The Bahamas by Mailboat...

Few people who visit the Bahamas ever hear of Potter’s Cay, though many pass within a few yards of it each time that they are whisked off Paradise Island in one of those ridiculous white stretch limos that are so popular in Nassau. Where Paradise Island is fabricated Caribbean perfection -- massive casino, glitz and high-rise hotels -- Potter’s Cay is its alter-ego, a shabby looking area of working docks beneath the bridge.

Potter’s Quay is the main mail-boat dock that links the central Bahamian island of New Providence, where the capital Nassau is situated, to all the Out Islands, the literally hundreds of islands, ribbons of rock and sandbars spread over 100,000 square miles of the spectacularly blue Bahamian sea. After Nassau it is a reminder that real West Indian life does exist in the Bahamas after all.

The mailboats are the Out Islanders’ lifeline. Pretty much every tea-bag, breeze-block, can of condensed milk and car that reaches them is transported this way. And that’s not to forget the mail of course, some of which also travels by sea. They also take passengers if requested, which makes a novel way of travelling around the islands. As many of them travel overnight, you even get a cheap (well, comparatively, it is the Bahamas) bunk for the night.

With a departure scheduled for 5pm I was a little panicked when Bahamas Air thrummed into Nassau Airport two hours late, at five minutes to five. But this is the Bahamas. When I finally pitched up, Bahamas Daybreak III, 120 foot long, destination Governor’s Harbour and Rock Sound in Eleuthera, was still surrounded by piles of cargo.

There was all the chaos of the dock: shouts of instruction, jokes and high five greetings and in the background a small stereo screaming tinny dancehall rap -- Murderer! A fork lift truck beetled back and forth lifting pallets on board, which were then shunted or hefted by men: bread in crates, breezeblocks, bags of cement, tile grout and kitty litter, tinned fruits from Trinidad, sacks of iodised salt, industrial boxes of M&Ms, slabs of Sprite. There were pot plants, films for the cinema (Black Hawk Down, Snow Dogs), private packages for Eric Cooper and Mr Hesley Johnson, and bags of onions, asparagus tips and boxes of wine for the hotels. The mailboats have been known to take coffins and even a horse or two, but tonight’s most exotic charge, swinging beneath the bow-crane, was a Bahamas Police Jeep – its motto Courage, Integrity, Loyalty stamped on its door.

Loading was clearly going to continue for some time yet. I headed off to grab some food, passing boats headed for Exuma, Bimini (Hemingway’s hangout in Islands in the Stream) and the delightfully named Ragged Island. Under the stanchions of Paradise Island bridge are a line of stalls selling fried fish and the local speciality cracked conch. Conch comes out of its shell, a bit like a dalek, as a rubbery handkerchief with a claw. It is tough so it is battered (with a hammer) and then battered again (with batter) before being deep fried and served with hot pepper sauce.

Eventually Bahamas Daybreak III left, in darkness, just a couple of hours late. We glided past the sailing yachts, fishing boats and the gin palaces into the open sea, leaving the Paradise Island high-rises behind. A full moon lit the calm sea up for miles around.

The captain allowed me up into the wheelhouse, where there was a bank of machines, radar, gps, depth sounders, automatic pilot. When I asked about the weather he paused and looked at the sky. I was poised for a nugget of sailor’s wisdom, for a moment:

‘Ah doan know. Mi didn’ look at de forecast.’

It looked pretty flat anyway.

He described the route, following a string of romantic sounding ‘cays’: Rose Island, Booby Rocks, Samphire, Six Shilling… The whole trip crossed the Great Bahama Bank, where the sea is never more than about 30 feet deep. It is also drug and desperation territory. One mailboat captain, cruising along on a pitch black night, actually sliced a boat of Haitian refugees in half. In their bid to reach America undetected they were travelling overloaded, without lights.

