Soufriere, St. Lucia

The guy at the hotel - I swear, this guy is a trip. When I ask for directions, he says he's not from around here. He says he's from Vieques. You know, the place where people started revolting against the American navy, because they bomb it for practice.

The guy, the guy is really, really white. He's so white, that he has red hair. And I have trouble imagining him being from the island of Vieques. A guy this white should be from the Isle of Man.

"You guys have been in the news a bit too much lately," I say, while I'm looking for Jane.

"Yeah," he says. And, no dogging you, he draws a map of the small outlier to Puerto Rico on my hotel paperwork. He says, "This is where they bomb."

He circles the map, where they bomb.

He says, "This is all about real estate. The bombs don't affect a thing. You can't hear them. You can't see them. The bombing affects nothing in Vieques. It isn't even harmful to the environment!"

He whispers, because - you know - the other hotel clerks around him. "Vieques is the last real estate boom in America," he says, "They're protesting because they want to raise the value of the real estate. They want to develop that part of the island."

The red headed guy is telling me his life story, because I'm probably the first today willing to listen to him. So it's good, when I see Jane in the lounge raising a drink, that I have an excuse to leave the red headed man and his story.

We ditch the hotel . There is this movie about San Juan called Under Suspicion. Morgan Freeman plays the detective. Gene Hackman plays the rich lawyer. The five hundred year old walls of San Juan's promontory fortress play the landscape.

The taxi guy can't speak English. I am telling him to take us somewhere. You know, like where they filmed that Gene Hackman movie.

He is wearing this great yellow shirt, and a fedora hat. He is so old that he turns his blinker on the wrong way. Some cars honk when he slows to a crawl on the freeway. He asks if we like music. He smiles, playing salsa. Something with four or five guitars and plenty of drums. In English, "You like Puerto Rico, yes?"

San Juan is vibrant and industrial, filled with economy and color, and pleasant streets. Honolulu with dumpy billboards in Spanish. The restaurants in old San Juan - the smell of coffee and baked bread, roasted chicken and spice.

He drops us off at a taxi stand, where some other old guys in bright hats smile at us and say, "You like Puerto Rico, yes?"

We are walking in alleys painted orange and yellow and that Caribbean blue that is just a shade off turquoise and green. We are walking in Old San Juan, which is monuments and apartments, along a ridge lined by old turrets.

Old San Juan rests between two giant old fortresses. Construction began when the sugarcane was first planted. Dungeons and towers and dank tunnels.

Imagine a plant evolving to become so wanted that a giant sea fortress of four hundred cannon would be erected to protect its crop. Imagine a mad rush to protect a crop against the Carib Indians, who had a knack for destroying entire villages. Or the English and French, who had a knack for claiming them as their own. Imagine Puerto Rico as a kind of guardian to the Spanish Caribbean; its geography a stopgap to Cuba and Hispaniola. If you are sailing into the Spanish Caribbean, you have to pass San Juan.

The sugar industry was already swinging into full throttle in Puerto Rico just twenty-five years after Columbus' discovery. Puerto Rico and Cuba and Hispaniola and Jamaica. This was the Spanish Caribbean - the so-called Greater Antilles.

To Spain, the Antilles were a revenue source. And although European enthusiasm for nutmeg found the Caribbean, a new sweet tooth in Europe would fuel the development of the region. Entire islands would fell their forests for sugar. Barbados was bare. Tobago was skin. Antigua was bone.

Sugarcane demanded a labor force. The pope thought that if you could catholicize the Carib Indians, you could get them to stop eating each other, and become proper slaves. But none of the native populations were inclined, and Africa would quickly fill that bill. By choice or enslaved, the Antilles were brewing the makings of Americas. Sugarcane, in its humble pursuit of its own existence, was creating the West.

While sugarcane was beginning to bring massive payments into Spain's economy, the effect would go largely unnoticed for hundreds of years by the imperial crown. In 1728, King Philip V of Spain began looking into creative ways to shave more profit from the Antilles territories.

His answer was not gold or silver.

His answer was botanical science and agricultural monopoly. Britain and France were already sending scientific missions around the world. They were already collecting specimens in Africa and Asia. Spain, which had a reputation among the European empires for backwardness, was eager to dispel the notion through an aggressive science program.

Men would begin dabbling and collecting, surveying and testing.

Cheap labor required cheap fuel. Captain Cook thought he found the answer in Polynesia, in the form of a big fibrous ball of a fruit. His botanist, Sir Joseph Banks urged King George III to send somebody on a mission to collect and grow the fruit in the Antilles.

It came from New Guinea, it grew in the Malay Peninsula, it flourished in Micronesia. The Polynesians seeded it throughout the Pacific, the Hawaiians brought it to Samoa. It's called breadfruit, and it tastes like drywall.

And that's precisely where Captain Bligh comes in.

Captain Bligh was ordered to transport twelve hundred breadfruit tree seedlings into the Caribbean and create instant carbohydrates. Breadfruit was the key to cheap sugarcane, and Bligh's mission was to get them to the sugarcane plantations.

He had already been successful in bringing a shipload of the trees to Jamaica. Those in port had referred to his ship as a floating forest. Although this time, pissed off with the prospect of enduring a breadfruit mission from the Pacific to the Atlantic, his crew declined. And, rather than leave their Tahitian mistresses, sent him and the willing half of the crew off in a launch. They, enduring one of the most amazing navigation feats in history, journeyed 3,700 miles to Batavia, in Indonesia - the capital of the nutmeg trade.

Fortunately for the breadfruit, Bligh's original shipment had taken hold, and breadfruit would flourish throughout the islands.

Unfortunately for the slaves, the starchy fibers of this beautiful tree were disgusting. They wanted plantains. They wanted fried bananas. Eventually, they would get them, and the botanical future of the Antilles would again take a bizarre turn.

Sugarcane was being planted the way pretty much anything was being planted in the old world. Potatoes. Apple trees. Olive trees. You basically propagate it by taking cuttings from the stalks of the healthiest plants. You force a speedy evolution. You don't wait for the seeds. You hack at a bit of the giant grass and plant it.