Welcome to France. We dropped anchor at precisely 7 a.m. in the harbor in front of the village of Bourg or “City” in English. The sun was on holiday this morning as it rose entirely unseen behind clouds at about 6 a.m. This small archipelago of seven islands is a dependency of Guadalupe and is a distinct region of France in the “Départment of d’Outré Mer.” It has the same relationship to France as Hawaii has to the U.S. The inhabitants are French citizens, vote in all elections, and have all the perquisites of being French citizen and a member of the European Union. As such the official currency here is the Euro. And the shops are not inexpensive. The town’s two most imposing buildings are a lovely Catholic Church and a town hall, proclaiming “Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité,” those ideals emerging from the French Revolution. Fisherman from Brittany originally settled the small islands in this archipelago and their descendants are still here today.
We took Zodiacs in at 8:30 a.m. and immediately Tom Heffernan led us 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 Tom 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 ships under Admiral Comte de Grasse who surrendered his sword to the English Admiral George Rodney. Today the fort contains a good museum 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 and luckily we spotted three of these wonderful creatures soaking in the sun, the largest of which was about three feet in length.
Lunch was on the lido deck aboard. The sailors went to the yards and hoisted the sails at 2 p.m. During the excitement of the sail hoisting, Bob Fuehrer spied a humpback whale surfacing off the port side. Once all sails were up, we were sailing along at 6.5 knots with a nice fresh wind of about 17 mph from the east. At 3:30 p.m. Mike Melford gave an illustrated talk, Pole to Pole with Lindblad Expeditions-National Geographic. And at 6:15 p.m.—after our afternoon tea!—Tom O’Brien gave a very informative and lively talk on the history of Sea Cloud. After Tom’s talk at 7:15 p.m. we were treated to an open house visit to the original cabins, accompanied of course with champagne and caviar!
We all went to a wonderful dinner, chatted, feasted, and drank until we happily went off to bed. Tomorrow the beautiful island of St. Lucia.