We docked before first light and the unloading began. The dock at Governor’s Harbour was soon littered with piles of goods. At dawn the shop-owners, hotel managers and private individuals expecting packages appeared, loaded their pick-ups and sped off. The bread truck arrived. Mr Hesley Johnson’s boxes sat for a while and then were gone. One man cussed the captain for bringing the wrong cargo and another searched the boat for a door-frame that simply wasn’t there. By nine the dock was nearly clear and Bahamas Daybreak III was on its way to Rock Sound in the south of the island.

ravenala madagascariensis - The Traveller's Tree

One of the most distinctive plants you will see around the Caribbean is the Traveller’s Tree, which stands in a splay of massive leaves up to fifteen feet long. They point vertically, rolled like a parchment to begin with, but they soon unfurl and gradually point off the vertical, like the hands of a clock, as each new leaf takes the previous one’s place. The most particular characteristic of the traveller’s tree, though, is that the leaves grow in a single plane, giving it the appearance of a huge fan.

Sometimes it is called the Traveller’s Palm, but this is in fact incorrect as it is not a palm at all. The source of the confusion is clear as it grows in a similar way, but it is actually more closely related to the banana. The leaves are distinctly bananery to look at and when the tree fruits it drops a proboscis with an extraordinary fruit like a series of lobster claws (very similar to the lobster claw heliconia). Its botanical name, ravenala madagascariensis, gives a clear indication where it originates, but it is now all over the tropical world.

So, why the name? It has often been said that the fan stands aligned east–west, thereby helping travellers to know their direction. This, it turns out, is not true, as they grow aligned in other directions as well. However, they are useful to travellers as they are a reliable source of water. At the base of the fan, between the stems of the leaves, is a sort of cup in which water collects as it runs down the stem. Stick a straw in there, or more likely drill a small hole, and you can find water.

For more information about Caribbean plants and flowers, see the Definitive Guide to Caribbean Gardens and Flowers.

Boston Bay is full of Jerks, Maroons and Buccaneers

It was an unexpected reaction. As I handed a ticket through a grille, the man behind the bars reached for a machete… But then, with his other hand he grabbed a half chicken - recently barbecued, slightly charred and glistening. It looked delicious. He slapped it onto the block and proceeded to hack it into pieces. Then he lobbed the hacked chicken into a large piece of paper.

‘Pepper sauce?’ he asked.

Not likely, I thought. ‘No thanks,’ I said.

I know about pepper sauce. It infects everything organic for yards around, with a scalding overlay that sears your taste buds into non-sensibility. Actually it’s worse. It’s painful. To be honest there is enough chilli for me in the jerk mix already.

While eating, sitting at a plastic deck chair, I turned to musing on the name jerk. I have often wondered whether it is related somehow to beef jerky, the flavoured, dried meat so beloved of South Africans and once of cowboys.

The leading theory is that both names come from a process called charqui. Apparently the South American Indian Quechua tribe would salt meat and then dry it in the sun or over low fires. Actually there have been processes like this all over the world. The Caribbean buccaneers - seventeenth century hunters in Haiti - did a similar thing to wild pig meat and to beef cattle. Their name, which was taken from their boucans, or grills, was eventually given to bacon. The buccaneers would sell the dried meat to ships.

Jerking in Jamaica had a slightly different version, even though it took the name. The Maroons, escaped slaves who hid out in remote mountains, needed a method of cooking which would not give up a smell or leave a visible smoke trail in the sky. Their solution was to cook their meat – again wild pig, largely – slowly, in underground ovens. The salting became a marinade and nowadays it is cooked in barbecues in the ground.

There are jerk centres all over Jamaica now, though the home of jerk is in the east, beneath the John Crow Mountains, where one group of Maroons used to live. Hence the many Jerk Centres lining the roadside in Boston Bay in Portland.

Of course it’s hard not to muse on the name as well as the origins. A Jerk Centre?! You wonder what people would do in there. Body-pop and break dance badly? Take over-acting to a new level? And not only do you get Jerk Centres, but I once passed an ‘Executive Jerk Centre’. Blimey. Perhaps they dress up in suits, chat over-earnestly and take to heart all the advice from about the latest business self-improvement books.

Papiaments - Chatter in Curaçao, Babble in Bonaire, Anything in Aruba?

