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HAMILTON, Bermuda -- Over a mug of Gosling's rum in the Rosedon Hotel's tea room here recently, the conversation turned to race relations. And retired policeman Ken McDowall reminded me that it was 40 years ago this month that the island's British governor, Sir Richard Sharples, was murdered by a black Bermudian named Erskine Burrows.
McDowall is from St Vincent in the Eastern Caribbean, but he has spent the last 40-plus years in Bermuda, most of them as a police officer. After the governor and his aide were ambushed in the gardens of Government House in 1973, police arrested Burrows and an accomplice named Larry Tacklyn, both career criminals.
Three years later Burrows was found guilty of murdering Sharples and his aide, as well as the earlier murder of the British police commissioner and two white shopkeepers. Tacklyn was found to be complicit in the murder of the shopkeepers.
Both men were said to have been influenced by a militant Marxist group called the Black Berets, and despite petitions for clemency they were hanged at the Royal Naval Dockyard on the island's western end in 1977. These were the last judicial executions under British law anywhere in the world.
KIRKWALL, Orkney -- Visiting this remote group of islands off Scotland's northeast coast recently, I was struck by some remarkable similarities to the Bahamas.
Our small Loganair turboprop - similar to Bahamasair's inter-island aircraft - was delayed in Aberdeen for three hours, and several suitcases failed to arrive in Kirkwall until the following day. The Orcadians on their way home from Scotland took it all in stride, much as Bahamians are wont to do.
Loganair was founded in 1962 by a big construction company, and is the oldest airline in the UK continuously operated under the same name. It connects relatively isolated islands and communities in Scotland, Orkney and the Shetlands just as air taxi services link remote settlements in the Bahamas.
Kirkwall is Orkney's main town, an easy-going harbourside community of about 7,000 in a 70-island archipelago. With a total population of only 20,000, Orkney is similar in scale and character to Abaco and its cays, where some 15,000 people make a living from high-end tourism, fishing and farming.
Orkney welcomes somewhat more tourists - about 200,000 a year. But visitor satisfaction levels are just as high as they are in Abaco, which receives about 100,000 affluent tourists annually. The locals are as friendly and helpful as any Bahamian out islander.
GEORGE TOWN, the Cayman Islands - At a dinner party on Seven Mile Beach here I asked a longtime resident (who serves on two public boards) for a briefing on the island's political parties. Curiously, he could not even recall their names.
So the next day I drove along the modern four-lane highway to Camana Bay's signature bookstore here to pick up a copy of Roy Bodden's political history - the Cayman Islands in Transition.
Camana Bay itself - a $400 million 'live, work, play' development by billionaire Kenneth Dart - is an obvious physical example of that transition. Dart, an American with Caymanian status, recently acquired retail and office property in downtown Nassau, but has yet to launch a project.
PANAMA CITY, Panama -- Except for the straw hat, Panama has never been on my personal radar.
Years ago I knew it as a nexus of American imperialism - a colonial enclave carved out of Colombia in 1903 to facilitate the US construction and operation of that engineering wonder known as the Panama Canal, the world's most strategic waterway.
The Canal Zone was a source of friction between Panama and the United States for decades, culminating in the 1964 riots that were suppressed by US troops. As a result, in 1977 the US agreed to transfer the canal to Panama with effect from 1999.
American troops were used again in 1989 to topple the military dictator Manuel Noriega, who was later imprisoned in the US and France on drug trafficking and money laundering charges.
So it was an entirely unexpected experience for me to visit a stable, prosperous and democratic Panama for the first time via Copa Airlines' new direct flight between Panama City and Nassau.
The $514 roundtrip flight has enjoyed passenger load factors of more than 80 per cent since its launch last June, with most arrivals staying on Paradise Island but 10 per cent going on to Grand Bahama and/or the out islands.
THETFORD, Norfolk -- Probably few readers will know that the first black mayor of an English town - specifically this town, a coach stop on the way from London to Norwich - was a Bahamian physician named Alan Glaiser Minns.
Of course, the term "black" depends on your perspective. Alan was the grandson of John Minns, who in 1800 "absconded from his apprenticeship" as a baker in Reading to be shipwrecked off Nassau. He subsequently married the African woman who saved his life - a slave named Rosetta. Retired airline pilot Paul Aranha and Exuma civic leader Basil Minns number among their descendants today.
John and Rosetta had several children. One grandson became the first non-white Anglican priest in the Bahamas. Two others trained as doctors in England, and both practised in Thetford. Pembroke Minns died here in 1912. His more illustrious brother Alan (who was born on Inagua in 1858), also died in England in 1930.
