627 and 1713. In its heyday the fort was known as the Gibraltar of the West Indies, a reference to its dominating height and the belief that it was impregnable. When the British and the French fell out, however, the impregnability proved to be a fallacy.

  From our elevated position we can see crops for the first time. There is also a sugar plantation on the island and a narrow gauge train passes along the shoreline below us, its wire cages full of cut cane. This island originally grew tobacco, but in 1640, unable any longer to compete with the colony of Virginia, it switched to sugar cane.

  From the fort’s walls you can also see the islands of Nevis and Montserrat, Saba, St Barts and St Martin, all of them spread out before you in a sparkling blue sea. It is breathtaking. So is the woman in the gift shop, although for a different reason, and who bears more than a passing resemblance, physical and otherwise, to the woman who struck the little boy across the face in the supermarket yesterday.

  David is buying a roll of film for his camera and politely querying the not inconsiderable difference in the amount she has taken from the note he gave her compared to the price on the film itself. ‘Jesus!’ she snarls, scrabbling a few more dollars from the till, slamming them onto the counter and looking ready to throttle him. I am across the way, considering a rather nice piece of pottery, but decide not to risk enraging her further by attempting to buy it. Instead, we go outside and wander among the ruins of where so many of our countrymen, and her
s, lived and died. It is early and we are the only visitors.

  Neglected for over a century, the site has been restored over the past couple of decades. It is beautifully kept and we roam around the citadel, the magazine, the bastion and the ruined quarters of the Royal Engineers and the Artillery Officers. Then we have lunch above the Infantry Officers’ quarters.

  Like any archaeological site, time and restoration have left little that is recognisably human. Until, that is, you get to a tiny graveyard down a slope below the foundations of what was once the hospital. Somehow, in death, the place comes alive. Everywhere else has been cleansed of people, spit and polish, the smell of wood smoke and gunpowder, human sweat and animal ordure, of leather and tobacco, the sounds of cannon fire and laughter, of pots and pans and the jingle of horses’ harnesses. What remain are the dark, square building blocks of volcanic stone with their lime mortar and white archways.

  But beneath the few surviving headstones lie the bones of men who once lived here. Some of them not for very long. One was only 19 when he departed this life. Another, aged 38, rests below an inscription that brings a sting to the eyes. It is from his wife. This stone, she says, is her last duty to him, and all that is left for her to do for him now.

  We walk back down the hill to the main road, making a detour to the kiln where the limestone clinging to the lower parts of the hill was converted into mortar to build the fort. At the bottom we cross the railway line that carries the cane trains, past a tin shed with a young woman sitting outside it in the shade, reading a book. Beside her lie two long poles, each with a red flag tied to one end. She is the level crossing keeper.

  We catch a bus immediately and embark on the ride home. Every time I get on a Caribbean bus, or more particularly when I stagger off one, I vow that next time we will pay the extra and take a taxi. On the way to the marina we approach three large trees that initially appear to have been decorated all over with white plastic medallions of some kind. When we pass them, they turn out to be dozens of little egrets perched on the branches, their backs turned to the sun and a blistering white in the afternoon’s brightness.

  When we get back to the harbour Europa has gone and been replaced with an enormous motor yacht complete with a small helicopter and revolving radar scanner, although why you would have a radar scanner operating at anchor we have no idea. Its large RIB mills about importantly, driven by a crewman in livery with a handheld VHF clamped to his ear. He looks so pompous that I start emulating him – like mad Michael mimicking the major in Ryan’s Daughter – with one hand to my ear and the other on an imaginary steering wheel, only to find a man leaning on the rail of the motor yacht watching me. I slink below.

  The motor yacht leaves shortly afterwards and is replaced by a two-masted 140-foot sailing ship, named after a famous Briton, and offering people tuition in sailing and diving. They could also do with a bit of training in how to use a RIB in an anchorage. They roar theirs round and round at high speed, heeling it over onto one side before hurtling into the marina past a sign saying, ‘5 knot maximum speed – This is a no wake zone’. Then they do the same thing coming back.

  Voyager is presently covered with tiny rectangular black specks of a surprisingly consistent size and shape but which quickly spread into sooty smudges. We are not sure if they are fallout from a large chimney in the direction of the cane processing plant which pumps out black smoke continuously, or ash from Montserrat’s most recent eruption. We are also being driven demented by flies but have stopped bothering to notch the handle of our swatter as there are just too many of them.

  At 1.30 next morning the dogs on shore have reached a crescendo, as have the revellers on the sailing ship bearing the famous name. He wouldn’t have approved. He was a man of modest habits, strict discipline and a profound belief in individual responsibility. I sleep soundly, regardless, thanks to ear plugs, and wake at dawn dreamily to see from the cabin window a fuzzy whiteness behind the sailing ship. I get up, find my glasses and discover Ocean Queen, a massive cruise ship five decks high. The sailing ship’s RIB is roaring round and round it.