Of all the creoles you hear in the Caribbean the oddest is surely the one which comes from the ABC islands - the cluster of three Netherlands Antilles off the coast of Venezuela - Papiamento, as it is known in Aruba (in Curaçao it is called Papiamentu and in Bonaire, Papiamen.

As the great traders of the Caribbean, the Dutch were most concerned most with ports. And in Curaçao, a generally low-lying and barren island, they found a truly magnificent harbour (Bonaire and Aruba they took to protect the approaches from seaborne invasion). Willemstad worked very successfully as a port for centuries, and it gathered, as you would expect, an immense number of different types of people - Europeans, Latin Americans and Africans, even a few Indonesians from the Dutch East Indies. The different strains baked into an extraordinary creole mix. There is even a (culinary) dish that mixes oriental rice and Edam cheese. Very odd.

And you can imagine what happened with the language. A hundred different strains intermingled, to create sounds that are more than the sum of their parts. As an anglo outsider, you think momentarily that it might be Spanish, but then you hear unaccustomed and wayward sounds, as though the words have got out of control. There is the background staccato of Spanish – a taca-taca-taca – with an occasional interloping, possibly Portuguese vowel – a taca-taca-taca-wow – and then the oddest Dutch interjection – a taca-taca-taca-wow-taca-plömpf!

Interestingly, the word Papiament, which - logically at least - means ‘chatter’ or ‘spoken language’, can have the sense of both ‘Parliament’ and ‘babble’. A reassuring thought for all voters...

The Pitons By Chopper - A St Lucia Fly By

Helicopter travel is not that regular in the Caribbean, but it does happen. Choppers are used for sightseeing sometimes and of course they are useful for getting to remote places quickly, high into the mountains, for instance.

My only helicopter trip in the Caribbean was courtesy of LeSport in St Lucia, when as part of a BBC team I was flown from the international airport in the south to the north of the island, the location of the hotel. It saved a long journey by road and of course it is fun to do. And there was one exceptional moment during the trip. I expect the pilots love doing it, but as a passenger it was stomach-lurching as it was impressive and unforgettable.

Helicopters are always fun to travel in. We were sent forward by the hostess to the machine which was idling on the tarmac, dipping our heads as we came under the rotors. I blagged my way to the front seat next to the pilot and grabbed the headphones. The pilot talked briefly to the control tower and then tensed as he deliberately pressed the footplate and held onto his gear stick. The rotors ground into the air, the cage of the airframe shuddering, whining and screaming a hundred different mechanical complaints.

We lifted gradually and at thirty feet the pilot put the nose down and drove us forwards. His eyes were on the horizon, but I watched the ground pass away beneath us - tarmac, grass, perimeter fence, cattle, a rivulet, individual trees dotted in a plain, a village of red roofs along a serpentine valley, a car making its way along a half hidden road five hundred feet below us. And then the interminable green, with barely a visible human imprint, just an occasional plot cut into the steep hillsides. Otherwise it was simply the canopy, like a green blanket covering the steep valleys and clefts that ran across our path.

We climbed, steadily, keeping pace with the rising ground - six, eight hundred feet, a thousand, twelve hundred. The Gros Piton rose on our left, a massive lump. I can’t remember at what point the tip of the Petit Piton appeared, but gradually it imposed itself on the surroundings, a spike of stone soaring out of the greenery. We chugged on and gradually up, maintaining a position a couple of hundred feet above the canopy, the green sea of the forest.

I guessed what was coming, but there is nothing to prepare you for the gut-wrenching, utterly boggling moment when it happens. Suddenly we cleared the lip of the land. It was like a fairground ride. The carpet of green beneath us fell away five hundred feet in an instant and suddenly we were a tiny blob in a massive volcanic bowl, all of which was clearly visible in the glass bubble of the helicopter. A miniature tennis court, red roofs dotted in the greenery, tiny fluorescent windsurf sails on the beach far below.

To make it worse, the pilot began to descend at once – a touch more quickly that he needed to, perhaps - and my stomach was left a hundred feet above me. The blackened wall of the Petit Piton is so vast that it seemed just feet ahead and I wanted to shout at him to watch out – surely we were about to pile into it – even though intellectually I knew it was half a mile away.

