A Worshipful Company of Provident Adventurers by Henry Shukman

Five fishermen are sitting around on makeshift benches beneath a palm shelter behind Miss Sophie's guesthouse. They wear dusty cut-off slacks and baseball caps. It is nearly noon, they are back from the morning on the sea, and their boats bob on the wavelets just beyond the muddy beach at the end of the yard.

"You want take a bathe?" one of them, Durman Dawkins, calls to a little boy. The boy runs up and hides his face against Durman's leg, made shy by the company. "Yer brother swimming. You want go with he?"

The boy's elder brother, dressed in a green string vest, is splashing about in the shallows chasing fish. Durman settles back on his board seat, still holding the child. "You don't like a licker bathe? Or you waiting on the crabs?"

At this all the others laugh. It is a reference to the crab soup that Miss Sophie is cooking, a brown broth bubbling away nearby in a huge blackened aluminium pan set over a fire. Clad in a shapeless white tee-shirt and bulky blue skirt, with a red scarf wrapped around her head, Miss Sophie just poured a pitcher of flour and milk into the pot to thicken it - "tickening," she explained to me - and the soup is nearly ready. She scoops out a plastic bowl and hands it to Durman for tasting.

"Falta salt, yes?" he declares, breaking into the bilingual idiom of the island of Old Providence: falta is Spanish for "it lacks." The other men mumble their assent from their various attitudes of repose. Not only is it the hot midday but now, early May, right before the rains start, is the hottest time of year. Repose is the only sensible condition from eleven till three each day.

But, today it is an expectant rest: for this is the first day of the year that Miss Sophie is making her crab soup. The land crabs of Old Providence are a great local delicacy, after they have been boiled up with plantain, yucca and coconut milk, but they only venture from their holes in the hills once a year, at just this season, when they scuttle down to the sea in millions to lay their eggs. They come at night, and cover the roads so thickly it is impossible to drive even a moped past without decimating their ranks.

One of the reclining fishermen is Durman Dawkins's father. I ask him why there are so many crabs around.

"Millzion upon millzion a crab," the old man agrees wistfully. Then he adds: "It shameful to see the amount a crab it have on the island," and shakes his head.

"But why?" I repeat. "How come?"

"I don't know. Maybe is because we right in the middle of the Caribbean." He shrugs.

"Is because we don't have no cars mashing them all up," says Durman. "Just a one or two licker pickup trucks."

Miss Sophie, a woman renowned in the island for her cooking, and for keeping a small guesthouse - and, let it be said, for the fact that she never married, though she has several boisterous offspring - turns from her soup and fixes us all with her stern, bright eyes, a hint of severity in her expression. "Is because God make them so," she tells us. "We should praise the Lord for that we can be making so much crabs soup. All because of He bountiful goodness."

All the above reasons might in fact be valid: the Lord has indeed made Old Providence bountiful, with its Eden-like abundance of yams, coconuts, sugar mangoes, and the plentiful fish of its reefs - not to mention the crabs. And it does have only one road, a twelve-mile loop circling the shore, round which the island's handful of pickup trucks trundle, while two door-less, windowless, wall-less Colombian buses lumber around in their wake, the one going clockwise, the other anti-clockwise. And Old Providence is more or less in the middle of the Caribbean. In more senses than one. Unlike most Caribbean islands, it does not form part of the sea’s perimeter. Nor does it lie in a chain of islands. It sits all alone in the middle of an empty sea, a fertile hilly isle some seven miles long and two wide dropped in the western Caribbean, a stray offshoot of the Andes. To the north lies Jamaica, to the south Cartagena and the Spanish Main, and to the west Nicaragua, but they are all hundreds of miles away. Old Providence floats on its own, lost, stranded, forgotten in the middle of the balmy sea - which is also one reason why it may be the last true island paradise in the Caribbean.

And, it has stood right in the heart of the region's history, in the middle of centuries of crossfire between the Spanish and the English. It has known all the classic ingredients of Caribbean history: English pirates (it was Henry Morgan’s base for years), Spanish galleons, a population descended from African slaves, and rumours of buried gold chests. But unlike most of the West Indies, where one influence or another became predominant, Old Providence remains a miniature distillation of all things Caribbean, a tiny crucible where Spain and England and Africa have fused. The people speak both Spanish and English; they listen to Jamaican reggae and Cuban salsa; they wear the headscarves and dresses of the West Indies, but when they go out they dress up in Latin sequins and satin.

