Posted by: travadmin on Jan 09, 2004 – 12:25 PM
exoticlocations  Reaching the sandy bottom of the Great Bahama Bank at 60 feet down, I was surrounded by soaring, sunlit limestone towers festooned with enormous pods of brain coral and tentacles of fire coral, bright sponges and purple sea fans.
Three barracuda materialized above me in water so clear I might have been viewing them in an aquarium. Rising from a white-sand street, the coral heads seemed like arabesque apartment buildings whose inhabitants could fly. And for the duration of a tank of air, I, too, had no fear of falling. I could glide effortlessly around, above and through these brilliant structures.

Their tenants were about their usual business. Schools of manic blue tang darted away as I approached, while around the corner a stack of yellow snappers rested motionless beneath an overhang. Among the small fish working the coral heads were deep blue and yellow fairy basslets, striped sergeant majors and yellowtail damselfish; among larger species were bar jacks and tiger groupers. There were uncommon crossings, too. I saw my sixth rainbow parrotfish, the most spectacular reef fish of the Caribbean, in 10 years; my first-ever yellowtail parrotfish; a contingency of blue striped grunts; and several large, absurdly ugly hogfish. At the end of the last dive, three large ocean triggerfish cruised by 30 feet above me, backlit by the sun.

That evening, on the veranda at the Stella Maris Resort Club, I was reconstructing the dive in my notebook when one of the divers from my group sat down beside me.

“You know there was a famous writer here last week,” he said.

“No,” I replied. “Who was that?”

“James Michener, I think.”

I imagined a spectral Michener gliding through the rustling, wind-whipped fronds of the coconut grove at the quietly elegant resort, haunting the rooms and cottages of this sprawling compound near the north end of the Bahamas’ Long Island like a ghost out of a du Maurier novel. My next thought was that some well-connected travel writer had gotten to Long Island before me.

Big Blue Hole

Spurred by the fear of being scooped, I passed up the next day’s dives and after breakfast turned the rental car south on Queen’s Highway toward Gordon’s, the last settlement on the island, 70 miles away. Peter Kuska, one of the owners of Stella Maris, had annotated a map with special stops and excursions along the way.

At Simms, a hardscrabble village 10 miles down the road, I stopped at Her Majesty’s Prison, two dark concrete rooms with benches and small, high, barred windows that held prisoners as recently as the last decade. Rich graffiti adorned the walls: “Farquharson, you *****, watch your back.”

Twenty miles farther, I rounded a turn that opened on a spectacular bay at the settlement of Salt Pond, site of the Long Island Regatta. The racers, single-masted Bahama boats, swung at anchor, and the milky green water was crisscrossed by white wake trails left by power boats. With the three-day regatta in full swing, Salt Pond was crowded with revelers. Though it wasn’t yet noon, many were hammered drunk; two or three had passed out under trees, while others staggered around booths that sold conch fritters, crab patties and curried mutton. The place seemed menacing, on the edge of violence. I braced myself with a gin and coconut water and pulled out of Salt Pond, having seen enough of the regatta.

Near the settlement of Cartwrights, I ate a lunch of curried goat, potato salad and rice at the Hillside Tavern and Bar, where soca music blaring from massive speakers out back made it impossible to concentrate on anything except chewing. Many of the locals coming and going had dark skin and kinky hair but sharp Caucasian features, even blue eyes.

Miscegenation is the legacy of Long Island’s colonial past. Centuries after the indigenous Arawak Indians of the Bahamas were destroyed, Long Island was settled by American loyalists fleeing in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War. After Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown in 1781, loyalists were hounded, vilified, had their lands confiscated, their houses torched and were beaten and killed by citizens of the fledgling United States. Their only recourse was to appeal to Great Britain for assistance. Coming to their rescue, the Crown granted American loyalists — mostly well-to-do Scottish-Irish planter families — vast tracts of land in the Bahamas. They fled to the islands with their slaves and carved out cotton and sisal plantations.

The topsoil in the Bahamian archipelago was thin, however, and the plantations failed within a few years. This meant that more land had to be cleared for more fields, which failed in their turn, and so on, until the islands had been denuded of their hardwood forests. The wasteland of scrub bush you see in the Bahamas today is one consequence of this extraordinary history.