But it was all in a day’s work for him. He calmly swung the airframe around to the left, swooping, down a thousand feet over the Jalousie Hilton (as it was then) and out to sea, swinging back into land and coming in to rest on their landing pad on the water’s edge. The other passenger got out and we continued our journey. We climbed and climbed and headed north along the coast, passing over the bays, beaches and towns. The Caribbean coast of St Lucia is exceptional in itself, but nothing can compare to a close up of the Petit Piton from a chopper.

Unwelcome Protrusion - Mont Pelé Erupts on Ascension Day, 1902

The Caribbean is quite well known for its volcanoes, which stand in a line between St Kitts and Grenada, where the Caribbean tectonic plate is gradually forcing its way under the Atlantic plate. They are very active, relatively. And a few people will have heard of the catastrophic eruption of Mt Pelé on Ascension Day morning in May 1902, which killed 30,000 people within a couple of minutes and completely destroyed the town of St Pierre, then the cultural capital of Martinique and the French West Indies.

But what about this for a curious natural phenomenon? In the September following the eruption, as the mountain continued to erupt, a column of solidified lava began to protrude from the top of Mont Pelé. The 'Tower of Pelé, a volcanic plug between 300 and 500 feet across, was so hot that it glowed. Over the next month it pushed its way up out of the crater until it reached a height of nearly 1000 feet. On one day it managed to grow 78 feet, but with each new volcanic eruption, the material split and cracked and eventually in 1929 it collapsed.

On the Bus - Caribbean Style! Part 2

You see names on buses all over the Caribbean. Some islands go in for it more than others, but they offer a good insight into Caribbean life.

In fact in Haiti they go far further than just naming their buses, They dress them up like circus lorries. But there is usually a religious slogan written on the front and side in Kweyol (Haitain Creole). Hey, it’s comforting to know, as you walk carelessly across a road that was empty a nano-second before, and look up to discover you are about to be run over by a super-charged gypsy caravan, that the last thing you read will be a blessing -

Béni Soit l’Eternel (Blessed is the Eternal Lord).

On one bus I saw the word Nissan written right underneath. Translated it would mean -

Blessed is the Eternal Nissan - not such a comforting thought to die with, unless you’re a Japanese salaryman possibly.

In most islands buses have a simple name, sometimes the driver’s nickname (most West Indians have them). In St Vincent recently you had the pleasure of nearly being run over by – or to be fair, getting a ride in -

Captain Sess, Rasta Ride, Freddy or Zion.

Or it might be Diplomat. Who knows how that got its name - a foreign ministry official turned taximan? His other car is a Diplomat? And Squeala? Does that come from the agonised screeching of his tyres, as he takes off to his next destination. Or was he involved in a B-movie and spilled the beans under torture. And what about the delightfully named Random?

Other names speak of the drivers’ (sometimes inestimable) self esteem - not to forget their driving prowess, no doubt -

No Fear! Shy Guy (yeah, likely), Xtreme and Rush.

And others are just plain surreal, but have a certain catchiness – no doubt they are the coolest bus in town –and therefore the one you definitely want to ride. What would it mean to ride in -

Code Red?

But my favourite name for a bus was always Not Guilty, Your Honour!, a bus that would ply its trade – or is that roar off in a cloud of grey exhaust? - along the west coast main road in Barbados. Perhaps it was a form of rebellion. You can just imagine the driver, in trouble again, standing in the dock,

"Are you, Mr John Smith, the driver of bus named Not Guilty, Your Honour? And did you drive Not Guilty, Your Honour at speeds without the specifications of the law? And have you anything to say in your defence…?"

The whole court would be in hysterics!

A Confusion of Nautical Names - Guadeloupe Explained

If leeward and windward always seem unnecessarily complicated to landlubbers, then pity the poor visitor to Guadeloupe.

