Memories of Antigua

Roger here, with impressions of Antigua which we have left. Lene will post on our successful passage on Monday, January 17, from there to Guadeloupe, where we are now.

Antigua is a very British island. It also a very black island, populated mostly with the descendants of slaves who worked the sugar plantations and those who were freed and taught trades, upon arrival, after Britain had declared the slave trade illegal, but before it declared slavery itself illegal. It is also a very cosmopolitan island with yachts large and like ours, small, from cities around the world, though with perhaps a higher concentration of boats from England and countries that were once part of its empire including Canada and Australia than in the French islands.

The island is quite sports minded. We saw a young black woman whacking the heck out of a tennis ball served to her by a big strong young man -- training to be the next Williams sister perhaps? And a fleet of very small sailboats was racing around us every night, with considerable skill. It seems that an empty mooring next to us was their windward mark and they came close, some passing in front and others behind us after they rounded this mark, and yelling to each other.


The other end of their race course was under the rainbow. There was also an eight day Cricket match that we did not attend.

The salamander is perhaps the unofficial national animal. They are everywhere, mostly brown or green. I tried to help the woman in customs who had one in her office when we checked in at Jolly Harbor, but he was too fast for me to catch.

Customs was not as efficient as on the French islands where the forms are filled out on a computer, and it is more expensive in Antigua. We had to fill in long forms in triplicate on the way in $US16 (The native currency is the Eastern Caribbean Dollar with one $US equal to 2.64 $EC. But prices were high; it costs a lot of ECs to buy anything.) but then we had to fill out an almost ientical form on the way out and pay $US108 (50 for "port charges" and 58 for two exit visas -- which they would have charged us at the airport had we flown out.

Unlike all of the other nations we have visited so far, which import all of their beer, Antigua has its own home brew, Wadadli, not bad, which is the original inhabitants' name for their island.


Its label features a map of the island. The map is why I have a Wadadli tee shirt. But in fact we visited only three of the harbors by boat and one by bus, of the more than twenty harbors the island has to offer.

Antigua is where we tried native foods. We stewed a quince in white wine, cinnamon and sugar and have a black (on the outside) white (on the inside) yam to cook and a christophane (I'll tell you what it tastes like after we eat it). We got these on our bus trip to St. John, Antigua's only and capitol city, where the cruise ships come in. Our one eyed bus driver was a frustrated tour guide and gave us a running commentary on the sights of his island. Though the route went from the south central coast to the west central coast, we were able to see the other side of the island, briefly, from afar, when at the high area in the center. We also saw a church made of the pale green limestone that is quarried here.


I had dried salt cod, bakala, which Mark Kurlansky, in his book, Cod, told was was the only material protein source for the slave population, shipped to the islands from New England in exchange for sugar and rum. Bakala is kind of like gefilte fish in the sense that poor people's food becomes a nostalgic favorite. You are supposed to soak it in water to reconstitute it and get rid of the salt but you are not getting rare or even medium done fish and it remains salty. I think you have to acquire the taste for it. With it came "chop up": a mix of chopped okra and spinach. And plantains, which they boil and ducanas: a mix of banana and sweet potato, that has been steamed in a banana leaf and comes out sweet and looking like a four inch long flattened cylinder.



We were impressed with the rugged barren beauty of the cliffs that conceal inlets to this island. A photo I took from the top of Dawes' Hill of English Harbor, showing the flat peninsula jutting into it that is the Nelson Dockyard is in this post. So is a photo of the three huge manual windlasses


used to careen the warships. Careening was the process by which huge ships were pulled over onto their sides in shallow water (one side at a time) to permit the bottom to be cleaned and repaired.