By 1778, the British had secured a small peninsular stronghold at the north of the island. They sent German mercenaries into the deep mountain jungles to pick off stray Frenchmen. They launched naval assaults, and after five more years of war, the island was at last theirs.
Or so they thought. With their newfound freedom, the black Caribs feared for their future and formed freedom fighter bands across St. Lucia to engage their new enemy - the British. This loose-knit coalition, although at last it would disband in defeat, was not unique - slave rebellions were popping up across the islands. They burned the sugar cane plantations, ravaged the militaries, fought for their lives.
Rebellions broke out in St. Vincent, in Grenada, and Dominica. In Haiti, which had been under French control, the slave rebellion was so vicious that it left thousands dead, bloodied, or butchered half alive. The Haitian rebellion would leave the French military with a broken back and in sore need of funding. So broke by the slave uprisings, the French would be forced to sell off their mainland American holdings to feed their world empires elsewhere.
This sell-off, which the Americans would call the Louisiana Purchase, would transform America and help them build their own agricultural empire in the West Indies a century later.
We left Soufriere and rode the coastline north. On the steepest rocks below us grow thousands of organ pipe cactuses. This sight - the cactus in the moist tropics - is sometimes seen as odd. But the cactus is believed to actually have evolved around here somewhere.
There are two theories about where the cactus became a cactus. One place is pretty much right here in the Lesser Antilles. Another place, close by in Northern South America. Either way, it is believed that as the large super-continent called Gondwanaland was splitting apart, the Caribbean was a much drier place. The whole region was arid, like the island Aruba is today.
These plants' leaves turned to spines and their roots became swollen.
Their ultimate destiny as icons of the Mexican and Southwestern Deserts did not begin and end there. The cactus, although one plant group among several around the world that came to similar succulent means of surviving aridity, is in some ways considered the new world's most successful plant group. The tiny potbellied plant diversified itself from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego in over three thousand five hundred species.
The coastline road is unpopulated for much of the way, and eventually flattens out from mountainous to valley flats - banana farms. Men and women with machetes, roaming the orchards. St. Lucia is the largest banana exporter of all the windward islands. It is a part of Derek Walcott's vision of a Caribbean that can determine its fate with or without the cruise ships.
