Massive, majestic, and mountainous is the northern portion of St. Kitts, and it takes no very vivid [[138]]imagination to see in towering Mount Misery the likeness of St. Christopher bearing the infant Jesus on his shoulder which caused Columbus to name the island after his own patron saint. But to the south the mountains with their dense, forest-clad slopes give way to hills covered with endless acres of cane, until at Basseterre the island is almost flat, and only isolated rounded Monkey Hill breaks the rolling, down-like land.
Basseterre is a fittingly pretty town for this lovely island, with its red roofs and its pastel-tinted houses shaded by palms above the wonderfully colored sea, on whose calm surface ride gaily painted sloops and schooners and bevies of rowboats of every color of the rainbow.
But it must be admitted that there is very little of interest here. There is a fairly attractive public garden; flowering shrubs and trees are everywhere; there are pretty embowered residences, and the people are friendly and hospitable. But there is nothing distinctive about the place: it might be any one of a score of dolce-far-niente tropical towns, and it is by no means either prosperous or over-clean. Time was when St. Kitts was a well-to-do island; its planters lived like princes or feudal lords, fleets of ships rode to anchor in its harbor, and thousands of toiling blacks planted and cultivated [[139]]and garnered the golden canes which sent a steady flow of molasses and sugar from the isle and brought an equally steady flow of golden sovereigns back to the Kittefonians’ pockets. But the omnipresent and lowly beet spelled St. Kitts’s doom, as it spelled the doom of many another sugar-producing land, and though the island is by no means poverty-stricken, and during the late war became prosperous for a time, the golden days of the past will never return.
Efforts have been made to win back prosperity with sea-island cotton, citrous fruits, and other tropical products; but it is a hard matter indeed to wean a sugar-planter from canes; and even those who have taken up the cultivation of other things have not been over-successful.
As a winter resort, St. Kitts is delightful, for it boasts a good climate and a healthful one; its scenery is magnificent; it possesses splendid motor-roads that completely encircle the island; it offers excellent fishing and hunting, plenty of outdoor sports, and an active volcano, Mount Misery, with a wonderful climb through the virgin tropical forests to its crater.
The island has, like its fellows, had a checkered career, but it can boast of being the first of the British West Indies to be settled by the English, [[140]]who established themselves here in 1623. However, they did not succeed in holding it in undisputed possession, and what with the Caribs, the pirates, and the French, those earlier colonists had a mighty hard time of it. More than once St. Kitts came wholly under the sway of France. At other times the two nations buried the hatchet temporarily, and while the English confined themselves to the northern half of the isle, with their headquarters at Sandy Point, the French were content with the other half, with Basseterre as their port; yet there was constant friction, and not until 1782 was St. Kitts definitely turned over to the British.
Except in the name of the capital, there are few if any traces of French occupancy, but at Brimstone Hill, close to Sandy Point, are the massive ruins of extensive fortifications built by the British. Here, on an isolated, precipitous mass of rock, for all the world like a young mountain gone astray, is a solid mass of loopholed and battlemented masonry completely covering every available portion of the eight-hundred-foot hill. It is an impressive and redoubtable fortification, well-nigh impregnable in the days of muzzle-loading cannon and black powder, and complete with sally-ports, moats, and drawbridges. But it is quite deserted and useless, the abode of countless monkeys—descendants [[141]]of apes brought from Gibraltar as pets, by the garrison—which are eagerly hunted and esteemed by the Kittefonians as a great delicacy.
Looking upon this stupendous work of defense, one marvels that any enemy ever dared attack or even approach St. Kitts, but, to tell the truth, it never saw battle, for it was not built until 1793, ten years after France and England ceased quarreling over the island and its neighbors, and all too late to be of any value whatsoever to its builders.
As an imposing ruin it is well worth a visit, but its historical attractions are nil. Indeed, St. Kitts seems strangely lacking in anything connecting its present with its rather turbulent and not at all bloodless past. I do not think there is even the customary tale of buried treasure on the island; at least I have never heard one. The people do not claim to have found pirates’ hoards in their cane-fields or caverns; and they do not even associate the name of any great pirate chieftain with their delightful home.
Nevertheless, St. Kitts was at one time a resort of pirates—or, rather, buccaneers—who were attacked by the Spaniards in 1629 and driven from the island. Many of these, of French blood, made their way to Tortuga, off the coast of Haiti, and there formed the nucleus of that famous headquarters [[142]]of the Brethren of the Main. As far as records go there is nothing to show that the freebooters ever returned in large numbers or for an extended stay, and, according to a most interesting document which I was so fortunate as to acquire in St. Kitts, when they did appear they were met with so warm a welcome that it is not at all surprising they gave the lovely island a wide berth.