On our Windward Islands cruise on the Royal Clipper we visited four of the Windward Islands and three of the Leeward Islands: the countries of Barbados, St. Lucia, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, and St. Kitts and Nevis, and islands within Guadeloupe and Martinique which are overseas departments of France.
A cruise is perhaps the ideal way to visit the islands of the Caribbean. The short stops (typically just six or eight hours) are enough to give a taste of each island, while visiting a new place every day allows for the appreciation of the differences. On our eight-day voyage, we visited six different countries, used four different currencies, and spoke two different official languages. And all within a distance of less than 600 kilometres (that’s less than 400 miles for the non-metric).
Despite their differences, the Caribbean islands do have some, or sometimes all, of these common features: beautiful beaches lapped by turquoise waters, sugar plantations, a rum distillery, and a Spanish/French/British fort that testifies to the fights over many of these islands during the colonial period. We are going to let our pictures do most of the talking about the places that we visited, with just a few interesting things of note:
On Dominica we visited one of the last remaining Carib villages. The Carib people (after whom the “Caribbean” was named) were almost completely wiped out by colonization and the importing of about 4 million slaves into the Caribbean islands from Africa during 350 years of the slave trade. (And that is only about a third of the total number of slaves sent to the New World.) It was interesting to visit the Touna Aute Carib village and hear about their efforts to preserve a traditional way of life.
On St. Kitts, we toured the UNESCO fort of Brimstone Hill. As Canadians, we were impressed to read that one of the British regiments garrisoned there (we believe that the signage said the 47th (Lancashire) Regiment of Foot) had fought under Wolfe at the Plains of Abraham, then in the American War of Independence, and went on to serve under Wellington in the Napoleonic Wars. The scope of the British Empire in those days is hard to imagine.
The final stop of great historical interest to us as Canadians was Guadeloupe. By the late 1700s, Britain had taken most of the French holdings in the Caribbean and in North America (as well as in India, Sumatra, etc.). After the Seven Years War, the 1763 Treaty of Paris provided that:
France lost all its territory in mainland North America except for the territory of Louisiana west of the Mississippi River. France retained fishing rights off Newfoundland and the two small islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, where its fishermen could dry their catch. In turn, France gained the return of its sugar colony, Guadeloupe, which it considered more valuable than Canada. Voltaire had notoriously dismissed Acadia as “quelques arpents de neige” (a few acres of snow).
- Wikipedia
It’s simply amazing that the sugar production of the 1,628 km² of Guadeloupe was considered to be more valuable than all of the millions of square kilometres of North America’s mainland that France conceded!
Bonus Youtube video of a kids parade for carnival season:
Pictures of the Caribbean Islands on Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/100countries/albums/72177720324260541
