Caribbean Issue : Small is Beautiful : On the Island Nation of St. Kitts & Nevis, the Clock Stands Still and Tourists Are Sparse

On the West Indian island of Nevis, there’s a museum devoted to Admiral Horatio Nelson, hero of the Battle of Trafalgar, who was married on the island in 1767. Among its artifacts--swords, Toby jugs, letters Nelson wrote with his left hand after his right was shot off--is an ornate tall clock with its hands stopped at 2:45. In honor of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, the clock was stopped at the very minute the royal couple entered the room on an afternoon in 1966.

Nevis and that clock have much in common. Both have seen lots of British history, and on the faces of both, time has stood still for decades.

Here on Nevis (pronounced knee-viss), it is possible to slip into the West Indies of 40 or 50 years ago, that sweet time before runway extensions, package tours and all-inclusive resorts with casinos at their cores.

That is the Caribbean I first touched down in 35 years ago, and fell in love with almost before the wheels were chocked.

I saw tiny houses that must have come from a confectionery shop. What kept those pink-and-orange-marzipan walls and buttercream lattices from melting in the rain, I wondered. What was that smell , I asked, that smoky aroma with hints of molasses and coconut? Nobody gave me a definitive answer then or since, but remembering that fragrance now, I can taste the salted sweetness of a mango dipped in the sea, hear the toy-whistle sound that identifies a sugar factory and feel a Caribbean breeze as soft as fog.

I fell for that smell--maybe it was the aroma of coalpot cooking--for bare beaches, uncultivated gardens and West Indian people, who spoke the most beautiful accent I had ever heard.

In the ‘50s, tourists were few enough that we didn’t outnumber the locals, and visitors seemed to have less money then. We mixed easily in the rickety restaurants and rumshop bars and at big, loud weekend dances at pavilions on the beach. Acquaintances were struck up quickly and there was always an invitation to “come lewwe fire one,” which then as now meant “come have a drink.”

Time has passed, and who knows how many marzipan houses have been razed? Once-bare beaches are lined with condominiums and shopping malls. Most of today’s tourists have too much money and most islanders still haven’t enough.

But even now, a precious few outposts of the Caribbean of the ‘50s can be found. Among the best examples are the islands of St. Kitts and Nevis, two former British possessions that became one independent nation on Sept. 19, 1983. These islands, only two miles apart, are about 200 miles southeast of Puerto Rico and 400 miles north of Trinidad, near the top of the Lesser Antilles.

Although St. Kitts--the larger half of the nation--is a far cry from heavily developed Antigua or St. Martin, it has a large airport, full-service resorts, gambling, shopping and nightlife. Like Nevis, it is amply endowed with beaches.

Between them, these two English-speaking islands have something to please most Caribbean visitors. The choice they offer--of a bit of development in the case of St. Kitts, or practically none on Nevis--together with the great natural beauty and historical significance they share, are likely to make them one of the top Caribbean destinations of the ‘90s.

St. Kitts has stressed careful planning of tourist facilities. The island is shaped like a short-handed canoe paddle. Since the early 1980s, new hotels, golf courses, condominiums and private vacation villas have been channeled into the base of the paddle, near the excellent beaches at Frigate Bay. No high-rise buildings are allowed and environmental protection is emphasized.

A new area for development has now opened adjacent to Frigate Bay. It is the handle of the paddle, narrow enough for most of its length that the sea is visible on both sides from the new South East Peninsula Highway.

“We didn’t know that down here was so beautiful,” a Kittitian friend told me as we drove the length of the highway earlier this year. “A lot of people have been living on this island 80 or 90 years and have never seen what’s down here.” The highway, completed in just two years and still empty, is as scenic as any in the West Indies. A Caribbean version of the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia, it follows the spine of dry hills that overlook beautiful coves and beaches.

Beyond this tourist zone and the capital city of Basseterre, St. Kitts is a collection of villages with names such as Challengers, Tabernacle, Mansion and Lodge, surrounded by hundreds of acres of sugar-cane fields.

Sugar-cane cultivation has all but disappeared from most Caribbean islands, but on St. Kitts it continues, nationalized and supported by the government.

In spring, during cane-cutting season, the island wakes up to the whistle of the sugar factory. Throughout the day, antique engines and carts roll along the 30-mile route of the island’s narrow-guage sugar-cane railroad, hauling carts of green stalks to the factory for crushing. The occasional whiff of sweetness in the air is a reminder of the West Indies described by Jean Rhys, Lafcadio Hearn and Alec Waugh.

Sugar makes this a working island whose people have an existence outside of tourism. Agriculture accounts for nearly half of all jobs.

And sugar cultivation connects St. Kitts with its past. Crumbling stone sugar-cane mills, the ruins of the great houses of the English aristocracy, and forts built by the British to discourage other colonial powers testify to the history of these islands.

First planted on St. Kitts in 1648, sugar reached its peak years in the 18th Century, enabled by the labor of thousands of African slaves.

