St. Kitts Has More to Offer Than Wild Monkeys

OLD ROAD TOWN, St. Kitts — Christopher Columbus came here in 1493 on his second voyage because he was looking for gold. Queen Elizabeth II arrived in late 1985 to dedicate Brimstone Hill National Park, the island’s main sightseeing attraction.

And we came here a few months later to see the wild monkeys we’d heard about in St. Thomas.

Only the queen achieved her goal.

“The monkeys, they smart,” John Abbott, the cab driver, told us. “See the scarecrows in the field there? The farmer have to keep movin’ them to keep the monkeys away from his sweet potato crop. The monkey, he see the same scarecrow standing still in one place too long, he just knock him down and help himself to the sweet potatoes.”

In the last couple of years we’ve exchanged the tour buses and professional guides in favor of caroming around Caribbean islands with loquacious cab drivers.

A Bonus in Legends

What they lack in facts they more than make up for in lore and legends. That’s how we heard about the wild vervet monkeys in the first place, from a St. Kittsian who has been driving a St. Thomas cab for 21 years.

He confided that his only problem getting along with the Virgin Islanders was that they used to make fun of him “because the people on St. Kitts, they eat monkey.” Properly prepared, he maintained, monkey meat tastes fine.

Then he told us a poignant story about a father and son hunting monkeys in the interior jungle. The son fired his rifle into a clump of trees when he heard the call of monkeys and killed his father, who had hidden there to lure them by imitating the cry.

But on St. Kitts, Big John (that’s what he was called everywhere we stopped on the island) seemed more interested in showing us as much as possible on our four-hour, fixed-price ($40) tour, especially after he pointed out that we would have had to pay $35 just to get to Brimstone Hill and back. He wanted us to get our money’s worth.

The No. 2 Industry

The government sets all taxi fares for both St. Kitts and nearby Nevis, which together became a new Caribbean nation in 1983. Although it’s still being discovered, tourism is the No. 2 industry after sugar cane, and, from the look of things, there are more cab drivers than sugar farmers here.

The radio station was playing a catchy calypso tune when we stopped at a small roadside stand for a cold Carib beer and a Coke for John (both are bottled here on the island). The lyrics seem to describe a running dialogue between tourists and islanders:

What kind of car you drive?

What kind of house you live in?

You ask me all these t’ings,

I must be in fashion.

Big John lives here in Old Road Town, where Columbus first came ashore and where, in 1623, Sir Thomas Warner and a few other British citizens settled to establish a tobacco colony.

A Battle for Dominance

The French arrived not long after that, and the two nations spent most of the 17th and 18th centuries battling each other, except for one notable occasion when they joined forces to massacre 2,000 Carib Indians at Bloody Point, about halfway between the capital of Basseterre and Old Road Town.

“The blood ran for three days,” Big John says, “and not one escaped. A woman named Barbara betrayed them.”

He is decidedly pro-British, perhaps because he served in the British army, was stationed in Birmingham, and gleefully points out that the British controlled the part of the island where four of the five natural springs were, giving them virtually all the water.

The French, perhaps to console themselves, brought in vervet monkeys from Africa as household pets, and set the creatures loose into the forested interior after the Treaty of Versailles in 1783 awarded the island to the British.

(The British had left their own unwanted animal legacy on St. Kitts when they introduced the mongoose from India in an effort to get rid of rats in the sugar cane. The problem there, according to John is, “They both work on different shifts,” the rats chewing away while the mongoose sleeps.)

The history of St. Kitts--its proper name is St. Christopher, but nobody ever calls it that--is a bit muddled between the British and French, both of whom established their first Caribbean colonies here.

A Friendly Beginning

In the beginning, everyone got along very well. The British took their half of the island out of the middle, while the French seemed content with both extremities, even without water.

The British started building the black lava fortress on Brimstone Hill in 1689 and completed it, with some sporadic French assistance, about 100 years later.

In 1782 Adm. De Grasse and 6,000 French besieged this “Gibraltar of the West Indies” against fewer than 1,000 British troops, seizing it after a month. But then De Grasse lost a battle at sea to Britain’s Rodney, and the French not only had to give up the citadel but the entire island.

