A Windward island named for a shipwrecked saint’s feast day
Saint Lucia covers 617 square kilometres in the Windward Lesser Antilles between Martinique and Saint Vincent. Legend says French sailors wrecked there on 13 December, the feast of Saint Lucy of Syracuse, and named the island for her. Britain and France fought over it so often it was called the Helen of the West.
Arawaks settled around 200–400 AD; Kalinago took over about 800 AD. The Arawaks called it Louanalao, island of the iguanas, and the Kalinago later knew it as Hewanorra. A Vatican globe of 1520 already labels it Sancta Lucia, which suggests Spanish explorers chose the name.
In the late 1550s the one-legged French pirate François le Clerc raided Spanish shipping from Pigeon Island. Sixty-seven English colonists landed from the Oliphe Blossome in 1605, but Carib attacks left 19 survivors who fled. France claimed the island in 1650, and it changed hands or was declared neutral a dozen times in the eighteenth century before Britain secured it in 1814. During the revolutionary wars France abolished slavery in 1794, the island swung between the powers, and British troops burned Castries while retaking it in 1796, as rebels escaped inland to form maroon communities.
Slavery ended in 1834, followed by apprenticeship until full freedom in 1838. On 9 March 1942 a German U-boat sank two British ships in Castries harbour. The United States used the island as a wartime military hub, with a naval base at Gros Islet. French colonization preceded British contests; representative government arrived in 1924, universal suffrage in 1951. Membership in the West Indies Federation (1958–1962) preceded independence on 22 February 1979. John Compton led the peaceful move to independence.
Mount Gimie reaches 950 metres, the twin Pitons are volcanic plugs, and the Sulphur Springs are billed as the world’s only drive-in volcano. Bananas became the main export in the 1980s before the economy turned toward tourism.
Source: Saint Lucia
