Limekiller got into his skiff.
A FAR COUNTRIE
At that time Jack and Felix were living in Eden, Felix was really Felicia, Love had just been invented, and the Garden was on the sea.
Limekiller gave his sunstained hair a shake, and began to get the sail up. Felix had already finished tying the skiff — he no longer checked to see if she were doing it right — and, jaw set, was giving an extra push down on the pole to which the Saccharissa had been, and the skiff now was, tied. Probably the skiff would still be there when they returned. It would be an extra drag to tow it under sail, and besides, they would not need it where they were going. It had taken them from Commeal Wharf to the wide waters of the harbor, but there was a wharf or dock at their destination. Behind, ahead, and all around them, others there, in the mouth of the Belinda (or Old Main) River, which was King Town’s Harbor, were doing the same or similar things to their own vessels. Some were going out for conch, some for sand or pipeshank-coral. Some for lobster. And some for fish. Well. some mainly for fish, and some for fish as well.
From astern Limekiller heard a voice ask the familiar question, “You no forget de ‘drop,’ mahn?”
And the answer, in the pearly light of pre-dawn: “Me forget me head, may-be. But no forget me ‘drop.’”
The somewhat more than colony of British Hidalgo abuts on the Great Bay of Hidalgo; the main things about the Great Bay of
Hidalgo is that God has put in it fish for the Bayfolk and the Black Arawack to eat but that God has not put enough fish in it for the Bayfolk and the Arawack to eat all the fish they want to eat. That is not to say" that they" are always hungry, but it is to say that they are always hungry' for fish. A local proverb goes, If there is not a plantain, there is a banana; and there is usually, also, for the Arawack, cassava, and, for the Bayfolk (who are also called Creoles), rice and beans. Both people will eat meat, Yea but we will eat flesh, when they can get it; except that the Bayfolk will not eat any fowl which has served an obeah purpose (and if you ask them why not, they say because it will make a man lose his “nature” and a woman lose her milk); and the Arawack will never under any" circumstances eat goat meat whether they can get it or not: and you must never, ever, ask them why not.
But best of all and most of all, thev both love fish.
It is not only unheard of for any of them deliberately to take to the water without a “drop” (i.e., a drop-line) to tow behind, it is inconceivable. They will eat the quash, a sort of lean-tailed raccoon; they" will eat the gibnut, a kind of large and large-eyed rodent; they" will eat the dark mauve meat of the “mountain-cow,” or tapir; they will eat crocodile tail and the ‘bocrob” or blue crab and the hind legs and red eggs of the iguana: but most of all, given any opportunity at all, they will eat fish.
But Limekiller and Felix were not going out for fish.
A brochure printed by what was still graciously named The Visitors’ Bureau contains the lines: “British Hidalgo’s numerous and picturesque lagoons, colorful coral reefs, sand banks and beaches together with clear blue skies and tropical vegetation, combine to provide this lovely little country a scenic beauty which, together with a mild climate and the friendly welcome of its people, forms the basis of its tourist industry. ”
This is, in fact, or, at any rate, very often in fact, a True Relation: although perhaps industry is too strong a word, and despite the Hotels Encouragement Act, Conrad Hilton somehow lacked the courage. Still, it is, in so many ways, a “lovely little country,” that one can perhaps understand its being coveted by other and rather larger countries.
Not so many years ago, it is well-known, the Director of Correspondence in the Republic of Hidalgo struck yet another blow for the liberation of what he and his countrymen still (after three hundred years) call Hidalgo Occupado, or Hidalgo Ingles: letters addressed to Inglaterra, he ruled, would be no more delivered. not, at least, until the Occupied Districts, falsely called “English,” were returned to their rightful allegiance, videlicet, the Republic of Hidalgo. This was front-page news for one full day throughout Centroamerica y Darien, with the implication of an isolated England supinely treating for a pax hispanica. (The ruling is, so far as anyone knows, technically still in effect; and the few letters which actually travel between Ciudad Hidalgo and, say, Birhmagnan, Mahcesthre, Liberpiil, and Londres — these being, it is also well- known, the only inhabited places in that distant and ice-bound Island, with its odd-odd names — are required to disguise their destination under the novel sobriquet of Gran Bretannia.) — A blow! Unquestionably a blow. One which could certainly not fail of effect, and of immediate effect at that time.
And yet. somehow. somehow. British Hidalgo, for reasons inexplicable (or, anyway, inexplicable in Centroamerica y Darien), failed to become Republican, Roman Catholic, and Mestizo-Ladino; and remained, as long it had been, Autonomously Monarchial, Nominally Protestant, and Predominantly Black. And, also, possessed of a memory like a wind of long fetch: not a single schoolchild cannot tell you how, when Don Diego Bustamente y Bobadilla, Sub-Admiral of the Spanish Main, came crawling down the Crawfish Channel with his armada of three shallow-draft galleys, intent on lowering the Unionjack, establishing the Inquisition, and raising both the Spanish Ensign and the tax on nutmeg — the Royal Navy being elsewhere at the time, either fighting the French for Canada or perhaps it was the Swedes for Spitzbergen — the Baymen both Black and White hastily mounted logs on cartwheels, stained them cannon-black with tar, and vigorously rolled up barrels of, presumably, gunpowder (actually: rum); and thronged threateningly around with lighted matchrope as they sighted their pseudo-weaponry. Don Diego and his three galleys prudently crawled back.
“And him de same mon who defeat de Torks at Toronto! Ah, but de Sponiard is ah fool, mon! De Sponiard is ah fool!"
Limekiller had once earnestly urged that the site of Don Diego’s victory over the Turks must have been Lepanto -