Pax Britannica by Jan Morris

French.
    To the Royal Navy, St Lucia was no less familiar. Castries was one of the finest natural harbours in the world, and St Lucia was traditionally the key to the command of the Caribbean. ‘His Majesty’s squadrons stationed in St Lucia’, Rodney had written, ‘will not only have it in their power to block every port in Martinique, but likewise the cruisers from St Lucia can always stretch to windward of all the other islands and intercept any succours intended for them. St Lucia in the hands of Britain must, while she remains a great maritime Power, make her sovereign of the West Indies.’ St Lucia was an Imperial Naval Coaling Station, and fifteen ships of the Royal Navy called at Castries in an average month. Statio Haud Malefida Carinis was the island’s motto—the Never Unfaithful Anchorage; it was a familiar but always stirring sight to see a British warship steaming in through the narrow harbour entrance, flags flying everywhere, respectfully saluted by the passing merchantmen, and glittering with the special white and brass éclat of the North America and West Indies Station.
    Hazily, perhaps lazily, with a love for old traditions and familiar stations, the imperial strategists still thought of St Lucia as the key to West Indian sovereignty, kept those guns greased in their mountings and sent their cruisers proudly down to Castries for fuel and a night ashore. The old bogy of the French still haunted the British military mind, especially in the West Indies—on a clear day you could see Martinique, the birthplace of Napoleon’s Josephine, from the barracks on the Morne. Also the British supposed that if ever the Panama Canal were completed the island might give them some control over its entrance, as Cyprus and Aden covered Suezand Port Said. It was true, as Admiral Fisher used to say, that the British naval forces in the Caribbean were generally too weak to fight and too slow to run away, and that the island garrison was so small as to be meaningless: but there, St Lucia had a proud military tradition, its installations might come in useful one day, and though the soldiers were not encouraged to go sea-bathing, in case it caused malaria, still it was a popular station. Besides, the garrison would be sadly missed, in an island neither rich nor very worldly. Often the Garrison Adjutant invited tenders for the supply of oats, green forage, kerosene oil, wicks, or the purchase of empty biscuit tins: and sometimes the officers gave a ball in their suave mess above the harbour, with smooth soft lawns above the sea, a string band, and pleasant terraces for sitting out and cursing sand-flies on.
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    Often, when a merchant ship approached the entrance to Castries harbour, a pair of pinnaces were to be seen racing each other boisterously to meet it, oars flashing rhythmically in the sunshine, spray sweeping from their bows. These were the salesmen from Messrs Peter and Messrs Barnard, ferociously rival establishments, competing for a fuelling order. With water at 3s a ton and the best South Wales coal piled high on the wharves, there were handsome profits to be made: a constant watch was kept on the lighthouse at the head, where the approach of a ship was signalled, and so much depended upon being first alongside that racing oarsmen were specially imported from Barbados, and more than once the crews came to fisticuffs as they arrived in dead heat alongside a client.
    To the Administrator in his little palace St Lucia was perhaps a far-flung gem in the imperial diadem. To the merchants, the planters, the few professional men—to the five English officials of the Colonial Bank—to MacFarlane Moffatt and Co, the Oldest Establishment in St Lucia, Special Agents for John Brown’s Selected Three Star Whisky—to Messrs Peter’s and Barnard’s anxious sales managers—to the business and commercial classes the island was essentially a coaling station. Since the decline of the sugar industry it had lived chiefly by its