The first thing you find out about Old Providence - or Providencia, as Colombia, which owns the island, has dubbed it - is that no one has heard of it, but everyone thinks they have. "Providencia? Oh yes, in the Bahamas, right?" Or: "Old Providence? Sure, I know, lemme think, somewhere down near Puerto Rico." The truth is no one knows where it is, and no one has heard of it. Virtually alone of all Caribbean islands it has remained a secret, untouched by the last fifty years of tourism.

Though the islanders sometimes bemoan their fate, it has been their good fortune to be a dependency since the 1820’s of a chaotic, neglectful nation. Colombia built them a road and a reservoir in the fifties and pretty much left them alone since then. At Christmas time a few holidaymakers come over from Bogota and Medellin, but they have little impact on island life. They stay in the handful of beachside cabanas and guesthouses in Freshwater Bay, a leafy strip with the island's only pizza restaurant, El Bucanero. A few islanders get periodic work on cruise ships, which love to employ them - "They know the islanders not fraid the ocean," Durman Dawkins explained to me - but wherever they go they always come back.

And, to this day the island is still the Caribbean of the Old Man and the Sea, of Jean Rhys' Sargasso Sea, of Earl Lovelace and Far Tortuga, of fishermen who trawl for tuna, marlin, and kingfish in little wood dinghies propelled by sails, of rickety sugar mills turned by horses, of Baptist churches down by the water's edge. In the four or five settlements clustered around the shoreline, the old wood-frame houses with their porches and tin roofs are painted sky-blue, green, yellow, pink, and in them the island's 4,000 people still go about their days with insular calm. Everyone is black, but has a resonant old British "title" - Archbold, Livingston, Hawkins - dating back to the original Puritan settlers of the 1620s. And the names are not the only things that have changed little since then.

A typical day: Six o'clock. The sun rises clear of the white line of reefs off the eastern shore. Miss Mary stands in her doorway in Southwest Bay and throws her red sandals on the ground. She steps into them and shuffles away, draped in a big pink dress, to open up her restaurant next door. Meanwhile in Freshwater Bay a fisherman on the beach casts a circular net over the smooth morning water. He catches his bait of glittering minnows then hoists the mast on his little wood craft and scuds away across the water, till his canvas sail is just a white speck far out.

All around the island, in fact, fishermen are clambering into their wooden boats. In Old Town they start late today. An old man who has come to rake up the seaweed on the beach observes: "The movement a little slow this morning." But soon the Lungs, father and son, appear on the muddy beach and load up their blue boat, See Princess. They pass under the arch in the "Love Bridge," a floating walkway that connects Providencia to its tiny sister island, Santa Catalina. (Raimundo Lung has a copy of a British Admiralty map of 1650 which shows the two islands connected by a neck of land. They say the pirate Henry Morgan dug the channel between them. "Yessir," Raimundo tells me, his clear hazel eyes shining beneath his cropped silver hair, "that man Morgan change up a lot a ting on the island. He was the fella with the money about the place.") They pass Crab Cay with its palms on top and the Three Brothers rocks where the frigate birds roost, and forge on until the island is a misty cluster of sharp green hills behind them.

Then they drop anchor--– a frayed yellow rope tied to an old car iron -- and pull on fins and masks. One by one, lying out on the surface, they lazily raise a leg clear of the water and allow its weight to tip them up. With the slowest of graceful strides they wade gently down to the grassy seabed some sixty feet below. There they pause, look about, and begin their stroll across the ocean floor, gathering conch shells as they go. When they have four in either hand they pause again, crouching there at the bottom, then launch themselves with the slow ease of an Apollo, rising up with wide ballerina-like strides, all in slow motion, their masks flashing white with the reflection of the sky. They break the surface and with little measured puffs, releasing the stale air like slow valves, and make their way, hands laden, to the boat. They have been known to stay down for four minutes at a time, always moving slowly, like astronauts.

"Diving plenty arts," Raimundo explains. "Is a arts."

His son Armando hacks at a shell and extracts the white animal inside by its horny claw. He cuts it open and pulls out from its entrails a transparent tube the length of a matchstick. "They say the man who eat this pipe have plenty wind," he says, popping it in his mouth.

Raimundo nods, extracting a water jar from under his folded trousers. The sun is well up in the sky now and it is hot. He holds the jar up, inspecting it. "Very licker," he observes. "Very less." It is in fact empty.

