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I needed to get away from America. From all-you-can-eat shrimp buffets, drive-in dry cleaners and most of all, adverts for hemorrhoid creams on daytime TV. The only problem was, my ticket home wasn’t for another week, and I hadn’t enough cash to get to Canada or Mexico.

‘Why not try Tangier Island?’ said friends in Washington DC, a little disgruntled at my waning enthusiasm for their country. ‘It’s a little strange.’

So I borrowed a car and headed south to the small port of Crisfield, Maryland, the ‘crab-fishing capital of the world.’ I caught a creaky ferry out into the immense flatness of Chesapeake Bay.

Tangier Island did sound most un-American. For a start there are no cars. And almost everybody has a Cornish surname - Crockett, Dise, Evans, Landon, Parks, Pruitt - descendants of the original seven fishing families who departed Padstow in 1686. To cap it all, they speak Elizabethan English with a West Country accent.

Tangier got its name from one of America’s first explorers, Captain John Smith, who landed in 1608 when, legend goes, he saw broken Indian pots which reminded him of the Tanja cooking pots of Morocco. The island is shaped like a fish-hook, 12 miles out in the bay. A mere 2.5 miles long and 1.5 miles wide, it’s also just four feet above sea-level.

‘If too many people in Washington DC flush their toilets it’ll go under,’ laughed the ferry captain.

As we approached, the dock-side crab-huts seemed to be floating on the water. Crabs are the lifeblood of this island, as important to Tangier as oil to Texas, or tarts to Bakewell. Beyond was the village, a church steeple and sky-blue water tower the only buildings of note.

The island has 800 inhabitants, a school with 115 children and 14 teachers, two registered nurses (a doctor and dentist come twice a week) and one full-time policeman who seems to spend most of his time giving elderly women lifts in his blue pick-up truck. At the dock we were met by a flotilla of golf-carts. They hurtle around the island’s one road like Nick Faldo Hell’s Angels, ignoring menacing signs that read ‘15 mph - speed controlled by radar’.

I noticed the accents immediately.

‘Hoie yar doein’?’ asked Shirley Pruitt, doyenne of Shirley’s Bayview Inn, one of the four hostelries on the island, in a drawl reminiscent of a landady I once stayed with in St. Ives. She had to repeat the question three times before I understood.

Some academics claim the Tangier accent, and obscure vocabulary (‘spide’ is a frying pan, ‘bateau’ is a boat, ‘tut’ is a rabbit) originate in the West of England; others that it’s a pure form of Shakesperian English, preserved because of Tangier’s isolation. What’s definite is that it’s often impossible to understand.

‘Thar’s noit a whole lat ta doie har, boit poiple seem ta lark thart,’ said Shirley’s husband Wallace.

I nodded enthusiastically and set off to see the island.

You could walk Tangier in an hour. Over two days I must have done at least 20 laps, but each one was different - different colours, birds, sounds, people. Most of the island is marsh, houses lie on two flanks, connected by little dutch-like bridges. But it’s incredibly tranquil, especially after the tour-boats leave at 4pm.

Because most men on the island rise to check their crab-pots at 3am, the three island restaurants close early. The Chesapeake House (all-you-can-eat ham, coleslaw, beets, potato salad, corn custard, clam fritters and crab cakes for $12.95) stops serving at 5pm. There are no bars (the island is teetotal and quite religious), no entertainment of any kind. So pack a good book. Or three. At night the only sign of life is a dissolute teenager doing laps in a golf-cart, rap music blaring. It’s not difficult to see why the island’s youth is leaving. In the 1990 census, 1/3 of households reported earning less than $10,000 a year (national average is $37,500). Times are difficult for the crab-fishermen, with new crabbing limits, micro-organisms killing oysters, and competition from Far-Eastern crab importers. And a nightlife that, to put it colloquially, sucks.

Next morning the island was empty of men. They were out at the crab-huts, awaiting the moment the crustacea shed their shells, to pluck them from watery trays and packed off to dinner-tables in New York and London. I sat, alone, on the beautiful white-sand beach, feeling far away from anywhere, in space and time, recalling Wallace Pruitt’s words:

‘Thes ayland es tha larst plece loike et larft on tha whoile Est Coist.’

On my last night I stood on the wooden dock, watching the lights from the fishermen’s shanties and thought about this world of crabs, golf-carts and Shakespeare. Where the green light at the end of the harbour is the end of the world. My friends were right. Tangier is a strange place, but strangely reassuring. Visit it soon, if you can, before it becomes part of America.

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