When historical accuracy loses the battle with creative licence, what’s sacrificed in the name of a good story, painting, movie or, in this case, musical, can have unexpected consequences. Such is the fate of Nevis (pronounced Nee-vis). If you haven’t heard of the island, don’t admonish yourself. As the sister island of St. Kitts, this Leeward Isles duo make up the tiniest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Shrouded in obscurity compared to its more resort- and charter-flight-friendly neighbours – Barbados and Jamaica, among them – the tale of Nevis is a story of what might have been. Specifically, what might have been if Lin-Manuel Miranda had only found more words to rhyme with ‘Nevis’.

This satsuma-shaped island, home to barely 10,000 people, is all but smothered with ferns, orchards and calabash trees, which yawn outward to the sea. There are also the ugly remnants of sugar and cotton mills; a slowly vanishing physical reminder of the island’s dark history as a slave colony. It was into this environment that Alexander Hamilton came into being, either in 1755 or 1757, depending on which encyclopaedia you consult. Born out of wedlock to Rachel Faucett and James A. Hamilton, the failure of his half-Huguenot mother and Scottish father to marry (caused, in part, by Hamilton Snr’s subsequent desertion and the desire by Rachel’s Danish husband to have her imprisoned for adultery) meant that young Alexander was shunned by the bien pensants of Nevis.

By the age of eight, mother and son had moved to St Croix in what is now the US Virgin Islands, where the precocious child began his first steps towards a career that would see him serve the presidency of George Washington as the inaugural First Secretary of the Treasury. Posthumous fame may have been assured in the States – Hamilton’s face adorns the $10 bill, after all. Yet it was the songwriter-playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda who broadcast Hamilton’s legend through a global megaphone.

Fusing R&B, hip-hop and rap, his eponymous musical about the mercantile pioneer gave the story of Hamilton the most unlikely of revivals; as the hero of the most celebrated musical of this century. Lin, however, failed to mention Nevis even once in his show – an omission that continues to grate on locals, even over a decade after the show’s Broadway debut. Feelings of resentment for depriving Nevis of the limelight might linger, but on this six-by-eight-mile island there’s one geographical feature whose resurgence is even less likely than that of Hamilton’s legend.

Unlike neighbouring Montserrat, whose own volcano blew in the 1990s, causing two-thirds of the island to be abandoned, there is no threat from this peak anytime soon. The only pain and peril promised by this volcano will target the shins and thighs of anyone who attempts to climb it. Dear Reader, I am 13 stone, walk two miles a day and haven’t drunk a can of Coke or eaten oven chips since the 1990s. But the peak defeated me and my moderate fitness levels around two-thirds of the way up its 3,232 feet.

It started so gracefully; trekking through rough paths, hacked out of a riotous tangle of moss-coated tree trunks, ferns and orchids with nothing but my guide, Devito, the insistent trilling of tree frogs and the occasional scurry of green vervet monkeys for company. Then came the ropes. Tethered to tree trunks, gripping these slippery lengths was the only way to haul myself up some ludicrously steep gradients, while what was merely soft, black soil in the lower part of the peak gave way to mud the colour and texture of sticky toffee pudding.

Nevis Peak, an inactive volcano that last erupted more than 100,000 years ago. Image: Shutterstock

I groaned. I sweated. I strained myself up well over three dozen of these roped ascents until I could take no more and, after two hours of the most physically arduous exertion I have done since walking the perimeter of the Glastonbury Festival looking for my girlfriend’s car in 2013, I collapsed into some bushes a mere 30 minutes’ walk, according to Devito, from the summit.

Still, the view from my point of failure was sensational. A break in the melange of jungle and cloud cover revealed a vista stretching out over the parish of the island known as Gingerland; a bucolic stretch of tin-roofed cottages, speckled like sea-smoothed pebbles among the sprouting, verdant greenery of ancient sugar plantations that suddenly scissor-cut into the green and cerulean blue of the ‘Narrows’, the stretch of Caribbean Sea that divides Nevis from St. Kitts.

Paradise Cottage

Golden Rock Inn

Respite from my failed attempt to conquer Nevis Peak came in the form of the Golden Rock Inn. Buried deep in the lower folds of the mountain, this is a boutique hotel built around the remnants of one of the island’s many sugar mills, this one constructed in 1801.

Narrow footpaths wind through a bricolage of cacti and succulents. Only the occasional lizard, scurrying across the grass, gives any indication that anyone or anything defers from the national motto: ‘rush, slowly’. The cottages themselves, just 11 of them, are hidden amid this Lilliputian wilderness along with a large, shaded swimming pool and a restaurant in the main building of the old mill. It serves gargantuan fresh lobster sandwiches at lunch and more piscine pleasures, including grilled snapper and mahi-mahi, come evening.

Amid the quietude, there is one small spot on Nevis where the pace does ratchet a few notches above the permanently somnambulant. Located on a stretch of beach next to the Four Seasons resort (the only genuinely large hotel on the island), Sunshine’s is known throughout the Caribbean for its ebullient owner, Sunshine himself, and his rum punch cocktail, known as the Killer Bee. As tracks by Toots and the Maytals and Gregory Isaacs filter through the al fresco, mostly wooden bar, festooned in red, green and yellow, the cocktail itself is a delusive creation in the extreme. Heavy on the lime juice and grenadine, it goes down with alarming speed.

Sugar Mill Room

Yet, as all Nevisians know, to drink more than two Killer Bees is to risk a hangover fiercer than a passing hurricane in rainy season. Nobody knows exactly how much rum goes into Sunshine’s cocktails but, after finishing my second Bee, I began to realise that I’d drunk enough rum to begin throwing shapes on the makeshift wooden dancefloor and caring not a jot how ridiculous I looked.

The locals, it seems, have seen visitors react in similar ways many times before. And the tide of collective good feeling at being lucky enough to either live on, or to visit, one of the last Caribbean islands not entirely beholden to large cruise ship traffic is easy to detect. “Yeah, we know about the Hamilton musical,” one local tells me while, sensibly, sipping a Carib beer as the magenta sun dips steadily into the sea. “He did a lot of amazing things. His only mistake was leaving Nevis,” he jokes. “I’m not planning on leaving anytime soon.” I wish I wasn’t either.

Nevis may have failed to make it into the Hamilton musical, but the island should bleep on the radar of anyone interested in experiencing a slice of genuine, small-scale Caribbean soul. I, for one, am happy for Miranda’s oversight.

Doubles at the Golden Rock Inn from £308 per night, visit goldenrocknevis.com

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