Les Saintes and Marie-Galante were both named and claimed by Christopher Columbus on the same day in November 1493. Subsequently they became — and remain — French, part of Guadeloupe. Despite a liking for baguettes, scooters, kissing on both cheeks, and whopping subsidies from metropolitan France, the two islands — within sight of each other — have divergent histories and distinctive landscapes.
Marie-Galante is a round, pancake-flat, green coral island, with a sugar plantation history and a mainly black population. Les Saintes is a scattering of volcanic islands whose residents are predominantly white fishermen and boatbuilders. If Marie-Galante looks somewhat like an old-fashioned Barbados, Les Saintes is an up-and-coming competitor to chic St Barts. Both are just a ferry ride from Pointe-a-Pitre, the capital of Guadeloupe.
The Santois are products of French colonialism. The 1 500 or so people of Terre-de-Haut, one of the two inhabited islands of Les Saintes, are mainly descendants of indentured labourers who arrived in the Caribbean in the 17th century from Brittany and Normandy. When Patrick Leigh Fermor — whose book The Traveller’s Tree is still the best piece of travel writing on the Caribbean — visited Les Saintes on a day trip, he found the people ravaged by alcoholism and disease. Now, tourism and subsidies augment a traditional seafaring economy.
About 6km long by 1,6km wide, Terre-de-Haut has a pretty harbour bobbing with boats, the bay backed by a small settlement as beguiling as any Aegean village. Tourists seek out unadorned white-sand beaches — all can be reached on foot — or saunter through the village and buy patisseries from chubby women sitting in their doorways. It is a dolls’ house of a place — its wooden homes painted in bright, contrasting colours — but now with good restaurants and sarong-selling boutiques. In the main square, the tricolore above the tiny town hall is limp in the heat.
All roads lead from the harbour to the beaches and to the forts because Les Saintes was once a strategic centre. Its most important fortification is Fort Napoleon, rebuilt in the mid-19th century when the French felt the British posed a threat to their interests in the region. It became a garrison, then a prison, most recently during World War II it was home to opponents of the Vichy government of Guadeloupe. The fort now houses a good museum, while the ramparts have a jardin exotique where camouflaged iguanas sunbathe.
Fort Napoleon never saw action, although the Battle of the Saints, one of the great set pieces of all naval battles, was fought in its waters. On that day in 1782, the English navy broke through the French line in a bit of radical strategic thinking that effectively ended French hegemony in the Caribbean.
The importance of the sea appears everywhere in Terre-de-Haut, from the monumental sculpture in the square dedicated to those ”lost at sea” to the cemetery, close to one of the island’s most dramatic beaches, Grand Anse.
The cemetery is noted for the gorgeous pink conch shells that edge the graves, although recently the shells have been largely replaced by what look like white bathroom tiles.
”Authentique” is what the tourist brochure blurb says of the placid, green island of Marie-Galante. Two images help confirm such a definition: deserted beaches and peasant farmers in straw hats who drive ox carts laden with cane. For, like its English-speaking neighbours, Marie-Galante got rich on sugar and slavery.
The classic plantation society that emerged in the 18th century was centred on a great house, a windmill and boiling house, and the wattle-and-daub tikay (small house) of the slaves. Little of this remains except abandoned windmills and a handful of the old estates, which now welcome visitors to rum tastings.
Marie-Galante has two towns, both coastal, both tiny and distinctive for the art deco flourishes of their public buildings. When Marie-Galante was ravaged by a hurricane in 1928, Tunisian-born architect Ali Tur was commissioned to rebuild its public buildings. Thus, Grand Bourg, where the ferries come and go, has an art deco town hall, school and Palais de Justice set around Place Victor Schoelcher.
Art deco, too, came to the buildings of Capesterre, Marie-Galante’s second town. But the greatest visual treat is the view from above the town — down towards its cluster of orange and raspberry roofs to a turquoise sea and, beyond the reef, to the deep royal blue of the Guadeloupe Channel.
At midday the people of Capesterre turn in as the heat seems to drain away all evidence of life. There is, however, always the nearby Plage de la Feuillere, where tourists while away their day at a beach bar under the sea grapes.
Inland from Capesterre, the Bielle distillery is one of the few working legacies of the sugar age. Go in January to May to see the cane being processed. For the rest of the year, there is a tour of the factory, rum to taste and women in Creole costume selling codfish accras (fritters); occasionally, an ox cart passes to complete the set piece.
At the nearby Moulin de Bezard, the island’s only working windmill turns to catch the easterly winds. Recently restored, the windmill’s sails creak as cane is passed between two rollers to extract the juice.
Much of the Caribbean has, until recently, tellingly ignored slavery in its presentation of its past. In Marie- Galante, there have been attempts to rectify that — at the Habitation Murat, for example, one of the great estate house ruins with reconstructed slave huts; while at Pirogue, a nondescript little pond called Mare au Punche is about to be redeveloped as a tourist site. So the story goes, in 1849 recently freed slaves from Habitation Pirogue threw all the rum from the estate into the pond in revenge for the mass killing of blacks whose attempts to vote had been thwarted.
History aside, Marie-Galante has its share of dramatic limestone cliffs and white sand beaches, none of which have been, unusually, ruined by resort hotels. Hotel Cohoba, the island’s one conventional hotel, has even set its cottages behind a line of indigenous forest, splendid in its variety and thickness, that frames the shoreline. At dawn joggers belt along the Plage de Folle-Anse towards the local sugar refinery while children search for red crabs.
It is said that the Amerindians once called the island Tulucaera, after those crabs locally known as touloulou. Columbus changed its name to that of his flagship Marie Galante, landing on that very coast. So, in a sense, the Plage de Folle-Anse stretches back through centuries of island history: from Amerindian settlement, to Spanish exploration, sugar industry and international tourism. Yet in more than 500 years, it has hardly changed.
That’s some achievement. — Â