By Steve Bergsman Travel Writers From Creators.Com

As my wife and I stood at the edge of the Guadeloupe rainforest contemplating the hike to a waterfall, a well-traveled car pulled up alongside us. Luckily the man behind the steering wheel spoke English — after all, Guadeloupe is a French-speaking island in the southern Caribbean. So we asked how long the walk was to the waterfall. I’m not sure what direction the conversation took after that, but soon we were chatting away in his halting English and our 100 words of French.

The man was Mac-Lean Andrew, the author of “Face a’ L’Ecrin,” which I learned about very quickly because he had a copy of his book in his car. I scanned the back cover, which showed the author’s photo of a handsome, debonair man in his 40s looking confident and proud. Clearly, the book had been published about 20 years before. As best I could tell he had spent a lot of time in France and had been an educator, but most importantly for me, he knew — or knew of, I wasn’t sure which — Saint-John Perse.

In the history of the Nobel Prize for Literature, there have been the famous — Bob Dylan, Toni Morrison, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus — and the not-so-famous, Halldor Kiljan Laxness, Ivo Andric, Eugenio Montale and, sadly, the poet Saint-John Perse, who had been born on the island of Guadeloupe. Eventually he migrated to France, and in 1940, as a confirmed anti-Nazi, he escaped and landed on the shores of the United States. Some 27 years later he returned to France.

There are so few world-renowned men of letters from the Caribbean that one would think the island of Guadeloupe would be celebrating its distinguished son in almost any manner conceivable, but after four days on the island I could find no mention of him. Finally, on the last day, while visiting the Beaux Arts Museum in Saint-Francois, I asked a docent about Saint-John Perse. Much to my surprise, she told me there was a museum to the man in Pointe-a-Pitre. We had missed it.

Perse had written so beautifully of his Guadeloupe childhood: “In those days they bathed you in water-of-green-leaves; and the water was of green sun too; and your mother’s maids tall glistening girls, moved their warm legs near you who trembled.”

Or: “My nurse was a mestizo and smelled of castorbean; always noticed there were pearls of glistening sweat on her forehead, and around her eyes — not so warm, her mouth had the taste of rose-apples in the river, before noon.”

Perse’s poetry of the land is everywhere you look. Guadeloupe consists of two main islands, Basse-Terre to the west and Grande-Terre to the east (the lands separated by only a narrow channel) and smaller outer islands. While you could probably kick a soccer ball over the channel, the two islands are geographically like two separate worlds. Grande-Terre is rolling hills and plains, not arid but not damp. Basse-Terre is dominated by a tall, volcanic spine of mountains (including the highest mountain at more than 4,000 feet in the Lesser Antilles) and is mostly dense rainforest. The storm systems seem to get captured by the mountains, leaving less moisture for Grande-Terre. Outdoor activities that range from boating and diving to hiking and canyoneering abound on these two small islands.

Our lodging options were a remote resort on Basse-Terre or a more urban hotel in the picturesque town of Saint-Francois. We chose the latter because we had heard the cuisine in Guadeloupe was excellent and that’s where the best restaurants seemed to be. It was a fortuitous choice for us. Our hotel was approximate to the island’s leisure-craft marina, which was surrounded by local eateries and shops. We ate every meal at a different restaurant, some as small and narrow as a limited hallway, and the food was excellent. The fish is literally pulled from the ocean and onto your plate in the blink of an eye. Beaches, marketplaces, outdoor markets and even the Beaux Arts Museum were within walking distance.

One afternoon we drove in our rental car on a long peninsula eastward to the end of the island. Much to our surprise, we were greeted by one of the most startling examples of natural beauty we have seen anywhere in the Caribbean — a lovely, arcing bay defined by cathedrals of rock that stretched deep into the Atlantic. Powerful, tall waves rolled in, smashing the pinnacles of stone and sending spray high into the air. We didn’t remember reading about land’s end, but here it was unheralded — like the island’s should-be-even-more-famous native son, Saint-John Perse.

For more information: www.guadeloupe-islands.com

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