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December 27, 2013 6:23 pm

By John-Paul Flintoff

The Montpelier Plantation hotel

It’s easy to forget, living in northern Europe as I do, that rain needn’t always fall inpersistent, cold drizzle. It can also be violent and swift. I was floating in the smooth watersof the Caribbean when a sudden darkness passed overhead and the water around mechanged colour: gunmetal, sludge-green, black. Seconds later, the glassy plain was studdedwith white polka dots from the heavens. The air became thick, a translucent veil that brieflyhid the neighbouring island. I stayed where I was, watching lightning bolts jab at distantpromontories.

That wasn’t the only big rainstorm I experienced. Another day, I was mesmerised by the

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The Caribbean island of Nevis has rich historyand charming hotels

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sheer force of raindrops that transformed the surface of the hotel pool so that it wasimpossible to see the bold geometric pattern of the tiles beneath. And it was a rainstorm thatdelayed my arrival, extending further the already lengthy journey from London to St Kittsvia Antigua, then by boat across the channel to Nevis (pronounced “knee-vis”).

But I wasn’t complaining. Remoteness has preserved Nevis asan exclusive, unspoilt haven, little changed since Diana, Princess of Wales, came here withher sons in 1992 to escape the media. And the rain? Well, that passes as quickly as it arrives.Not long after that rainstorm at sea, for example, I was back on the hotel’s private beach,playing a game of cricket with other residents and staff. The best bowler was a waitresswhose deliveries at breakfast and dinner were, mercifully, much gentler.

I had come to the island on the 30th anniversary of its independence from Britain. TheFederation of St Kitts and Nevis is the smallest sovereign state in the Americas, with acombined total of 100 sq miles and some 50,000 inhabitants. Today, Nevis is home to moreoffshore companies than human beings. Citizenship is available to buy and has beenacquired by large numbers of people who can afford to pay for the convenience of a St Kittsand Nevis passport; residency is not a requirement.

Nevis, the smaller of the two islands, has a rich history largelybecause of its fertile volcanic soil: the circular island consists almostentirely of a single mountain, Nevis Peak (985m), which is oftenshrouded in cloud. Columbus was here and so was Captain JohnSmith; and a thriving sugar trade developed off the back of slavelabour and the secrets of crystallisation brought by Jews expelledfrom South America. As you drive round the island, you can’t missthe sugar mills in various states of ruin.

France seized the island in the late 18th century, capturing slaves forsale in Martinique. (The French are also blamed for introducingAfrican monkeys to control the muskrats; today, the monkeys are apest in their own right.) After Britain took Nevis back, a youngHoratio Nelson was dispatched to guard it. While here, he met a plantation owner’s niece,the 26-year-old widow Fanny Nisbet, and married her under the vast cottonwood tree in thegrounds of what has become my hotel.

One of six former plantations on the island, theMontpelier is part of the Relais & Châteauxgroup. When Princess Diana stayed here, thehotel had British owners, but in 2002 it wastaken over by an American family. Foodcombines the native cuisine of the French chef,Benjamin Voisin, with local ingredients in waysthat made me laugh with pleasure: I’m thinkingin particular of a beet jelly with coconut foam.

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The hotel’s pool The Montpelier offers guests a chance to cookwith the chef, and I leapt at the opportunity. In

an annex beside the main kitchen, we prepared a salsa of onion, pineapple and peppers,filleted large pieces of red snapper to fry, enlivened basmati rice with fried onions and lemonzest, and turned freshly squeezed orange juice into caviar-type beads to garnish.

If you want something more “Caribbean” – and I did, one evening, when I saw on the menufresh Alaskan salmon, flown in by FedEx – you should go to the weekly Caribbean feast atanother plantation, the Hermitage. Built around 1670 in hard-wearing lignum vitae wood,the Hermitage is the place to try fisherman’s soup, roast hog, jerk chicken, stuffed pumpkin,sweet potato, curried chickpeas and guava bread-pudding.

The Hermitage is fitted out like an old-fashioned family home, with shelves packed withbooks, chintzy sofas and an upright piano. Like the Montpelier, the gardens contain greatpieces of black-painted ironwork, vestiges of sugar processing. Other plantation hotels alsomake a virtue of the old stone mills and boiling houses but each one has its own distinctcharacter. Golden Rock, recently restored by American artist Brice Marden, boasts stylishbright red fittings and gardens of artfully overgrown jungle.

Many of the same plants can be seen at the island’s botanical gardens, near the Montpelier.It boasts the Caribbean’s largest collection of orchids, a covered structure built to resemblethe glasshouse at Kew Gardens in London and a huge lily pond with a fountain. Mostmemorable, for me, were the many statues of Buddha and Hindu deities, although thepeople I was with found them no less jarring than that Alaskan salmon.

You might think that you would find something more “authentic” on a trip into therainforest on the upper slopes of Nevis Peak. And you do. As a European, I was delighted tosee vines hanging from every tree, prehistoric tree-ferns, tree roots as high as a garden wall,great rocks hurled who-knows-how-many years ago from the volcano, and pristine waterflowing from one waterfall to the next.

But my guide, Reggie, showed me that even the jungle is full of imports. As we walked slowlyuphill, Reggie pointed out areas that had once been plantation, abandoned when the sugartrade collapsed nearly 200 years ago. Suddenly, we would see bamboo everywhere; thencocoa, then mango.

On our way downhill, Reggie, who is a Rastafarian, told the group how he had disengagedfrom the “brainwashing” history dispensed at school – Columbus, Nelson, and all that. Hehad taught himself about the deforestation that made way for the sugar cane, the rebellion ofescaped slaves, and the culture brought over from Africa and handed down through thegenerations; Reggie’s grandmother taught him to grow his own food and find herbalremedies in the rainforest. “You got to know your history,” he said, and we all solemnlyagreed.

As he talked, we walked beside cast-iron pipes, imported more than 300 years ago and

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Charlestown, capital of Nevis, with Nevis Peak behind

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carried up the mountain to convey fresh water to towns where it was needed. Nobodyneeded to spell out that slaves must have transported the heavy pipes, but everybody wasimpressed that they were still doing their job. Here and there, they had burst and watersprayed everywhere, creating miniature rainbows on the forest floor.

As well as fresh water, sulphurous waterbubbles up in springs all over the island. One ofthe most notable is the Bath spring, south ofNevis’s capital, Charlestown. When I arrived,still sweating from my excursion up the peak, Ifound a man sitting in the pool who looked ascontent as the stone Buddha in the botanicalgardens. Stepping confidently into the pool withhim, I was not prepared for the heat of thewater. I yelped and took refuge in a slightly lesshot channel running nearby. Prominent white

men who once patronised these baths include the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the futureEnglish king William IV and Alexander Hamilton, Nevis-born founding father of the US.

In the future, the islanders hope to exploit the hot volcanic waters by using them to create anew source of renewable power and to export the energy to neighbouring islands byundersea cables. Nevis already has some wind power – turbines that turn in the steady northeasterly trade winds and can be brought down swiftly at the first sign of hurricanes. (The lastreally damaging storm was Hugo, in 1989.) But funding this sustainable development is theproblem, so for the short term Nevis will continue to depend substantially on its offshoreindustry, selling its passports, and luring the likes of me away from the long cold drizzles ofthe wintry north.

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Details

John-Paul Flintoff was a guest of ITC Classics (itcclassics.co.uk), which offers a week atMontpelier Plantation (montpelier nevis.com) from £1,389 per person including flights fromLondon with British Airways and return ferry transfers. The Hermitage(hermitagenevis.com) has doubles from $180

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