The two ‘wings’ of the ‘butterfly’ of Guadeloupe are called Basse-Terre and Grande-Terre. Logic would tell you that ‘Basse’-Terre, meaning ‘low’ ground, would be the lower one and Grande-Terre (‘big ground’) the larger. Not so! Basse-Terre is a hulking volcanic colossus that soars to nearly 5000 feet, while Grande-Terre is physically not really that impressive at all. Mysteriously Grande-Terre is actually smaller in surface area than Basse-Terre too, so it is hard to see the justification for the name.

As it turns out Basse-Terre is the French equivalent of windward because it is the ‘lower ground’ with regard to the wind. Leeward is generally ‘capesterre’, so why Grande-Terre is called so is another mystery - until it becomes apparent that it is ‘grande’ by comparison to the two tiny Petit-Terre islands just offshore.

But in all of this linguistic confusion there is one shining light of oddity. One of Guadeloupe’s offshore islands is called la Désirade. Why? Because it was the first land that sailors would see on the old Atlantic crossing. After anything up to three months at sea they would be scouring the horizon, longing for any sight of land. La Désirade was literally ‘the desired one’.

Carousel tails - Waiting for luggage at Fort de France in Martinique

With all the short inter-island flights, Caribbean travellers spend quite a bit of time hanging around in airports. Once, these were tiny wooden sheds, with overhead fans spinning...‘squeak, clunk, squeak, clunk’ - or just sweltering silence - but now all but the smallest airports have an air-conditioned departure lounge.

This time, in the early Nineties it was, I found myself in the old inter-island terminal at Fort de France in Martinique. Actually I was not waiting to board a flight, rather waiting for my luggage, which seemed to be taking an age to reach the baggage hall. I was the only person who had got off the LIAT flight in Fort de France, so I imagined it abandoned on the tarmac somewhere, just lost in the system. My imagination began to run away with me. Perhaps, this being France, the baggage handlers were on strike (it’s one of the habits that the French West Indians have happily picked up from their metropolitan counterparts). I approached a person in a window and asked gingerly what was going on.

‘Trente minutes!’ (Thirty minutes) Thunk. The window closed, as though that was explanation enough.

There are times when you huff and puff in frustration at this sort of thing, and demand to see the manager, but good things happen to those who wait around in the Caribbean. So I found a plastic chair and sat down to wait. It was a fairly typical Caribbean scene. The two short carousels were surrounded by piles and piles of luggage, stacks of the things that you see so regularly in the islands, the odd car tyre, massive cardboard boxes tied up with twine and addressed to people with wonderfully exotic names like Hypolite Louis d’Or. And then those woven sacks of red, white and blue plastic, with spiky pineapple crowns sticking out of them.

As I looked around I realised there must be something going on, with all this luggage stacking up. But there was silence, extreme inactivity. It could have been a surreal French movie. The minutes ticked by. No other flights arrived, so I sat alone. An occasional security man or porter came in, scratched his head in confusion, and left. I sat, having generally dreamy thoughts, punctured briefly by volcanic bad-temper that then subsided soon enough.

Then a man arrived, in tropical French uniform, long socks, pressed shorts, powder blue shirt and the paraphernalia of officialdom, gold epaulettes, pistol, possibly even a képi cap (the memory is too distant now). At his side was a sniffer dog, a delicate, bright-looking thing about the size of a spaniel. Perhaps I had been unfair to the baggage handlers. Perhaps they weren’t on strike. Perhaps this was a hunt for something particular.

The two of them began their rounds, lead paying in and out as they negotiated the piles of bags. The dog trotted happily from one pile to the next, sniffing carefully around the suitcases, occasionally hopping daintily onto the carousel to test the air. The tension was building. Sniffer dogs are trained to sit when they smell something. Perhaps there was a massive stash in the pile of luggage. I waited for it to go quiet and settle back on its haunches.

But suddenly the dog changed. It became uppity, a little too keen on a certain pile. The stash must be massive, I thought, to generate this sort of excitement. He buried his nose under a couple of awkwardly stacked bags, then pulled back and hopped onto the suitcase above, lunging too keenly and slipping as he made his way forward. The tension was unbearable. A whole suitcase of Colombia’s finest must be right there, in that pile. The dog was straining at his lead now and his minder was having to hold him back.