Meanwhile off the south side of the island, Amadeo, a lanky blue-eyed fisherman, is riding the twelve-foot Atlantic rollers beyond the reef. It is a good day. He has already trawled a dozen fifteen-inch silver bonitos, and his big line is set and baited with a fillet of one of them. Suddenly it stiffens and swings out. He slips on rubber finger-tubes and begins to haul in. A scythe flashes through a wave nearby and Amadeo stands in the wildly pitching canoe and pulls hard. A gulping, thrashing four-foot barracuda finally comes to rest, vertically, against the side. He whacks it three times with a club. It shivers and hangs still. For Amadeo, too, the island now is nothing more than a hazy angular hill on the horizon. Some days he doesn't even sail back home, but trundles on in his little boat, up and down the waves, dressed in his black track suit, to lonely cays and sandbanks where he camps for days, weeks, cooking over driftwood fires, sleeping under the stars on unknown beaches. He can wander anywhere in the warm Caribbean sea, provided he has a boat and a hook, like a nomad in the desert.

But, not everyone is a fisherman. Radiga Sjogreen Brown, descendant of four Swedish brothers shipwrecked on the island a hundred years ago, was up at first light throwing a banana-leaf saddle over his slender horse and clopping off up a dry stream bed towards his farm.

He is a tall gentle man. He loves the farm he has known all his life and is kind to his animals. When it gets hot and the tree tops are buzzing with feeding bees he rests his horse in a dark pond, where it stands cooling its hoofs and slurping up mouthfuls of water.

On the farm he keeps hogs, chickens, a few cows, and grows sugarcane and melon, which do well together. "Cane and melon very friend," he tells me. He has mango and papaya trees and watermelon too. The farm provides all his family need. "Everything it produce we sell a part and eat a part," he says. It is a scruffy place, though, just a tin shack with the hog pens under a tree. In a bosky hollow across a field stands his sugar mill, an old spidery contraption with long spindly wooden arms, into which he harnesses two horses. While they trot round he feeds the cane into the ancient black gears in the middle. Brown juice spouts into a bucket beneath.

"The juice fetch five thousand a bucket," he tells me. "From the juice we boil up the molasses. That fetch thirty thousand. And from the molasses you make a bush rum. The rum fetch seventy. And plenty nice."

While the horses in the sugar mill rest I can hear the thrumming of the bees high up overhead again, and the glutinous popping of frogs in the undergrowth. A bird hoots, and I realise I am in a miniature forest, a private woodland of the island's very own.

While Radiga was riding slowly up to his farm the office workers of the island were making their way to town, by pickup and motorbike and on foot. Seven o'clock and they are all at work. The Mayor, Alexander Henry Livingston, is seated behind his desk in a cool dark office upstairs at the Alcaldia, a large green and white house in the middle of town. His secretary runs from her desk on the veranda to fetch him a coffee from the Junto Al Mar restaurant across the street, where Madam Elsie has just served half a dozen misty bottles of beer to a gang of workers. Elsie pours out the coffee then goes back to add more coconut milk to the rondon fish stew (so called after the traditional cook's call to lunch - "Run down!") The judge, a young woman from Cartagena who hasn't seen a single trial in eight years, clacks away at her typewriter, preparing a title deed. And the police inspector in his office further down the street listens to two men who have come to him to settle a dispute: one man's cattle trampled through the other's yard, destroying his pepper plants. The fan in the corner of the room makes all the papers on the desk flutter as it sweeps back and forth.

And so the morning draws on. By noon the island's work is concluded. Most of the fishermen are back on shore, the farmers are back home waiting for lunch, the school kids have heard the noon bell and roared out into the road, the boys in jeans, the girls in their tartan dresses. (I met one little girl who wished she could wear jeans too, instead of a dress. Her friends said of her: "She doh wah be a gyals, she wah be a boys.")

And the torpor sets in. Four heavy hours of immobilising heat.

One lunchtime I made the mistake of riding round to the village of Bottom House on my scooter, and not only that, but of forgetting to put on my sun cream. The road was completely deserted, and the sun so strong that by the time I arrived at the first shack my thighs had already turned scarlet. And the town itself could have been in mourning. Here and there a man lay in a hammock slung between two trees in a yard. A woman slept on a couch in a porch; three men lay balanced on the walls of a cistern with its faucet running, in the shade of a Banyan tree. Sticks propped open every front door, in the hope of catching any faint breeze.

Come three o'clock and there was more happening in Southwest Bay. On a track outside the unfinished Catholic church I ran into two girls holding sticks to their mouths like microphones and singing "Guantanamera", and falling about in giggles. They were eight years old, cousins. One was called Jeimy (she spelled it for me) and the other Jennifer. And inside the church I could see a group of people in a room across the empty concrete interior. I asked the two girls what was going on there.

"Inside up the church them take cistern water," Jeimy informed me. The town's water supply was erratic. People used the church's tank when desperate.

