The Big Red Boat screeched and hawed, and spat a cloud of smoke, and I could see people leaning over the guard rails. A hat flew into the water. The Cruise Liner is an awful polluter: In the deep sea, it shits the poisonous excrement of potato-chip-eaters and Mountain Dew drinkers, and dumps its wastes into the water streams that follow the same route as the plankton, the jellyfish, and the birds on their way to the shallows of places like the barrier reef between the Atlantic and the Caribbean, where Jane and I are now.

Premiere Cruiselines, under contract with Disney, originally quarantined the most beautiful side of Guana Cay, and set loose a carnival of tractors to tear apart its pines and replace them with expensive palm trees from the Middle East and the Pacific. Barges came in and began one of the largest cruiseline dredging projects in history; removing sand from the ocean floor and silting the tidal highways between the cays to make way for the Big Red Boat cruiseliner.