One of my favorite pastimes in the Caribbean is to visit old forts (see, for example, my write-up and photos of Castillo de San Cristobal in Puerto Rico ). Now almost universally converted to public spaces, these monuments to the past astonish me with the incredible effort that went into creating them — and how futilely anachronistic they seem today.

During a recent visit to my favorite French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, I spotted a poster advertising a photo exhibit featuring traditional island sailboats, to be held in a 17th-century fortress. I found this doubly intriguing, because I had already seen a couple of the replicas of traditional craft and wondered what they were. The nautical photography would be exciting, I thought, and Fort Louis Delgres would be fun to visit.

Upon my arrival, I was provided literature (in French) for a free, self-guided tour of the ramparts. I set off, following signs along thick stone walls, past a brig with a horrifying isolation chamber and then up some steps to bastions overlooking the turquoise waters. The enclosed space of the fort stretches uphill to include two armories, a huge cistern that was ingeniously fed, back in the day, by the Galion River, and even a small military cemetery with eight elaborate graves for heroes.

Spectacular as it was, something seemed wrong. Other Caribbean forts I have visited command the highest ground above natural harbors. This one reaches barely a third of the way up the precipitous mountains that include the lofty (4,800-foot) La Soufriere volcano. The fierce Carib Indians were perceived as enemies at the time of construction. But the rainforests overlooking Fort Delgres would seem to give any Carib attackers both dense cover and the high ground.

And while the sea below was tranquil in the lee of the mountains, there was no obvious harbor to be protected from the British, the favorite warring partner of the French for more than a century.  Just to name one alternative landing place, Bouillante, 15 miles up the west coast, offers a crescent beach guarded by the Ile de Pigeon (now part of the Jacques Cousteau Reserve favored by scuba divers). It looks to the layman like a better bet. So does Trois Rivieres, the nearby ferry port that serves the islands of Les Saintes  and Marie Galante.

Was this edifice in Basse Terre — called Fort St. Charles when construction began in 1649 — a stronghold or just a target? When I learned it was destroyed by or surrendered to the British four times between 1691 and 1794, the cost in francs, ingenuity and slave labor appears way out of proportion.

Rider University historian Rod McDonald, who specializes in Caribbean history, assured me this is just the way things went in those days. And he made a case that big forts were more than symbolic marks of ownership; they had to be taken for an enemy to claim the ground around them, and those thick walls really were formidable.

My thinking is shaped by a different century, of course, when war seems less of a formal ritual. I couldn’t help but recall the Rev. John Dear, the Catholic war protester. He says in his autobiography that his attitude toward conflict evolved when he began to see “not only the immorality of violence, but also its impracticality.”

More head-scratching occurred when I learned the origin of the fort’s sixth name starting in 1989, Fort Louis Delgres. Delgres was a rebellious French officer who, around 1802, opposed a threat by Bonaparte to re-establish slavery in Guadeloupe. (The French empire had freed all slaves in 1794.) But after fierce fighting, Delgres and his followers abandoned the fort. Up the mountain, he was wounded, and when government forces closed in, he committed suicide. A well-intentioned leader, we all might agree, but not exactly a hero.

Trying to take this all in, I barely noticed the poster tacked to a tightly locked door. It was the very poster about sailboat photos that had drawn me here.      

The images revealed the colorful sails of traditional, long-boomed fishing boats called “canots.” Their five-person crews have to be able to hike out with agility as they compete in regattas that have been held annually since 2002. The hiking-out is even trickier on Martinique, where the traditional boats are gaff-rigged skiffs called “gommier a voiles.” There, too, competitions have been organized for the odd-looking craft, and the crews climb out on long poles to balance the boats.

Only a couple of the photos were spectacular, but at last I understood a practice session I had witnessed in Sainte-Anne. The sailors’ efforts to launch a canot and get under way entertained me for a whole lunch – and that’s a two-hour French lunch!

Happy traveling!

Captions: 1. An ancient gum tree stands guard near the cistern. 2. A promenade under development near the base of the fort gives a good view of the mountains behind. 3. The fort lords over a tranquil sea, if not a cozy harbor. 4. This munitions depot served from 1720 to 1750. Photography by Thomas Simonet