At Sea -> St Kitts/Nevis -> Guadeloupe -> Martinique -> Dominica -> St Lucia -> Barbados – fly -> Miami/Fort Lauderdale

Dearest Reader,

And so it falls to your humble correspondent to conclude this account of the second and final week aboard the very elegant Seabourn Ovation – that most gracious vessel, whose decks have witnessed both civilised splendour and the occasional lapse in manners too conspicuous to go unremarked.

We again suffered some rough seas and a spot of rain. A hardy son of Scotland, I assure you, found neither cumbersome in the slightest.

Day at Sea

One must confess to a rather prolonged communion with one’s pillows in the morning; a long lie of the most restorative variety, followed by a leisurely half-day at the pool, which is, after all, precisely what the gods of leisure intended. Yet even paradise has its thorns, and aboard the Ovation, those thorns arrive in the form of the “Towel People”.

It has come to this correspondent’s attention – and indeed it would be impossible that it should not – that certain guests of the Ovation are in possession of a most common habit: they dispatch their towels to claim sun loungers at what one can only imagine to be five o’clock in the morning, yet they themselves do not appear until precisely four minutes past four in the afternoon, drawn forth by the last desperate rays of the Caribbean sun. The loungers languish. The towels reign supreme. Society is horrified. Such bad and common behavior.

The evening, one is pleased to report, offered full redemption. After cocktails of the customary excellence, the night was surrendered to Sushi, where your correspondent partook of his usual Blue Sake – that celestial elixir – while Carla and June, those two most entertaining of companions, were in quite extraordinary form. One cannot ask for more.

St Kitts & Nevis

Now here, Dear Reader, is where this chronicle takes a turn of the most dramatic variety – for what was planned was nothing short of magnificent, and what was delivered was… different, though in the end no less magnificent, which speaks entirely to the genius of the captain and crew.

The plan had been outrageous. 

Decadent.

Perfectly, gloriously, unapologetically excessive. A private beach gathering at Carambola on South Friars Bay – that jewel of St Kitts – to which caviar and lobster were to be ferried by high-speed boat directly from the ship’s kitchens. Let that image settle upon your imagination for a moment, Dear Reader. Lobster. Caviar. Delivered by speedboat. To a Caribbean beach. One had rather been looking forward to it.

Alas, Neptune in his infinite wisdom and the seas had their own opinions, and our tenders could not be safely dispatched ashore. One paused. One reconsidered. And then one reconvened – with considerable dignity – around the ship’s pool, where the very same feast was laid out with such impeccable presentation that several guests reportedly forgot they had not, in fact, reached the beach at all.

The crew, it must be stated plainly, executed the entire affair with a professionalism that this correspondent found deeply moving. They are to be praised in the highest terms. A small number of guests, it is understood, were rather less forgiving of Neptune’s intervention. To them, one can only suggest a restorative Blue Sake and a quiet word with themselves.

Guadeloupe

Guadeloupe is shaped, as every well-educated person of good breeding is perfectly aware, like a butterfly, its two wings divided by the Rivière Salée. We were deposited at Pointe-à-Pitre, the island’s commercial capital, which presents itself with a charming and somewhat bewildering mixture of French grandeur and tropical insouciance, as though Paris had been transplanted to the tropics and had decided, on reflection, to slow down considerably and have another pastry.

Your correspondent took a most agreeable turn about the town. The market at La Darse, which sprawls along the waterfront with magnificent disorder, offered pyramids of spices in colours so vivid they seemed almost improper, and some wee: turmeric bright as scandal, scarlet piment antillais that one was firmly advised not to touch without due preparation. One touched one. One was adequately warned. One failed.

A small observation for those who follow: the French of Guadeloupe consider a bonjour not merely a greeting but a moral position. To enter a shop without one is, apparently, to have committed a social transgression of considerable gravity. The French. Your correspondent, being a man of impeccable manners, bonjour-ed with such enthusiasm that the proprietress of a patisserie awarded him an extra madeleine entirely unbidden. Moral: always lead with the bonjour. Indeed!

Coffee was taken at a terrace café in the shade of an old Creole building whose shutters had long since decided their own angle and stuck with it. The tarte aux coco that accompanied it was, and this is not hyperbole, precisely the sort of thing one should encounter at least once before departing this mortal coil. Simple, buttery, fragrant with sharp vanilla. One ate two. Society need not know.

Martinique, again

If Guadeloupe is a butterfly, then Martinique is a crown jewel – and it knows it perfectly well. The French have been here since the seventeenth century and have arranged matters, as they invariably do, to their own maximum satisfaction. The result is an island of quite extraordinary beauty that smells faintly of rum and ambition in equal measure.

We began, as all persons of cultural curiosity must, at the Musée de la Pagerie, the birthplace of one Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, who grew up on this very Martinican sugar estate before reinventing herself entirely as the Empress Joséphine, consort to Napoleon Bonaparte. Yes! I know! Who knew!

The estate is now a small and rather affecting museum, the childhood home reduced to its stone foundations by a hurricane in 1766, the kitchen building alone surviving.

One stood in it and reflected, as one must, on the extraordinary improbability of destiny: that a Creole girl from these tropical ruins should end up sharing a throne, if not ultimately a bed, with the most consequential General of the age. Short, but still a General.

Napoleon, history records, eventually had opinions about her inability to provide an heir. One suspects Joséphine had equally strong opinions about shorty Napoleon, which she was too dignified to commit to the historical record.

