Bahama Pundit

A Bahamian in Normandy on D-Day Plus 70 Years

by Larry Smith

NORMANDY, France - As we eased along the peaceful wooded lanes in Alan Wilson’s powerful green Bentley, it was hard to believe that one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War lay just around the corner.

There are memorials and museums all over the rolling Norman countryside, but driving up to Mont Ormel we passed a sign identifying "Le Couloir de la Mort” - the corridor of death. This was where the Allied forces that had landed on D-Day, 77 days before, decisively ended the Normandy campaign in August 1944.

“The German army was hemmed in all along this road and suffered terrible casualties trying to escape the Allied pincer movement,” Wilson told me in his best schoolmaster voice. “Artillery and air strikes caused tremendous damage during the retreat and some 40,000 Germans were captured. The stink of death hung over the valley for months."

Since he began coming to Normandy several years ago, following open heart surgery in Nassau by Dr Duane Sands, Wilson has had a lot of time on his hands to bone up on war history and explore the countryside. He now spends several months of the year here, returning to Nassau for the winter.

“I'm fascinated by the history and I love the people,” he said. “The life is so relaxing I can get a lot of reading in, and you don’t even have to lock your door in our village. There’s fresh vegetables, fruit, meat and beautiful bread - not to mention the wine.”

Originally from Yorkshire, Wilson met and married Bahamian Sharon Cadman (former headmistress at St Andrew’s School) in the early 1970s while at Westminster College, a Methodist teacher training institute in Oxford. He taught at Queen’s College in Nassau for a few years before leaving to work in the automotive trade. 

A Trip to Taiji - Bahamians Help Stop Japan's Dolphin Hunt

by Larry Smith

They call him Flipper, Flipper, faster than lightning, 
No-one you see, is smarter than he, 
And we know Flipper, lives in a world full of wonder, 
Flying there-under, under the sea! —  Flipper TV show theme

For most people of a certain age, our image of the cheerful, helpful and super intelligent bottlenose dolphin was formed by the iconic 1960s Flipper television series - a marine version of Lassie.

The TV show was an adaptation of the 1963 Ivan Tors movie. It was based in Florida, but parts were filmed here - out east near High Vista. And 30 years later, a Flipper revival movie was filmed at Jaws Beach, between Lyford Cay and Clifton. 

The show portrayed a wild dolphin who acted as a sidekick to a Florida marine park warden and his two young sons. Produced in cooperation with the Miami Seaquarium, all the TV dolphins were captured and trained by an ex-navy diver named Ric O’Barry.

"I went to the Seaquarium for the first time on opening day in 1955, when I was on leave from the navy,” O’Barry said in a recent interview. "It was only the third dolphinarium in the world…and I realized that's what I wanted to do. And five years later when I got out of the navy, that's what I did. My first day on the job was on the capture boat.”

The show gave O’Barry a good life. He lived in the house that was used in the filming, on the Seaquarium property at Key Biscayne, with the dolphins he trained just down the beach. And as a result of the show’s popularity, marine mammal facilities began opening all over the world, giving rise to a multibillion-dollar trade in live dolphins.

But Flipper also ended up changing O’Barry's life. In 1970, he made an about-face and began educating the public on the plight of captive dolphins, spending some time in the Bimini jail for trying to release a dolphin held at Alice Town's now-defunct Lerner Marine Lab. For the last 40-plus years he has spoken out against dolphin capture at lectures and conferences around the world. In fact, he gave a talk in Nassau a few months ago.

Bermuda and the Bahamas

by Larry Smith

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.

The Bahamas and Orkney

by Larry Smith

 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.

Politics and Pleasure in the Cayman Islands

by Larry Smith

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.

Panamanians and Bahamians Mingle via Copa Airtlines

by Larry Smith

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.

Bahamian Heritage in the County of Norfolk

by Larry Smith

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 Hart 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.

Diving into Blue Holes and the Sargasso Sea

by Larry Smith

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.

Treasure Island—San Salvador's Gold Fever

by Larry Smith

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.

A Bahamian in Search of Fidel

by Larry Smith

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.”