More On St. Kitt's
05 April 2014 | Basseterre, St. Kitt's
Lynn
My first assessment of Basseterre, outside of the cruise ship area, was wrong. The town is clean, and very nice. The streets are wider than the norm in most of the islands, due in large part to a fire that nearly decimated the town in the 1860’s that allowed them to make it organized. This island was the first one that was really colonized, and has been fairly prosperous for much of the time, with sugar as king.
A little history about the island. St. Kitt’s (or St. Christopher) is the mother colony for the Eastern Caribbean. Sir Thomas Warner brought the first English colonists to this island. Not too long after, a boat of French colonists came ashore after narrowly escaping a Spanish ship; they set up housekeeping, too. The two groups ganged up on the Caribes that were still here and killed them at a place now called Bloody Point. The English and French tolerated each other, but eventually the French fought the English at Brimstone Hill in a drawn out siege. A couple of years later, the Treaty of Versailles gave the island totally to the English. From St. Kitt’s colonists branched out to the other islands.
With the English completely in control, the island could settle down to making money, especially with the lucrative sugar trade. The refortified Brimstone Hill Fortress would become the Gibraltar of the Caribbean. The island had it good. 98 plantations dotted the land, and today, because of the high lime content in the mortar, many of the ruins are in exceptionally good shape, with walls built 250 years ago still standing and holding their own. The landscape is liberally dotted with chimneys and mills from the sugar processing done at those plantations. In the 1930’s, they even built a railway around the island to being the sugar form the plantations to the port.
Today, many of the sugar cane fields lie fallow. Sugar is being replaced by tourism and resort/housing developments. The building sector of the economy is quite strong.
We see evidence of all of these things here. It is hard to go anywhere on the island and not see the evidence of the building boom. The old chimneys and mills appear like dandelions in summer. Brimstone Hill Fortress is a World Heritage Site, and has been well taken care of. The old railway has been turned into a tourist attraction.
When things were going well, it wasn’t uncommon to build churches that were more than just functional. There are a couple of churches in Basseterre that reflect the prosperity that could be found on St. Kitt’s. The churches in downtown Basseterre are in excellent shape, but there are some farther from the center of town, or in the countryside, that reflect the harder times since sugar has fallen from its’ throne (trade protectionism is the reported culprit here).
The main town of Basseterre has been either well maintained, or well spruced up. Most of the “original” buildings are still in use (original from after the 1860 fire, anyway), and look as fine as they day the last roof tile was laid. The roads are spacious, and not overly crowded with cars, making it an easy place to walk around. Crews pick up the garbage left behind by the careless. “The Circus” is a mini Picadilly Circus, and there are a couple of fountains and statues adorning roundabouts and squares.
The market is not fancy, but it is still a typical Caribbean market. The building is not full, but the typical plethora of vendors offering their wares out on the street, where the rent is more affordable, is there. The bounty of the land is laid out, and it is so nice to experience tasty tomatoes again, as well as fresh bananas, plantain, breadfruit and good pumpkin. And while not quite as delectable as Dominican grapefruit, Kittitian grapefruit is still mighty fine!
And through it all, we are greeted with smiles and friendliness. Once people realize we are not from a cruise ship, but here on our own boat, they start to open up even more. Yachties are not really that well known here, which is a blessing and a curse. Nice not to have crowded anchorages (or marinas), but a shame that so many people are bypassing this wonderful place.