17:08.963N 062:37.894W

Whisper
Noel Dilly
Sun 24 Mar 2013 15:01
"Nevis - 22nd March"

We left Whisper at 8:30am so that we would arrive at the dock in Charlestown in time to meet Teach.  We didn't want to be late for our island tour and start off our day with a black mark against our names on the Register!  As we tied up Rustle we were greeted by Barry, who was to be our guide as Teach was unable to take us.  Barry had a good sense of humour and we all got on well.  As he drove along he told us points of interest about the island.  There are some 12,000 residents, with 53 churches of various dominations as the people love to go to church on Sunday.  The island being volcanic has good fertile soil and used to have several large sugar plantations, which are no longer farmed.  The owners beautifully situated homes have now been turned into equally beautiful hotels.  The islands main income now is from tourism.  Our first stop was the Four Seasons Hotel, this purpose built beach hotel was oozing wealth, but it has brought many jobs to the community.  We had a peak inside and it was quite ostentatious.  The gardens were beautifully manicured and as we drove through Barry stopped to talk to a friend, who was working in the gardens.  Evidently when the hotel was built, a bacteria was brought in which has killed all the palm trees around the hotel and now it has spread along the beach and slowly the palms are dying.  They are hoping to bring in a different variety from St Lucia to see if they will survive, but palms take some 15 years to grow tall so it will be sometime before this gorgeous beach is backed by tall swaying palms again. 

We saw the area where Jamestown the first town built on Nevis used to be, it was destroyed by an earthquake and tidal wave in 1680.

Every so often Barry would toot his horn gently and wave at people he knew, he could not believe it when I told him that in Britain, people mainly blast their horns in anger.  All the beaches on Nevis are public and we stopped to look at one openly walking through the hotel complex of tiny apartments.  We saw Nelson's Spring, where the fleet would anchor in the bay and bring barrels ashore and roll them up to a natural spring, fill them and roll them back again.  Whilst Nelson was Captain of HMS Boreas he married Fanny Nisbet, the daughter of the owner of the Montpelier Plantation.  We were shown the site where the marriage had taken place under a silk cotton tree on the plantation.  The developers of this hotel had converted its old windmill into an attractive room where wedding ceremonies could be performed.  It's old pieces of machinery, cogwheels, drive shaft etc lay around on the lawn as decorative features, even the old iron rings used to restrain the sails when the mill was not in use were there embedded in huge pieces of rock. 

We drove up the long stone wall drive of Golden Rock Estate which borders onto the rain forest.  The magnificent historic buildings are set amongst bright flowers, it was very beautiful.  The old house was built of volcanic stone, the pinks and greys were amazing against the strong orange of the painted wooden window frames and shutters.  The lush gardens have been so thoughtfully created around the many stone ruins of the sugar mill.  The dining area overlooked a wondrous water garden with distant views over the island and far out to sea.  We spoke to one of the gardeners who has worked there for 20 years and has seen it all mature.  The gardens were so lovely that later when Barry asked if we would like to visit the Botanical Gardens we declined.  The drive down to the main road through the estate was on two single tracks of stone and concrete with a grass strip in the middle, we learnt that this was so that the donkeys pulling the cart loads of sugar cane could walk on the soft grass and the cart wheels could roll more easily on the hard core of stone and concrete.

The highlight of the day was a visit to Cottle Church, it was built of stone in 1824 and was  the first church in the Caribbean to be built for all people regardless of colour so that they could worship together.  It was built by an English planter, Thomas Cottle, on land inherited from his father, a lawyer who became the solicitor-general of St Kitts, so that his family and those of his slaves could worship together.  Whilst many plantation owners still favoured slavery, Thomas Cottle worked hard to improve the conditions of slaves, educate them and convert them to Christianity.  The Church is now a ruin, but volunteers have cleared the grounds which had become overgrown and made some restoration.  They also erected a shelter in the corner of the grounds, with literature telling the history of slavery in the region and photographs of the restoration work carried out.  This site had a wonderful atmosphere, it was not high up on a hill like other churches seen during the day, but lies peacefully at the foot of green rolling hills.  It was a special place to have visited.
 
Photographs:  "Cottle Church"
 


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