We are in France! We dropped anchor in the harbor in front of the petit village of Bourg, or “City” in English. The sun shone brightly this Sunday morning as we took Zodiacs to the pier. The Saints (Iles des Saintes) are a small archipelago of seven islands and are a dependency of Guadalupe which in turn is a distinct region of France, referred to as the Départment of d’Outré Mer. This territory has the same relationship to France as Hawaii has to the US. The inhabitants are French citizens, can vote in all elections, and have all the perquisites of being French citizen and a member of the European Union. The official currency here is the Euro. And the shops are not inexpensive, as I know many of us found out. I saw a great number of bags bearing the shop name Mahogany.
The town’s two most imposing buildings are a lovely Catholic Church Our Lady Queen of the Sea and a town hall, proudly proclaiming the motto of the French Republic Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité -- ideals that emerged from the French Revolution. Fisherman from Brittany originally settled the small islands in this archipelago and their descendants are still here today.
Once ashore I began our tour and led the group up to the magnificent overlook of Fort Napoleon built by Napoleon III between 1841 and finished in 1867. The vistas from the top of the island are remarkable – we could see Guadalupe to our north and Dominica to our south. During our visit to the Fort and the museum I explained the crucial Battle of the Saints, where the largest naval battle in the western hemisphere took place between April 7 and 12, 1782, concluding in the bloody defeat of the French shops under Admiral Comte de Grasse who surrendered his sword to the English Admiral George Rodney. This battle played an important role in the American War of Independence and may have helped shorten that conflict.
Today Fort Napoleon houses a good museum – the exquisite models of Rodney’s Formidable and de Grasses’s Ville de Paris are amongst the best large models I have ever seen -- and a botanical garden with many of the representative species of flowering trees on the Lesser Antilles represented. In addition to the trees, there are wonderful cacti, euphorbia and aloes. We also visited the nesting areas of the large land iguanas where luckily we spotted three of these wonderful creatures soaking in the sun, the largest of which was about 3’ in length and perched on a branch looking towards Guadalupe.
After the visit to the Fort many of us explored this wonderful village, shopped and ate some of their great homemade ice cream. Lunch was on the Lido Deck aboard. The sailors went to the yards and hoisted the sails at 2PM. They were able to raise the great spanker sail and we sailed at about 6 knots until 5:45PM.
Tonight during drinks on the Lido, the Captain bade us farewell and wished us good seas as we readied for disembarking tomorrow morning. Ian completed his work on the guest’s slides and set them on the great screen for all to see. It was remarkable how the different photos revealed a different perspective of the last seven days. We all went to a wonderful dinner, chatted, feasted and drank until we happily went off to bed. Tomorrow, Antigua.