The unusual complexion of Long Islanders in the Hillside Tavern and Bar is another. With the failure of plantations and the abolition of slavery in the 1830s, many planters moved to more fertile locations in the Caribbean and south Florida. But others stayed behind on Long Island, surviving unthinkably difficult lives of subsistence farming, working shoulder by shoulder with men and women they once legally owned. People being people, the two races discovered the beauty of one another. Ten generations of life on Long Island produced these rough-hewn, handsome young men carousing at the Hillside Tavern and Bar.

At a rubble road south of Deadman’s Cay, I followed Kuska’s directions and turned left off Queen’s Highway. A mile east, over a rough, rain-rutted ridge, the track ended at two perfectly curved, pristine beaches separated by a hill spar. They were nearly closed coves refreshed by waves breeching the lip of rock at their mouths. Mine were the only footprints in the fine, immaculate sand.

A third cove nearby was perhaps a half-mile across, at the head of which was a pocked limestone cliff rising 50 feet above water so deep it was blue-black. I reached this magnificent spot by continuing along a dirt track that ends at the foot of the cliff. Three feet from the shore, the water was only inches deep. Thirty feet beyond, the bottom fell out. At some 660 feet, this is the world’s deepest known blue hole, one of the most extraordinary geological phenomena on Earth.

The stunning, expansive beauty of the scene overwhelmed me, and I was suddenly close to tears. I was traveling alone, but standing in this natural theater, I badly wanted someone to turn to and say, “Can you believe this?”

Spirit of Father Jerome

Later, at a roadside conch shack, I ate a cup of conch salad and two mangos I had picked up from the ground earlier in the day. Centuries after the native forests of the Bahamas had been destroyed, the land still gives up flowers and fruit in astonishing profusion, especially at this time of year, early June. Everything natural around me — bougainvillea, mango, hibiscus, Poinciana — was blooming promiscuously, rioting in a fresh breeze.

South of Deadman’s Cay, Queen’s Highway hugged the leeward shore at the foot of a lofty ridge covered by thick stumpy vegetation, a ridge that grew steeper the closer I got to Clarence Town. At Clarence Town, St. Paul’s Anglican and Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic churches came into view. Seeing these churches was one of my main reasons for taking the drive south.

St. Paul’s and Sts. Peter and Paul are the work of Jerome Hawes (1876-1956), the Hermit of Cat Island, one of the most extraordinary and mysterious figures in Bahamian history. British-born and trained as an architect, he came to Long Island in 1908 as an Anglican priest after a hurricane had destroyed the churches of Clarence Town. Sleeping, eating and working on a plank table in a hut, Hawes designed St. Paul’s and led the villagers in its construction, having to start over after the newly finished church collapsed in a storm. Next he designed Sts. Peter and Paul on a hill across the way, but underwent a crisis of faith in 1910 and disappeared from Clarence Town before construction began.

He next appears as a student in Rome, having converted to Catholicism. He took Franciscan orders and spent nearly three decades building churches in Australia. In 1939 Hawes returned to the Bahamas. He purchased Mount Como on Cat Island (the highest point in the Bahamas), renamed it Alvernia after St. Francis’s retreat in Tuscany and built his architectural masterpiece, the Hermitage, atop it. Here he lived as a hermit until his death 17 years later. One account says he was buried at the Hermitage in the rock cave where he slept at night. But I’ve crawled into that sepulcher and, believe me, there are no human remains inside it.

Neither ostentatious nor grand, Hawes’s twin churches dominate Clarence Town. From a distance they are proud and beautiful — St. Paul’s facing north, Sts. Peter and Paul facing south, both with twin towers rising above pitched roofs.

I parked and walked through the immaculate sanctuary of St. Paul’s, then drove to Sts. Peter and Paul’s, an altogether more imposing structure from the outside, with its tiered stairway flanked by stately palms leading up to impressive wooden doors. Inside, I climbed the narrow stairway to a tower and gazed out over Clarence Town. Up here, from what must be the summit of the island, I felt something of the spirit of Father Jerome, a man so great and obscure, so long dead, who loved high places in these islands.

I climbed back down and studied the Stations of the Cross, Hawes’s signature motif, depicted on plaques between the windows of the nave. I said a prayer for my brother who had died a year ago this day, and left Clarence Town thinking that only the truly soulless could visit these churches and feel nothing holy in them.