“In that time, sugar was a commodity as valuable as oil in our time,” Larry Armony told me one day last spring. Armony is chairman of Brimstone Hill Fortress National Park, the first national park in this island nation. We talked at the fortress, a vast collection of handsomely restored stone buildings and fortifications on an 800-foot peak on the northwest coast of St. Kitts. From the heights of Brimstone Hill, British troops defended St. Kitts against the French.

In recent years, a road has been built to the top of the hill and buildings have been beautifully restored with money from public and private sources. Visitors who drive to the fortress will be rewarded by the island’s best view. There are exhibits in a small museum and a gift shop offering an excellent choice of publications and island crafts.

Another kind of colonial architecture--you might call it Anglo-French-Kittitian--can be seen in St. Kitts’ lively capital city, Basseterre. The city, whose population is now about 20,000, was founded in 1727 by the French, who, off and on, shared possession of the island with Britain.

Basseterre’s buildings are clustered around a deep-water port enlivened by inter-island cargo boats, occasional cruise ships and a market whose vendors offer just-caught fish and some of the Caribbean’s most flavorful produce, from mangos to fiery peppers and the red salad staple that the jovial market women call tomartees .

Good Kittitian cooks comb the market for ingredients for their coconut biscuits; cassava pone made from nutmeg, coconut and orange rind; homemade ginger beer; pumpkin soups; fish pies; mackerel and coconut “run down,” made with boiled bananas or yams, and goat water, the oddly named spicy West Indian mutton stew.

Nearby are two reminders of the long British presence here--the Circus and Warner Park. The Circus is a traffic circle with a huge Victorian clock-cum-water fountain at its center. The Ballahoo bar and restaurant on the Circus is the place for limin’ . That’s a West Indian word for taking it easy, perhaps over a rum punch and a plate of parrotfish.

The park is the site of cricket matches as well as events of the annual Carnival. Held just after Christmas, St. Kitts’ Carnival remains more traditional than many such events in the islands. Uproarious days of music and dance include themes brought from Africa during slavery. “Moko jumbies,” for instance, dance through the streets on stilts six to 10 feet high, clad in bloomers, dresses and big black top hats, a practice that can be traced to West African ancestors.

Basseterre’s architecture brings out the color film. A typical downtown building houses shops in a stone-walled ground floor and residences in the wooden floors above. A gallery often runs the width of the second floor to provide a cool place for the household and protection from sun and rain for shoppers below. Gingerbread lace is applied with enthusiasm, as is paint in all colors of the market women’s fruit and fish: pepper red with soursop green, ripe mango with breadfruit, a lobster red door on a pineapple yellow house.

The area around the Circus has lots of souvenir and clothing shops, but many visitors head first for the St. Kitts Philatelic Bureau on Bay Road. The island’s formal name, St. Christopher, is seldom used now except on official documents. Even the softly colored postage stamps for which the island is known bear the name St. Kitts.

Nearby is the pier from which the ferry departs for Nevis, two miles across the Narrows and about 50 years away in time. There are also inter-island flights across a breathtaking landscape of hills and palm-edged beaches.

Nevis is a truffle of an island, only 35 square miles in area, a place for connoisseurs and travelers whose idea of a good vacation is a good rest, a good book, good food and good company. Nevisians still outnumber tourists, and animals--donkeys, goats and Vervet monkeys whose ancestors arrived on French ships in the 17th Century--outnumber Nevisians. This is an island out of a historical romance, dotted with the ruins of sugar plantations whose legends include duels, runaway brides and mysterious fires.

Although sugar is no longer produced on Nevis, the island is full of reminders of the era of the great plantations, when the planter aristocracy--dubbed the plantocracy --lived on high, cool hillsides in stone great houses, overlooking the sea and surrounded by the fields that were the source of their wealth.

Several one-time great houses and sugar mills have been recycled as typical Nevisian inns. Each is small, each has its own personality. My own longtime favorite is Montpelier Estate, owned by James and Celia Gaskell. James Gaskell reconstructed Montpelier’s great house on the ruins of one of the island’s early plantations, the estate of an 18th-Century president of Nevis, John Herbert.

“He sends annually to England 500 casks of sugar,” Horatio Nelson wrote in 1780, before his marriage at the plantation to Herbert’s niece, France Herbert Nisbet. The ceremony was performed under a silk-cotton tree, reputedly the huge old tree that stands outside the inn today. The restored stone tower of John Herbert’s sugar mill now stands guard over Montpelier’s swimming pool, and pieces of antique machinery are displayed along the walks to guest cottages.

When I stayed at Montpelier earlier this year, it had been six years since my last visit to Nevis, and I was happy to see how little things had changed. Telephone service and electrical power on the island are still quirky, but generators take care of essentials.

Air conditioning is not among those, by the way. Traditional Nevisian inns such as Montpelier rely on the trade winds for cooling; it was refreshing to sleep under a ceiling fan in a room filled with the fragrance of the gardens beyond my louvered windows.

The major event of my visit was an invitation to attend the opening of Nevis’ first large hotel, the Four Seasons Resort. Islanders view the handsome new resort as a mixed blessing.