Today Brimstone Hill is peaceful and quiet, grassy slopes leading up to wide steps and battlements. A bronze plaque unveiled by Queen Elizabeth last Oct. 23 proclaims the citadel a national park and, next time, we’ll take a picnic lunch to munch atop the battlements and laze in the sunshine by bright hibiscus, admiring the view of Statia (St. Eustatius) across the water.

There’s a $2 admission fee; Brimstone Hill is open daily 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. except Thursdays and Sundays, when the hours are 2 to 5:30 p.m. A small museum traces the history of St. Kitts from the first Stone Age people, the Siboney, down through the stories of the fortress.

Near Brimstone Hill, at the 17th-Century great house called Romney Manor, a spreading 350-year-old Saman raintree casts its welcoming cool on the lawn, while inside the house, artisans create the bright cotton batiks sold throughout the Caribbean under the Caribelle Batik label.

Visitors are welcomed into the workrooms to watch women paint designs in wax onto the white fabric, which is then dyed. A gift shop sells everything from T-shirts ($10) to dresses and skirts ($35) and wall hangings of village scenes ($25-$50). There’s another shop in Basseterre.

A Fog-shrouded Mt. Misery dominates this 65-square-mile island, whose dormant crater once deposited the jagged cliffside Black Rocks and the black sand beach at Dieppe Bay.

A Famous Lemon

There by the palm-dotted beach is Arthur Leaman’s famous lemon. In Big John’s version of the story, an island favorite, the former magazine decorating editor arrived from New York, fell in love with the spot and bought some land. A friend took one look and said, “Uh-oh, you bought yourself a lemon.” So Leaman named his inn The Golden Lemon and set about to prove his friend wrong.

Built around an old stone warehouse, the sunny yellow exterior walls and lush gardens surround 12 luxurious rooms, each with its own distinctive decor, while a new wing of one- and two-bedroom condominiums opened recently.

The ultimate fantasy would be the two-bedroom duplex unit called LC 3 and 4, with its own courtyard pool reached from double doors opening off the living room, while upstairs and down, each large airy bedroom has its own huge bath with Roman tub.

Daily rates range from $185 for two May 1 through Dec. 15 to a maximum of $550 December through May, and include breakfast, afternoon tea, dinner and all laundry service. Call Scott Calder International in New York, (212) 535-9530 or (800) 223-5581, for reservations.

Non-residents of the inn may make lunch or dinner reservations in what is one of the finest restaurants on the island by calling (809) 465-7260 after arriving in St. Kitts.

Between Dieppe Bay, which sits at the top of the chicken-drumstick-shaped island where you’d take a first bite, and the new resort development of Frigate Bay, down at the point where you’d hold it, the road passes country villages.

Each village has its own public bathhouse with people outside politely waiting their turn, fields of waving green sugar cane topped with golden plumes in this month before harvest, black volcanic rocks with waves crashing against them, even a faint rainbow after the afternoon rain. Goats are everywhere, and on the rainy side of the island, mossy air plants grow like green fur along the utility lines.

Unfinished Resort

Frigate Bay is more manicured, albeit incomplete, with golf course, finished and unfinished hotel structures, tennis and casinos. The Royal St. Kitts Hotel and Casino is operated by Jack Tar Hotels ($35 for a day pass to the casino, with meals, drinks and some activities included; various room packages and condominiums available). Good view from there across to Nevis.

Basseterre’s center, The Circus, will not remind you of Piccadilly. The big square is centered with a painted wooden clock. Non-lethal traffic flows around it past a rambling wooden building called The Ballahoo that is lined with several balconies of restaurant tables that overlook the lack of midtown action.

Not far away is a painted statue of the young Queen Victoria, and the former Pall Mall Square, now called Independence Square, the erstwhile slave market facing the Church of the Immaculate Conception.

A Sleepy Town

Basseterre is still an oftimes sleepy West Indies town where the modest shops don’t feel it necessary to post signs outside to hustle customers, and the fad among the belles is to wear bright plastic hair curlers that match their clothes.

Next time we visit St. Kitts, after our picnic on Brimstone Hill, we’re going to take a peek inside the Whiplash Bar in Old Road Town and the Arizona Bar near Black Rocks, maybe even check out Merlyn’s Mini Mart and Pool Room in Sandy Point. If time permits, we may even climb up to Monkey Hill.

To get more information about St. Kitts, contact the Eastern Caribbean Tourist Assn., 220 East 42nd St., New York 10017, telephone (212) 986-9370.