It is noted by historians that Martinique, despite producing its most famous daughter in Joséphine, erected her statue in Fort-de-France only to have it twice decapitated by those who considered her complicit in Napoleon’s restoration of slavery. The head has not been replaced. The statue remains, headless, as a conversation one imagines neither party particularly enjoys. History, Dear Reader, is rarely tidy.

In the afternoon, the party repaired to the Habitation Clément in Le François, a rum estate of breathtaking elegance, its great house surrounded by tropical gardens and trees of the sort that make one question why one lives anywhere else.

The estate is currently exhibiting art, including artifacts by one of my favorite blown glass artists – Chihuly

Other art was – notable ……

The Clément family have been producing rhum agricole here since 1887, and unlike the molasses-based rums of lesser imagination, their spirit is distilled directly from fresh-pressed sugarcane juice, the difference being as evident to the initiated palate as the difference between a duchess and her less accomplished cousin. You know to whom I refer, of course.

The tasting that followed was conducted with the seriousness it deserved. Each expression was presented with its own character…

Dominica

Now we arrive at Dominica, which one must immediately distinguish from the Dominican Republic, a confusion that the island’s citizens bear with the weary patience of those who have been correcting this error for generations. Dominica – Dom-in-EE-ka, if you please is the Nature Isle of the Caribbean: volcanic, dramatic, extravagantly green, and refreshingly unbothered by the kind of resort development that has smoothed the personality from so many of her neighbours.

One came here not to recline, but to venture forth. And venture forth one did, in the most literal sense, directly into the island’s extraordinary waterfalls (#365) and river systems (#12) for a white water tubing expedition of entirely unexpected exhilaration.

One is lowered into the current on an inflated ring and simply… surrendered to Dominica’s will. The river, fed by those volcanic mountains and their extravagant rainfall, courses through gorges of dripping fern and overhanging forest, the water cool and startlingly clear, the light arriving in shafts through the canopy above. It is, Dear Reader, the sort of experience that makes one feel rather more alive than one had felt that morning, which was the point entirely. One’s bum is a bit sore at the end due to the many river boulders, but still intact.

Dominica receives, on average, more rainfall than almost any other island in the Caribbean – a fact its forests make abundantly clear. Everything is improbably, almost aggressively green.

One half-expects creatures from a more fantastical era to emerge from the undergrowth. The island is home to the Sisserou parrot, found nowhere else on earth, which one did not see but heard at some distance, presumably judging us.

A forest walk completed the afternoon – paths beneath a ceiling of giant tree ferns and mahogany, the air thick with moisture and the sound of waterfalls everywhere, invisible streams conducting their own private conversations through the roots. A naturalist’s paradise. A Scotsman’s idea of an agreeable Thursday.

St Lucia

Oh, St Lucia! She presents herself, from the sea, as one of the Caribbean’s great theatrical gestures: the twin volcanic spires of the Pitons rising from the water at Soufrière like two acts of geological drama staged purely for the visitor’s appreciation. Castries, our port of call, is the more commercial proposition – bustling, colourful, and alive with the particular energy of a place that has long understood itself to be beautiful and is entirely comfortable with the attention this attracts.

The town has the warm, pleasantly chaotic character of a proper working Caribbean capital: the market at Castries overflowing with hot sauces of varying degrees of optimism, straw hats, and the particular energy of vendors who have identified the cruise passenger as a species requiring gentle but persistent assistance with their purchasing decisions. Your correspondent emerged with provisions he had not planned to acquire and was, upon reflection, not displeased about it.

St Lucia smells of sweet nutmeg and sea air and whatever is being grilled just around the next corner. The people are possessed of an openness that one finds immediately disarming. The island has been French and British no fewer than fourteen times collectively – a fact that has produced a Creole culture of quite remarkable richness, the French patois persisting in the cadence of speech even as English holds official sway. One felt, walking those streets, that St Lucia has simply observed the centuries and decided to make the best of all of them.

Barbados & Departure

Every journey, Dear Reader, must conclude – and the universe, apparently committed to dramatic irony as a structuring principle, had arranged for ours to conclude through the port of Bridgetown, Barbados, which your correspondent will describe only as follows: the less said, the more dignity is preserved. The port was – one reaches for the word – uninspiring. The transfer to the airport was an experience that one endured rather than enjoyed and shall not revisit in these pages. Some things are best released, like a not-quite-ripe mango, into the warm Caribbean air.

The flight home with American Airlines was, by sharp and welcome contrast, a triumph of efficiency. One was airborne, comfortable, and reunited with a drink and steak of reasonable quality before one had fully processed the relief of having left the port behind. The journey onward to Fort Lauderdale by Uber concluded matters in the civilised manner that the port had so conspicuously failed to provide.

· · ✦ · ·

And so, Dear Reader, the Seabourn Ovation and her impeccable crew deposit us, two weeks wiser, considerably better fed, and with a liver that has bravely served above and beyond the call of duty, back upon the shores of the ordinary world.

The Towel People shall continue their dawn occupations.

Carla and June shall be magnificent somewhere.

The Blue Sake shall wait.

Until the next voyage, one remains -as always – your devoted correspondent,
thoroughly entertained, and in the very best of health.

And speaking of the next voyage, Dearest Reader, your narrator will not be me. It will be one of my other, courser, personalities.

In honesty, he is welcome to describe the journey, as 10 days in the Outer Hebrides and St Kilda in a converted lifeboat with 7 other guests, a captain and a chef is not for this correspondent!