Local environmental groups praise the hotel’s owners for building a low, rambling structure in a West Indian design. But the hotel is air-conditioned, and it has a golf course that consumes more water each day than the capital city of Charlestown. But for now, most islanders seem to agree with the government official who spoke at the lavish opening party, praising the hotel’s role in bringing new revenue to Nevis.

Whatever happens with the razzamatazz of development, the Nelsons’ faded marriage certificate is still displayed at Fig Tree Church, one of five 17th-Century Anglican churches on the island, and visiting them is one of the island’s quiet pastimes. Churchyards hold quaintly worded memorials.

The reconstructed Alexander Hamilton Birthplace in Charlestown, the island’s capital, commemorates another bit of history. Hamilton, who became an associate of George Washington and first Treasury Secretary of the United States, was born on Nevis in 1757.

The Hamilton house, rebuilt with contributions from the U.S. State Department as well as local money, officially opened the day the nation became independent. It houses a small museum of Hamiltoniana, as well as a gift shop where local food items and crafts are sold.

But while the island has a great deal of history per square mile, it is nature that attracts most visitors to the island. “We are certainly seeing an increase in nature tourism,” Jim Gaskell told me when I visited Nevis a few months ago. Because the island is small and--lacking a large airport--less accessible than others, it missed the development rush that has caused environmental damage elsewhere, which makes it a favored destination for the new wave of “green” tourists.

Nevis remains a place where goats graze in churchyards and men ride to town on donkeys. Its main highway is a 26-mile route around the island. Its beaches are empty, but its rain forests and coastlines are crammed with birds and monkeys, mongooses, tree frogs, land crabs and the fireflies called “Simey Jimmies.” Honeybees, which arrived in 1720, feed on cocnut, mango and genip trees, coral creeper and hibiscus. Honey-cutting is an important source of employment here.

Trails lead into the rain forest and to the summit of 3,232-foot Nevis peak; guides are available on the island.

I love both of these different islands for different reasons, but when I wake up in the Caribbean, I want it to be on Nevis, where the trade winds blow through open windows. I remember a morning not long ago when the sound that woke me was the outraged braying of a donkey on the hill beyond my ginger tree. Maybe a monkey scared him. Maybe he saw a jumbie. But I was glad the donkey woke me in time for the beach, because clocks on this island are undependable.

On Nevis, it’s always quarter to three on an afternoon in 1966.

GUIDEBOOK

St. Kitts and Nevis

Getting there: American Airlines flies from Los Angeles to San Juan, with connections from San Juan to St. Kitts via American Eagle. Round-trip excursion fare from Los Angeles to St. Kitts, with 14-day advance purchase, minimum stay of three days and maximum of 21, is $690 plus tax for weekday travel, $736 plus tax for weekends. Air travel between St. Kitts and Nevis is via LIAT; $20 one way.

Where to stay: St. Kitts offers a wide choice of hotels, from sprawling the Jack Tarr Village at Frigate Bay to the cool elegance of the White House, a restored 250-year-old great house near Basseterre.

Jack Tarr is an all-inclusive resort with more than 100 rooms, casino, golf course and tennis courts. Winter rates begin at $250 double. Frigate Bay, St. Kitts, West Indies; from the United States, call (809) 465-2651.

The White House, on a hillside with a view of Basseterre and the sea, has 10 rooms, a swimming pool, grass tennis court and croquet lawn. Winter rate is $350 per day for two, including breakfast, dinner and afternoon tea. P.O. Box 436, St. Peter’s, St. Kitts, W.I., (809) 465-8162.

The Fairview Inn, on the west coast above Basseterre, is a West Indian wedding-cake house with 30 rooms and a scattering of cottages. Winter rate is $100-$120 for two; great local dishes served in the dining room.

Nevis hotels are fewer and smaller, but no less attractive.

The “Discover Nevis” package offered by the Montpelier Plantation Inn and Golden Rock Hotel--both restored plantation houses--includes accommodations for seven nights, breakfasts, dinners, beach and town transportation and tours for $2,032 per couple, Dec. 20-April 14. Montpelier, Box 474, St. John’s Parish, Nevis, W.I., (809) 469-5462. Golden Rock Estate, Gingerland, Nevis, W.I., (809) 469-5346)

Where to eat:

ST. KITTS

Fishermen’s Wharf, at the Ocean Terrace Inn--known locally as the OTI--is a popular local gathering spot. Local fish is served on a waterside deck.

For a special occasion, try The Patio at Frigate Bay. Helen Malliahau produces dishes such as lamb en croute , served in the patio of a private house amid lovely gardens.

Every visitor to Basseterre makes at least one stop at the Ballahoo, just off the Circus, for rum drinks and roti (a filled crepe), or for a leisurely lunch.

NEVIS

Little Nevis hasn’t much of a restaurant scene. Most visitors explore the excellent fare at the island’s hotels.

Golden Rock, Old Manor and Nisbet Plantation offer locally grown foods creatively prepared.

For more information: Contact the St. Kitts and Nevis Tourist Board, 414 East 75th St., N.Y. 10021, (212) 535-1234.