Île-à-Vache

Île-à-Vache lies twelve kilometres off Les Cayes and has no cars, no paved road and no mains electricity, so everything moves by boat, donkey or foot along sand tracks between the villages. Around fifteen thousand people live on it by fishing and farming. Henry Morgan used the anchorage as a base before he sacked Panama. Abaka Bay on the north-west shore is a crescent of white sand with a small hotel behind it, and the mangroves and reefs around the island are snorkelled from a pirogue. Boats cross from Les Cayes in forty minutes. Lincoln settled several hundred freed Americans here in 1863 and the colony failed within a year.