Although not many Bahamians are aware of Dr Minns' place in English political history, Susan Ketchell at the Ancient House Museum on White Acre Street here certainly was. During my visit, she recalled a recent lecture and exhibit on the subject. Minns' three-year term as mayor (from 1904) may have been just a footnote to Thetford's 1500-year history, but he was considered an exemplary candidate nonetheless.
The Bahamas is like a piece of Swiss cheese, scientists say. Our limestone bedrock is riddled with cracks and fissures, and everything is tidally connected.
Ages ago, when sea levels were lower, rainfall eroded the limestone to form extensive underground caverns. These were described on land as early as 1725, by the English naturalist Mark Catesby. The marine caves we call blue holes were first recorded on charts in 1843.
But it is only in the past 50 years or so that we have been able to visit the "enchanted voids" of this mysterious interconnected underworld. In fact, experts describe blue holes as a final frontier - the last unknown places on Earth that humans can physically go to explore.
And explorers are making unprecedented discoveries in Bahamian blue holes, especially on Abaco, where Dan’s Cave has broken all records for an island cave at well over 30,000 feet in length. It is now the longest cave system in The Bahamas.
FORTUNE HILL, San Salvador -- "I been farming this hill all my life," 81-year-old Thomas Hanna told me last week, although no crops are grown on the island these days. "Every now and then people come and start digging, but ain't nobody find nothing yet.
"There's caves and tunnels all through this hill that we used to play in when I was a boy. I wish they would get to the bottom of it once and for all."
Hanna lives alone at the foot of Fortune Hill, with just a dog and a billy goat for companionship. His singular claim to fame rests on the fact that he is the last survivor of three boys who once played marbles with a legendary cache of gems they came across in one of the giant solution holes that honeycomb the land around Fortune Hill.
"People used that cave as a storm shelter, and when I was a schoolboy we played in one of the tunnels with what we thought were marbles. They were man-made," Hanna said, explaining that years later he learned the "marbles" were in fact diamonds, rubies and emeralds, undoubtedly stashed there by one of the infamous pirates who once frequented these parts.
HAVANA, Cuba -- "So you wanted to visit before the country opens up and everything changes?" a 30-something tour guide asked me as we surveyed Havana's bustling historic quarter from the rooftop of a restored colonial mansion.
It was true, I suppose. I had come in search of Fidel - 50 years after his revolutionary triumph and an uncertain time before his death - to get a glimpse of life in what is probably the last true communist state. According to Fidel's brother Raul, who took over as president two years ago, "Cuba is the only country in the world where people can live without working." But there are plans to change all that.
Cuba is about to take the Chinese road to transform its economy and, not coincidently, to pay back billions in overdue Chinese loans. Last November, Raul Castro issued a 32-page document calling for a raft of reforms to save the revolution. ¨We are running out of time," he conceded. "If we don´t change things now, we will bring about the collapse of efforts by many generations.”
The connections between Florida and the Bahamas are more complex than some readers might imagine. In fact, Bahamians were among the first settlers of many South Florida communities - including Coconut Grove, Ft Lauderdale and Key West.
Growing up in Nassau in the 1960s, I clearly remember what an event it was to visit Miami and eat at the fabulous Burger King on Flagler Street. We stayed at cheap downtown hotels like the Patricia, the Alhambra or the Columbus, and shopped in mercantile palaces like Zayre, Walgreen's or Woolworth's.
I'm not sure what black Bahamians did in Florida during those days of cracker-barrel segregation. It was only in 1960 that sit-ins led by the Congress for Racial Equality made it possible for blacks to shop and eat in Burdines and other department stores. And it was not until the following year that a "white" hotel (the Biscayne Terrace) accepted black guests for the first time.
Miami was always the Bahamian metropolis. But since the 1980s, many white Bahamians at least, have preferred Ft Lauderdale to the overcrowded and increasingly Hispanic conurbation further south. Since I attended the University of Miami in the early 1970s, the area's growth has been explosive, but Miami is far more congested than the rest of South Florida.
Usually a Bahamian trip to Florida is planned for purely commercial reasons, with little time to stand and stare. But after settling our daughter into college last week, we decided to take a closer look at a community we really knew nothing about.
In 1963, theTwilight Zone ran an episode called the Printer's Devil. It told the story of a publisher who, when his linoptype operator quit, had to strike a deal with the devil to save his newspaper.
The point is that linotype operators were critical to a newspaper's survival. So what is a linotype, you ask? Well, it was a big noisy machine that cast lines of type from molten metal for printing.
Sounds medieval, right? But back then it was considered "the acme of perfection", and was a huge leap for the printing industry. For hundreds of years before the linotype was invented in the 1880s, typesetting had been a painstakingly slow process performed by hand, letter by letter.
Today, the entire newspaper production process is digital. But it took a long time for the industry to make the transition from complicated mechanical systems like the linotype to computers. And the changes were bitterly resisted by linotype operators and others, who took years to learn their trade.
