Synopsis:
"You've got to sleep. If anything comes through I'll wake you." He raided the kitchen and made me warm milk laced with brandy. Afterwards he told me that he had roused Luke Bailey who found Julie's sleeping pills and he dissolved one into the milk.
So it was that when he woke me at five in the morning I felt doped and muzzy. At first I did not know what he was doing there in my bedroom, but then the knowledge hit me "Any news?" I demanded.
He shook his head.
"Just a call from BASRA; the Coasi Guard are putting helicopters out of Miami as soon as it's light enough to see."
I got up and found Debbie in the living-room; Billy had rung her and she had immediately come from the hotel. None of us did much talking because there was nothing much to say, but Debbie insisted that she was going to stay to look after Karen. Luke Bailey made an early breakfast and I drove to the airport feeling like hell.
Joe Kimble was in the office ofLucayan Beach Air Services, allocating areas on a map. Bobby Bowen was there, and Bill Pinder, another Corporation pilot, and there were three other pilots, volunteers from BASRA. Joe said, "Now, remember we're tying in with the US Coast Guard on this. Stick to your own areas and watch your altitude. And watch for the choppers we don't want a mid-air collision to complicate things."
We walked out to the tie-down lines and the sky was just lightening in the east as we took off. I flew with Bobby Bowen and, as we flew west and gained altitude, the panorama in the rising sun was achingly beautiful.
My name is Tom Mangan and I am a Bahamian a white Bahamian. This caused some comment when I was up at Cambridge; it is surprising how ill-informed even supposedly educated people can be about my home islands. I was told that I could not be a Bahamian because Bahamians are black; that the Bahamas are in the Caribbean, which they are not; and many confused the Bahamas with Bermuda or even Barbados. For these reasons and because an understanding of the geographical and political nature of the Bahamas is essential to my story it seems to me that I must describe them and also give a brief account of my family involvement.
The Bahamas are a chain of islands beginning about fifty miles off the coast of Florida and sweeping in an arc 500 miles to the south-east to a similar distance off the coast of Cuba. They consist of 700 islands (called cays locally, and pronounced 'keys') and about 2000 lesser rocks. The name is derived from the Spanish baja mar which means 'shallow sea'.
I am descended from one of the Loyalists who fought in the American War of Independence. Surprisingly few people are aware that more Americans fought in that war on the side of the British than ever did under the rebel generals, and that the war was lost more by the incompetence of the British than any superiority on the part of George Washington. Be that as it may, the war was lost by the British, and the American nation was born.
Life in the new United States was not comfortable for the erstwhile Loyalists. Reviled by their compatriots and abandoned by the British, many thought it prudent to leave, the northerners going mostly to Nova Scotia and the southerners to the Bahamas-or to the sugar islands in the Caribbean beyond Cuba. So it was that in 1784 John Henry Mangan elected to settle with his family on the island of Abaco in the Bahamas.
There was not much to Abaco. Shaped something like a boomerang, Great and Little Ahaco Islands stretch for about 130 miles surrounded by a cluster of lesser cays. Most of these smaller cays are of coral, but Abaco itself is of limestone and covered with thick, almost impenetrable, tropical bush. Sir Guy Carleton intended to settle 1500 Loyalists on Abaco, but they were a footloose and fractious crowd and not many stayed. By 1788 the total population was about 400, half of whom were black slaves.
It is not hard to see why Carleton's project collapsed. Abaco, like the rest of the Bahamian islands, has a thin, infertile soil, a natural drawback which has plagued the Bahamas throughout their history. Many cash crops have been tried tomatoes, pineapples, sugar, sisal, cotton-but all have failed as the fertility of the soil became exhausted. It is not by chance that three settlements in the Bahamas are called Hard Bargain.
Still, a man could survive if he did not expect too much; there were fish in the sea, and one could grow enough food for one's immediate family. Timber was readily available for building, the limestone was easily quarried, and palmetto leaf thatch made a good waterproof roof. John Henry Mangan not only survived but managed to flourish, along with the Sands, the Lowes, the Roberts and other Loyalist families whose names are still common on Abaco today.
