The dredging failed, because tidal highways between the Atlantic and Caribbean kept filling up the dredged depths. This silt movement damaged or destroyed tracts of the barrier reef between the oceans in one of the last relatively untouched reef systems - and the third largest barrier reef - in the world. Nobody took notice. This was on top of a trend at the time of 'bleach' fishing, where you dump bleach canisters into a reef system to instantly kill, and therefore catch, tomorrow's market fish or lobster.

Caterpillars and garbage trucks and men with blow-torches turned a pine-forest into 'Treasure Island.' Employees were asked not to refer to the island by its native name, 'Guana Cay', and to act the part of the pirate-ship laden paradise that had been built of plastic and spare parts from California and Mexico. Disney's contracted cruiseline bought dolphins, brutalized them into submission, and built a small net for them that jutted into the silty shallows of the ocean. Some claimed the dolphins were well treated, but anybody who saw their plight after the Big Red Boat left knew that lines had been crossed and budgets cut. The Abaco native who cared for the dolphins shook his head when I asked about them. He squinted in the sun and told me not to look at them.

The Big Red Boat came to Guana Cay for a few years, but the dredged passage silted up; and so the dredging had failed, and Disney bought a nearby island and scrapped paradise for a place they called Castaway Cay. The dolphins stayed, a man was hired to feed them. Beaten by the sun, bruised, first spit on by small kids with bags of Cheetos that would end up in the sea and float to Cuba, then submitted to quarantined loneliness in the baking sun of shallow, dredge-silt water. Some lived, and were eventually shipped off to Nassau. But nobody noticed, because the plastic and spare parts of Treasure Island, abandoned, had already begun to break apart, and collapse as the native Caribbean pines and Australian casurianas overtook the Middle Eastern palms.

The Bahama Islands is associated with a kind of post-slave culture, which is true, in part. But the Bahamas is settled by blacks, and loyalists - those American Brits who sided with the Empire and then fled, and a fair number of Haitians, and other assorted Caribbean Latinos. The shame in all this is, of course, that there once existed another people. Enslaved, driven to extinction, the Lucayans were a brown race whose traditions and peculiarities are all but lost to history. At one time, they were Mongols, moving north through China, through Russia, and into Alaska. They settled in the Tundra and disbanded for New Mexico. They passed through the Isthmus, into South America, settled the Amazon Basin, and then rowed up the Atlantic and Caribbean coasts. They populated islands like Saint Lucia and Martinique until Carib Indians chased them north, to the much less hospitable Bahamas.

No other race, imagine an inception in the Rift Valley of Africa, to Mongolia, to Alaska, to the Amazon, to the Bahamas, in the history of humanity, had traveled so far.

This is the puzzle of the West Indies, because its culture is lost. What remains are people who never intended to be there. The blacks had been forced, or were freemen who pondered their political fate, the loyalists pushed out of America, the Haitians were escapees. The Lucayans themselves never wanted to be there. They were pushed into the northern Caribbean islands because of the ferocity of the Caribs, who wanted to eat them. The Spanish, upon asking them about scars on their bodies, received a reply that indicated they had been constantly attacked by the Caribs.

The Spanish, of course, decided to enslave the Lucayans and sell them. But this practice didn't last long. The Lucayans, so adverse to enslavement, just died, or committed suicide, or fell prey to European diseases. Always eating light; a mix of cassava and fish, the foodless holds of the ships to Florida were enough to kill them and their already empty stomachs. One Spaniard noted that you could find your way from the Bahamas to Florida by the multitude of jettisoned Lucayan bodies floating in the sea. It was said that Lucayans, chained by their neck in a long column, would be decapitated when they began to tire, leaving a lifeless head attached to a column of people already committed to their own deaths.

The extinction of the race was quick. There is no Lucayan blood in any living human. Just a small footnote in the sorry-excuse-for-a-conquistador Spanish massacre of the entire Caribbean, which was said to have eliminated between 500,000 to 13 million people.

This is an awful shame, considering the Bahamas is the center of the Earth. I have heard many places named the center of the Earth. New York, London, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo. But only the Bahamas is the actual geological center. This is precisely where Pangaea - the original sole super-continent, broke apart into the seven continents. The Bahamas is the unlikely beginning of land.

Tourists in Bahamian hotspots - you know, Nassau, Freeport - seem to come back with the same story; 'the service is horrible, Bahamians are assholes, everything was forced on us.' I cringe at this, since I spent two years of my life here, and consider Bahamians like anybody else, anywhere in the world. Tourist centers, in the Bahamas, in Mexico, wherever, are all the same. Bad service, poor manners, all that, is hardly a reflection on the people. It is a reflection on the tourists themselves. Through their rudeness, their willingness to over-tip, or become enamored with something commercial and unrepresentative, bring a place starving for business to a worse fate - a scavenger's fate.

But tourism doesn't need to be a bad thing. That poor American - two weeks of vacation and no obligation to the in-laws in Delaware - needs a place to relax, to kick back. He's worked his whole year for something like Nassau or Freeport. A clean beach, somebody to bring his wife a drink.

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