Jeimy invited me to climb the cliff behind the town for the view. On the way the girls stopped to swing on giant aerial roots. "That there a long time," Jeimy said, pointing to the lianas. "From we small we come here and swing on it." She skipped off a boulder and travelled slowly out over the sloping ground, clutching a fat tendril.

At the top of our scramble up the cliff she said, "We get now. We reach. Look down there. You see plenty plenty land." You could see the whole valley of Southwest Bay, the beach, the palms, the fields with small herds of cows here and there. On a road below a boy was driving along a dozen silver zebus with a switch, like a Maasai. But otherwise the afternoon was still.

Four o'clock, and life begins to resume again. People gather to drink a coke at the stores - shacks with names like "Here I Stay," "The Original Store," and "The Hilton" - and women get back to their washing and cooking. The light softens, the heat mellows, and finally, at seven o'clock, the sun slips beneath the western sea. As darkness falls men start playing dominoes at the tables outside the rum shops, slapping down the ivory pieces as hard as they can, stopping to swig from beers, breaking out sometimes in arguments. In the houses plates of rice, fish and plantains emerge from kitchens to be eaten slowly in rocking chairs. In the dusty yards lit by the open windows of houses hogs grunt softly, hidden in their pens, roosting hens rumble in the branches of bushes, and children, barefoot, barelegged, stand about in groups beneath the trees watching for what will happen next.

And another day is over on Old Providence, a day like so many before and so many to come.

One woman who knows a great deal about the island's former days is Virginia Archbold, chief repository of local history. Virginia, once Mayor of Providencia and Intendente of the Archipelago, a formidable woman, has invited me onto the balcony of her two-story blue and white frame house to drink Pepsi, smoke Marlboros and talk about her island's past. She is heavily made up, bundled into a stiff flowery dress, her hair larded back on her shapely head like a ballerina. She flicks her ash through the banisters and snaps her fingers for emphasis, eyeing me theatrically out of the corner of her smouldering dark eyes.

"Columbus call it ‘The Garden of the Queen of Spain.' But he don't stay. No, Sir," she tells me. "The Puritans was the firs' that settle here."

The Puritans came in 1629. They were all members of the Worshipful Company of Provident Adventurers, venturing forth to the New World as the Pilgrim Fathers had done only nice years earlier. Indeed, they sailed from Plymouth on the Seaflower in company with its sister ship, the very Mayflower itself. Just west of Bermuda, a hurricane separated the two vessels, and for more than a year the Seaflower meandered from port to port trying to find its lost companion. But while the Mayflower had been blown northwards, the Seaflower had somehow been sent south, and accidentally wound up on the deserted paradise of Providencia. The Puritans knew a good thing when they saw it, and by 1631, 500 of them had settled the island.

"But only men," says Virginia, fixing me with a fierce stare. "No women yet. "She wags her cigarette at me. "Then the Spanish come and mash up the place and send the Puritan away. The Puritan come back, and this time bring women for marrieding."

The island in fact passed back and forth between the Spanish and the English many times. "Each group that come and move on the other, they always lef' the slaves in the midst, and each one come use the slaves," Virginia explains. Which is why virtually all the island's inhabitants are descended from slaves.

But the highlight of Providencia's history is the year 1670, when the pirate Henry Morgan started using the island as his lair, from which he would strike out on his daring raids. He is said to have buried forty chests of gold somewhere near the Peak, the highest hill on the island, but along with the treasure he also buried the four unfortunate men who dug the hole for it, so that knowledge of its whereabouts would reside with him alone. Their spirits guard the treasure still, which is why no one has ever found it.

"You want to find that treasure, got to use obeah," Virginia advises me. "Witchcraf'. Evil spirits does protec' and care it."

Evil spirits or no, the lives of Old Providence's farm and fisher families have quietly plodded on for three hundred years undisturbed. Virginia leans forward slowly, gracefully, to offer me another cigarette. "Well," she says. "That is about all our history. We are a quiet little island."

It may be a quiet little island, but its calendar is rich with holidays: not just the many saints' days and the periodic horse races held in the surf at Southwest Bay, but also the annual Carnival, when all the distillers of bush rum bring their concoctions out onto the street.

And this Sunday happened to be Mother's Day. In the convent in town the Sisters invited the mothers of their pupils in for ice-cream. The ladies, all done up in their best, sat on rows of seats along the wall silently spooning out their pink ices from paper cups, awed not only by the holiness of the place but also by the nuns' music system, which was blaring out Colombian Cumbia music from speakers all around the building. There was something wrong with the hi-fi, and the nuns couldn't turn the volume down. Nor could they switch off the speakers on the street, normally reserved for solemn announcements and prayers. Two young men passing by on a motorbike tooted the horn jubilantly, assuming there was some festivity in progress. They even slowed down, considering whether to check it out.