  Ocean Queen begins lowering her own jolly boats just as Ocean King, a matching five-decker, arrives and begins to anchor. After several more roars around the anchorage the people under sailing instruction pull up their RIB and begin to raise their anchor. It seems to take a long time and they end up rather close to the nearest cruise ship. All this activity in the anchorage is occurring, of course, because Hurricane Lenny destroyed the cruise ship dock.

  I sometimes feel sorry for people on cruise ships. It’s not just the gleam they bring to the eye of local traders, as if they were walking wallets. It’s the advertisements. They give the impression that there will only be you on the ship, and that you will become young and beautiful in the process, but when you board you find four thousand similarly deluded people. Then horror of horrors, you find you are travelling in tandem with a doppelganger, identical except for half the name on the ship’s bow, and filled with four thousand more deluded people. And everywhere you visit the queues are terrible. We are glad we did Brimstone Hill fort yesterday. It will be standing room only up there today.

  As we are making our preparations to leave, two small local boats roar either side of us leaving David, currently perched on Voyager’s back steps and securing the outboard, clinging on for dear life. The size and power of cruise ships, not to mention their audience potential, tends to bring out the worst in virile young men in small boats. When we set about lifting the anchor, after raising only a small amount of chain the anchor winch dies and David raises the rest by hand.

  As we set out along the coast he points to two small local boats bobbing in the distance.

  ‘Shall I blast between them?’ he says with rare malice. ‘D’you recognise ’em?’

  ‘Er...’ I say. I’ve always found that my own petty acts of retaliation go badly astray and the colours of these two boats look wrong. There had been some orange paint on one of the offending boats and green on the other, with a bare-chested stud in micro shorts at either tiller. The boats ahead of us look grey but that might simply be the effect of the sunlight on the water. And anyway, we don’t create enough wash even at speed to affect anything much.

  We decide to take the nobler course which is just as well as the boats do, in fact, turn out to be grey. The one on the left contains two dignified, elderly men in shirts and trousers, and the one on the right three people in scuba gear receiving an orderly lesson from a fourth. All of them give us a friendly wave.

  We have the most wonderful sail along the coast of this fish-shaped island. Our route follows the direction of our bus ride yesterday, past fields of cane being harvested, the cane trains tooting their presence and the fort towering above us. Beyond Brimstone Hill lies one of the three mountain ranges that make the centre of this island too steep for habitation. This one is the highest and contains the volcano’s crater. Originally called Mount Misery, the name was changed in 1983, when St Kitts and Nevis gained independence, to Liamuiga, the name the Caribs gave to the whole island and which means fertile, which it surely is.

  It is a stunning sail. The sun sparkles on a gentle sea. The cane leaves shimmer bright green in the sunlight. And although received wisdom says flying fish manage a maximum of 30 feet we witness a flypast from one of them that continues for so long we initially think it is a bird.

  SINT EUSTATIUS

  38

  Such Friendly People

  We arrive at Sint Eustatius, known simply as Statia, at lunchtime. At Oranje Stad in Oranje Baai. This island is Dutch and both the town and the bay are named for the House of Orange, the Netherlands’ royal family.

  In the harbour of Orange Bay, contrary to our Caribbean cruising guide, we have to pick up a buoy as they no longer allow anchoring here. After lunch we paddle ashore to the place where it recommends that visitors land their dinghies. It isn’t easy as there is a strong swell, rocks to be avoided and as you clamber up a metal ladder the ding
hy surges upwards and drops so violently away beneath your feet you feel it must surely overturn at any moment. We pay US$10 at the customs shed on the harbour and then make our way up into the town to the police station, to clear in with Immigration.

  The island is lovely. Saddle-shaped, it has a large dormant volcano at one end and two small ones at the other, with a flat bit in the middle where most of the population lives and there was room to build an airport.

  It is a world out of time. The little town has a stone-walls-and-flowers neatness to it. There is no litter. The residents greet you warmly and genuinely as you pass and the motorists wave – or, where appropriate, stop to offer you a lift.

  They don’t lock their cars when they park them, or even wind up the windows. Mobile phones and handheld VHFs lie on passenger seats. Ask for directions and instead of telling you they drive you there. There are only around 2,000 inhabitants and too few visitors to be a threat, whether of unwanted change or anything else.

  We visit the tiny museum, formerly the family home of the Dutch merchant Simon Docker and also for a time the HQ of Britain’s Admiral George Rodney after he captured the island from the Dutch in 1781 in the aftermath of an historic salute.

  We have already noticed how, so often in these islands, the small local museums turn out to be little gems. Here, the history of the island is presented on a number of levels: the house itself, showing how a Dutch merchant lived; the mercantile environment in which he operated; and in the basement – underground as it were, to where the colonial invaders consigned the native populations they gradually supplanted – is a large model of Amerindian society.

  The house itself is on high ground, light and airy, and would have been a delight to live in. Some of its rooms contain contemporary furniture and furnishings, although probably not the original ones given the rapacious habits of Admiral Rodney.