St. Barthélemy, to give it its complete name, is a place.
It is is also a group of people and a way of life.
The place stays more or less the same: a fixed set of hills and valleys emerging from a warm and generally friendly ocean.
It is small, dry, rocky, and steep. Agriculture of any kind is an exercise in frustration; fresh water is always in short supply. The island isn't tall enough to force the moist Trade Wind aloft where it can cool and squeeze out precious drops of rain.
A characteristic feature of St. Barths' taller neighbors is a seemingly permanent dense cloud enveloping the higher peaks, a water factory that supplies the lush tropical undergrowth that most northerners think of when they think of Caribbean islands. Look westward to Saba, or St. Kitts: the cloud is almost always there, constantly materializing on the windward side and de-materializing on the leeward side. That's why it doesn't drift away with the others; this kind of cloud is more of a process than an object. In St. Barths there is no such thing; only the endless parade of trade wind cumulus parading overhead.
This lack of rainfall explains several important things:
There was never any hope of lucrative sugar plantations in St. Barths. It was too dry, too steep, too rocky, and, finally, too small. Unsuitable for agriculture, the island was never seriously coveted as a prize during the colonial wars of the 18th century.
It did, however, have a serviceable harbor, and this allowed St. Barths to play a key role in that intermittent conflict, a role that was to presage much of its future.
As a free port under Swedish rule, St. Barths served the useful purpose of providing a trade and supply center for the various warring factions. When a British, French or Spanish sea captain captured a prize or raided a settlement, he could sell the booty in St. Barths, and at the same time resupply his ship. Overflowing warehouses surrounded a harbor packed with ships from many nations, the population of Gustavia reached six thousand, and a mercantile tradition was established that has lingered to the present day.
Coincidentally, the agricultural uselessness of St. Barths' land precluded the usual need for large numbers of slaves. This has resulted in a regionally singular prominence of European bloodlines. Most St. Barths' People descend directly from their Briton and Norman ancestors, though "a lick of the tar barrel" is evident from time to time.
Why is it, then, if Nature has been less than generous, that everyone is so eager to tell you how beautiful St. Barths is ? In exclusively natural terms it isn't beautiful at all. Compared to the green sloping plains of St. Kitts, or the lush river valleys of Martinique, it is scrawny, parched, and inhospitable. There is, of course, an explanation.
St. Barths is beautiful because of the ingenious alliance between the place that Nature made, and the place that men and women have made within it.
It's more of a feeling than a catalog of sights, sounds, and smells. Some corner of our minds recognizes that a people have evolved a way of life, adapted to difficult circumstances, that has resulted in things like charm, and pride, and peace, and, more recently, plenty. |
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