Rock of Diamond

The rock of Diamond is an uninhabited small island located in the Atlantic Ocean at the south-east of the Martinique, with approximately 3 kilometers of the point of Diamond in the channel (or strait) of St Lucia. The small island owes its name with the reflections of its walls at certain hours of the day which evoke those of an invaluable stone.

Geography

Vestige of the strong volcanic activity which has affected this area, here nearly a million years, this island is presented in the form of a basaltic rock 175 height meters. Covered of undergrowth and cactées, difficult to reach, the rock however played a great part during the Napoleonean Guerres. Diamond indeed occupied a strategic position in the north of the strait of St Lucia, making it possible to control navigation between the Martinique and its southernmost neighbor, St Lucia.

History

At the beginning of the 19th century, the war making rage with the the Antilles between the France and the England which tried to make sure control of this insular arc, the British décidérent to occupy the small island. In January 1804, benefitting from the effect of surprised and helped by favorable weather conditions, the rear-admiral Samuel Hood (on board the HMS Centaur ) seized the rock of the Diamond which it hastened to strengthen, installing five guns at its top (three of 24 books, two of 18 books). A garrison of several tens of men (107 according to certain sources), placed under the orders of lieutenant Maurice, was left on the spot to badger the French navy. The caves are used then as dormitories to the men (officers profiting from tents), to mitigate a dubious supply conveyed using baskets hoisted until the top thanks to pulleys and cords, a small animal breeding of Chèvre S, Pintade S and Poule S develops on the thin pastures of the place. For seventeen months, the French troops tried to reconquer the small island in vain, but, in 1805, the governor of the Villaret-of-Merry island, with the assistance of the admiral Villeneuve sent by Napoleon to regulate the problem, managed to take again Diamond with the British. The garrison, lack food and water (cisterns having been fissured), went to the French forces, on June 2nd 1805, the grass snake couress ( Liophis cursor ). As the 47 other islets which surround Martinique, the rock of Diamond has its own ecological characteristics, profiting compared to the principal island from a more important sunning, less precipitations and one period of longer seasonal dryness

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