Suddenly, there was a cat. It leapt vertically out of the pile of luggage, within an ace of the straining dog’s jaws, danced over the uneven bags and sprinted, at about ninety miles per hour, along the rubber of the carousel. The dog was onto it like a shot, paws scrabbling at the suitcases, straining at the lead, throttling itself in its effort to get away. But the cat dived through the plastic flaps at the end of the carousel and was gone.

Rivers of Time – Why is everyone talking to Philippa? (Matador) Caribbean Book Review by James Henderson

Rivers of Time is about captivation by the Caribbean. It is set largely on Nevis, which is ideal for a romantic dream of this sort to begin with. More than on other islands it is possible to see the history there – the plantation buildings poking through the overgrowth and the incredibly pretty stone bridges marooned by the straightened road. Pause for a moment and in these ruins you can feel the effort, care, even love that went into building the island. It is this connection with the West Indies, the people who carved their life in a frontier land, that is the most romantic tale of all.

As you might expect from the title, Rivers of Time momentarily draws together the streams of several lives. One is that of the author herself, Dr June Goodfield, who visits the island on holiday (and stays at Montpelier Plantation Inn, itself an old plantation restored). She is shown a memorial stone lost in the bush. There is not much more than three names – Philippa Prentis Phillips and those of her two husbands - and the year of her death. But it is the start of a compulsion and the courses of the two lives combine. Who was this other woman? What was her life like? How did it start and end? Captivation complete.

The discovery is a process that takes 20 years in all. Dr Goodfield describes the many people she meets and how she trawls libraries and archives, gathering any, even the tiniest, nugget of information that can contribute to her story. At one stage we hear that among the 12,000 emigrants recorded in one archive just two were called Philippa – what luck that there were only two, but at one every 6000, what an effort to find them.

The book divides into three sections, the first and last of which are a frame on which the story is woven. They are written in the first person by Dr Goodfield and tell the story of the discovery, her motivation and her eventual resolution of the search. But the other, the middle section, is very different. Here the author departs from the factual and personal and, using her considerable knowledge of Nevis and undoubted expertise as a historian, tells the story in a different way, as a historical novel.

She follows the story of Philippa Stephens from her village in Ashburton in Devon in the early 1600s, through the plague which decimated her village, to emigration in The Margarett in 1634 and her arrival in Nevis. Then she tells of her life, as Philippa and her husband carve out their plantation on Saddle Hill, planting first tobacco and indigo and later sugar. Their lives mirror the success and development of Nevis itself, which was so fertile and productive that it was known as ‘the Queen of the Caribbees’.

As Goodfield herself acknowledges, to fictionalise a story in this way is a controversial method among historians, but she feels that it is the best way for her to bring back the memories of these other, now forgotten lives. Of course there is simply no way of being sure that it is true (and life for Philippa is quite likely to have been blacker and more desperate than she describes) - but by presenting it in this way she makes it more compelling to read. The drier aspects of the history, all that peering in documents, which sustains the frame of the story is reduced, so that it does not become overwhelming. There is a good deal of imaginary dialogue, which though clearly modern, is otherwise convincing and brings the lives and concerns of Philippa Prentis and her family alive.

Rivers of Time is an easy and pleasant read. It is also revealing. While the narrative is necessarily uncertain, the setting on the other hand is solid. You can feel the work of the historian in the background, drawing on extensive research and understanding to paint life in the early days of Nevis, when the small colony struggled for survival but gradually grew into a successful settlement.

The author also has an obvious love for Nevis, which will make a regular visitor smile. There is a touching sense of gentle Nevisian charm and politeness. And, in typical West Indian fashion, as soon as word gets about of Goodfield’s quest, everyone pitches in to help.

And Rivers of Time was certainly enough to captivate my wife. She began to read it over my shoulder and then nipped off with the book when I put it down.


Rivers of Time – Why is everyone talking to Philippa? By June Goodfield, published by Matador, www.riversoftime.com.