End of the Road

South through the towns of Hard Bargain, Roses and Cabbage Point, the hills played out and the road became flat and straight, lined by stone walls marking 18th-century property boundaries. There were scattered houses and, at several places, shallow ponds beside the road. In old times these pans were flooded with sea water that was left to evaporate, leaving behind salt that was harvested and sold.

There were more goats than people on the final stretch of Queen’s Highway, and the beasts didn’t concede half the road. I was stopped twice by meandering nannies with kids. Then the sign appeared — Gordon’s — though I didn’t see any evidence of a settlement or village, just the end of the paved surface and a causeway to the right over a shallow mangrove flat leading to another pristine beach and water the color of lime and cream blended.

I parked under a casuarina tree. Standing alone in the shade with not another soul around me, I gazed out at the expanse of the Great Bahama Bank stretching to the horizon. Behind me was the rental car I’d taken to so many rough places — the rubble causeway I’d crossed and the end of the road. I felt a sense of accomplishment, but I also had the rueful, sad feeling that comes when something — a life, a road — comes to an end.

But the end was only the end until I turned the car around and started back to the Stella Maris. Then it became the beginning. It’s all, I thought, a matter of perspective.

And timing. Checking out the next day, I came across this entry in the guest book, written the date I’d arrived: “Thanks for four wonderful days. John Grisham.”

Details: Long Island, Bahamas

GETTING THERE: Unless you charter a flight from Florida, the best way to reach Long Island is to fly to Nassau — from D.C., rates start at $360 round trip — and catch the 50-minute Bahamasair flight to Stella Maris airport ($78 one way). Stella Maris Resort Club (see below) operates its own afternoon charter flight from Nassau for $102 each way. Info: 800-426-0466 , www.stellamarisresortairservice.com.

GETTING AROUND: Bicycle and scooter rentals are available. Renting a car ($75 to $90 per day, plus 40 cents a mile) is the only way to really see the island. Although costly, I find car rental indispensable in the Bahamas. WHEN TO GO: Long Island is in the southern Bahamas, on the edge of the Gulf Stream, which means there is hardly a bad time to visit. Located in the path of the trade winds, it is rarely too hot or cold. I prefer early June, when the flowers are in full bloom, but this is also around the time of the Long Island Regatta, when the island population soars. Flights to Stella Maris are often full the second week in June and rooms can be hard to find. The fall or winter seasons are also outstanding. The worst weather I’ve experienced has been in February and March.

WHERE TO STAY: Rates at the venerable 40-year-old Stella Maris Resort Club (800-426-0466 , www.stellamarisresort.com) range from $160 per night for a double to four-bedroom bungalows with private pool for $580, during the winter high season (Dec. 22-April 27). Prices include land excursions, use of small sailboats and bikes, weekly cave party and more. The much newer Cape Santa Maria (800-663-7090, www.capesantamaria.com), 15 miles north, has one-bedroom villas for $285 a night from Dec. 15 to May 31, $195 June 1-Dec. 14.

In Clarence Town, Gems at Paradise (242-337-3016, www.gemsatparadise.com) offers views of town with its twin church spires as well as Clem Cay; rooms start at $85 a night (summer) and $100 (winter), with one-bedroom condos for $185 in summer to $225 in winter.

The Bahamas Tourist Office (see below) provides links to Out Island hotels and resorts, including Long Island.

WHERE TO EAT: Breakfast and dinner at Stella Maris are consistently excellent. Full breakfast is $12, dinner $25 to $35 per person. The hotel provides box lunches at $5 for those diving or fishing or otherwise away from the resort at midday.

There are mom-and-pop eateries along the length of Long Island, with sandwiches for $5 to $8 and full meals for $8 to $12. Most restaurants offer conch, spiny lobster (called crawfish) in season and a variety of fresh fish. Goat or mutton is a better bet than beef, since there is very little cattle on the islands. Bahamian fruits and vegetables are excellent. I’ve lived happily for days on peas, beans and rice and local bread.

INFORMATION: Bahamas Tourist Office, 800-422-4262, www.bahamas.com.

By Marvin Hunt
Special to The Washington Post
Marvin Hunt, who lives in Durham, N.C., writes frequently about the Bahamas.