St. Lucia Moleskine Journal Notes
Field sketches from Soufrière, St. Lucia, drawn in my Moleskine journal.
Updated September 29, 2026
I kept this Moleskine on a trip Jane and I took to St. Lucia, near the southern end of the Lesser Antilles. Most of it was drawn around Soufrière, the old French town on the island’s southwest coast, in the shadow of the Pitons. We drove a jeep with a local guide up into the rainforest reserves of the interior, stopped at sugar mills and plantation gardens, and spent the evenings with the journal and a glass of rum.
It is less a diary than a naturalist’s notebook. The pages fill up with the island’s parrots and orioles, its mangroves and fruit trees, a timeline of its history and a list of everything we ate. Many of these notes grew into my long essay on St. Lucia and the botanical history of the Antilles. You can also see my finished, hand-painted map of St. Lucia.
The journal opens with a map of the Lesser Antilles, the arc of islands from the Virgin Islands down to Trinidad and Tobago, with St. Lucia among the Windward Islands.
An Island That Changed Hands
St. Lucia changed hands between Britain and France more than a dozen times, which is why the towns have French names, the civil law still has French roots, the official language is English, and most people speak a French-based Kwéyòl at home. I filled several pages with that history before I ever drew a bird.
A timeline of St. Lucia, from the Arawaks and Caribs to the first failed English colonies of the 1600s and the long fight between France and Britain, with a soursop and a start on the island’s cuisine.
Notes on the island’s two Nobel laureates, the crops that shaped it and the towns along the west coast: Castries, Marigot Bay, Anse-la-Raye, Canaries, Choiseul and Soufrière.
A list of places to see: Gros Islet, the Errard and Marquis estates, La Sikwé sugar mill, Mount Gimie, Diamond Falls, the national rainforest and the Mankote mangrove.
Soufrière and the Pitons
Soufrière was founded by the French in 1746 and named for the sulphur vents in the collapsed volcano above town. Its harbor is still full of painted fishing boats, and the two Pitons, Gros Piton and Petit Piton, rise straight out of the sea to the south, one of the most recognizable views in the Caribbean and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The Pitons from the water, the two volcanic spires that tower over Soufrière.
A street in Soufrière, with its wooden balconies and shops.
Fishing boats pulled up under the palms.
A street map of Soufrière and the Soufrière Estate, with a white-breasted thrasher, a shiny cowbird and a yellow-crowned night heron.
Notes on the southwest coast, from the Qualibou volcano and Diamond Botanical Gardens to Jalousie, with orchids, a St. Lucia tree lizard, a pygmy gecko and a spotted sandpiper.
Carib stonework, and palms at Marigot Bay, with notes from lunch at a beach shack and a walk through Castries.
Parrots, Orioles and the Rainforest
The rainforest reserves of the interior hold the island’s rarest animals. The St. Lucia parrot, or Jacquot, is the national bird, and by the 1970s only around a hundred were left in the wild. Protection of the forest brought it back, and it has become one of the Caribbean’s conservation success stories. The island also has its own oriole, pewee, warbler, wren and black finch, and its own fer-de-lance, a dangerous pit viper found nowhere else.
The St. Lucia parrot, Amazona versicolor, and a close study of its head, with a tree fern and mountain cabbage palm from the rainforest.
Two of its cousins on neighboring islands, the St. Vincent parrot and the imperial parrot, or Sisserou, of Dominica.
The St. Lucia oriole, a purple-throated carib hummingbird, the fer-de-lance and a boa constrictor.
The St. Lucia pewee, wren and oriole, a leatherback turtle, a doctorbird and a yellow tube sponge, with a note on nutmeg from Grenada.
A page from the cloud forest and the shore: a wild almond, a bananaquit, a Lesser Antillean bullfinch, a roseate tern, a brown noddy, a peacock flounder and a scrawled filefish.
Journal notes on who gets to write the history of the Caribbean, with a red-necked pigeon and a cashew leaf.
An agouti, an orchid, a warbler and notes from the road, including the story of the man who lives alone at the top of Mount Gimie.
The rainforest, drawn from the trail.
A Botanical Notebook
Almost everything that grows along St. Lucia’s roads came from somewhere else: sugarcane from Asia, bananas from Southeast Asia, breadfruit from Tahiti, mangoes from India, the traveler’s tree from Madagascar. Following those plants back to where they came from turned into the history of the whole Caribbean, and these pages are where that idea started.
Heliconia, or lobster claw, with notes on the ginger order and the hummingbirds that pollinate it.
Notes on bananas and plantains, with barrel and prickly pear cacti, orchids and bromeliads, the gommier tree and the chatagnier.
Red ginger lily, the mongoose brought in to kill snakes and rats, balsa, aloe and notes on the banana industry of the Windward Islands.
The island’s mangroves: red, white and black mangroves, buttonwood and the swamp bloodwood, with notes on how each survives in salt water.
The mangrove fern, an anole, sugarcane, dasheen and the traveler’s tree of Madagascar.
A strangler fig and mountain cabbage palm, with notes on rum, from its first distilling in the 1600s to the Royal Navy ration.
The coconut, the most useful tree in the islands, with beach morning glory, bay bean and an upside-down jellyfish.
Seagrape, manchineel, Indian almond and white cedar, with a blue-striped fish.
Casuarina, Madagascar periwinkle, a brown booby, a century plant and jackfruit.
A mangrove tree crab, a land crab, a West Indian sea egg, a long-spined black urchin and a gumbo limbo branch.
Acacia, breadfruit, mango and West Indian mahogany, with the ship that brought breadfruit from Tahiti.
A piping frog, a green heron and orchids, drawn after a thunderstorm over the Pitons.
The Sea and the Table
The last pages turn to the water around the island and to what we ate: saltfish and green fig, the national dish, along with accra, bouyon, breadfruit, callaloo and a long list of fruits I had never tasted before.
The ocean off St. Lucia in cross-section, from the continental shelf down to the abyssal depths.
A checklist of St. Lucian food, from accra and bouyon to saltfish and green fig, sweetsop and tamarind juice.
The journal closes with a map of St. Lucia, from Gros Islet in the north to Vieux Fort in the south.