But they only had to wait till the next day for a real festival. It was a long time since a President of Colombia last deigned to visit Old Providence. Consequently not only Virginia Archbold and the nuns but the entire island was seized by a frenzy of excitement at the news that the Presidential Candidate Andres Pastrana, who went on to win that election, would be paying them a call. Pastrana had guaranteed himself all their votes merely by announcing his visit. All around the road hung banners and posters of his handsome moustached face, and quite a party was planned for him.

There was a crowd at the airport to welcome him. I arrived late and ran straight into Ridley Huffington, the new Mayoral Candidate, who had organised the day for Pastrana. Ridley told me not to worry about my lateness: "Pastrana expec', but he don't reach yet."

He was expected, in fact, at one, and didn't make it till three. But no one minded. Willy B was there with his "Coral Group" playing calypsos and pasillos on guitar, bathtub bass, mandolin and the distinctive island instrument, jawbone of an ass. The jawbone maestro, a large man with a brush of grey hair, would strike it extravagantly with his palm and set all the teeth jingling. Willy B himself, a bulky tall man who used to be a chef on a transatlantic tanker, led the group with his violin. Men in slacks took it in turns to dance with the four candidates for the Carnival Beauty Queen title. The girls, in sequinned miniskirts and flouncy blouses, moved about demurely, aware that they were the centre of attention in the crowd, at least until the great man swooped down in his aeroplane.

Once he did, there was a great surge onto the runway. The Candidate, young at only 38, breezed his way through the throng shaking hands and liberally distributing his winning smile. Back in the terminal Virginia Archbold stiffened herself at a microphone and formally welcomed him. He made a short speech, then everyone piled into the trucks and motorbikes outside and roared off in the wake of his white pickup truck. Only one woman stayed behind - Nory MacNab. Earlier in the day she had set out a dozen coconut shells adorned with hibiscus flowers and filled with her notorious "coco loco" drink to welcome the visitors. In the excitement of arrival the drinks had been overlooked and now she didn't know what to do with them.

"I know," offered Willy B, glancing at his thirsty band members as they packed up their gear.

The motorcade made a stop at Southwest Bay for another speech, while soldiers with rifles patrolled the beach for unlikely assassins (being a Presidential Candidate in Colombia has to rank as the world's most dangerous job), then continued its round-island tour to town. The bikes made a noisy pack, and came growling up to the wharf by the Alcaldia in a cloud of exhaust smoke.

Willy B's band was already there on the dockside bouncing through a quadrille with a new gusto. "In de Caribbean de very best," they sang, "is de beautiful island of Providence." Meanwhile the Candidate boarded the bar-boat where he was to have his late lunch, together with the island's dignitaries - among whom I somehow mistakenly found myself counted.

The soldiers guarding the gangway ushered me on board with their rifle barrels in a manner I could hardly disobey. Clad only in T-shirt and shorts, both reeking of two-stroke fuel, I felt distinctly underdressed, and loitered uneasily by the tureens of the buffet, while fat waitresses fed me crab claws and glasses of champagne. But Pastrana himself soon noticed me and beckoned me over, rising from his seat.

I edged towards him shiftily, shook his hand, and suffered a sudden lapse in my normally fluent Spanish. I wanted to tell him a little about myself, to attempt to justify my presence at the grand floating luncheon, maybe even to rave a little about the island, but words failed me.

It didn't matter. With a charming smile he launched into an explanation of his election campaign, and of his close rivalry with the other leading contender, all in perfect English.

Fumbling for words, I said that it was nice Colombia still had its own little piece of the Caribbean, in the form of this island.

"We're very lucky. You English might have had it," he laughed. "But we held onto it."

The boat loosed its moorings. I had been thinking I might still slip away after the pre-lunch drinks, but now it was too late. Smoothly the bar-boat swung out into the bay and churned across towards the green hill of Santa Catalina, which seemed to glitter in the afternoon sun. Two speedboats packed with soldiers flanked us, weaving in and out of the wake.

A waitress began bringing bowls of soup to the tables. Pastrana sat down. "This is something I have heard a lot about," he said, chuckling. "I don't want to miss it."

Before him sat a bowl of rich brown broth with a pair of crab claws floating in it. "Providencia crab soup," he declared as he began to eat.

He looked around appreciatively at his fellow guests, who were all slurping away. "The true taste of paradise, no?"

The waitresses smiled and nodded - "Yessir, we thank the Lord for He goodness in giving us all them crabs" and stood waiting, tureens in hand, to replenish the bowls, as the barge forged on across the sparkling bay.