A houseboat-like affair at the tip of the dock next to the bobbing seaplane was where we waited momentarily for our baggage-mine was a single canvas duffel-and at the end of the short pier in a one-story modern shed was a Pan Am passenger station where a polite, casual Negro in a white shirt as dry as mine wasn’t and the crown-crested blue cap of a royal immigration officer asked me a perfunctory question or two and waved me on.

No passports were needed here, I’d been told; and no currency exchange was necessary-though a British colony, New Providence would be glad to take my American money.

Back out in the humid air, I drank in the languid, off-season, wartime ambience of a wharf that no doubt often bustled, but not now. The handful of American tourists who’d made the Miami flight with me-with European travel a memory, the rich had to go somewhere in the summer, even if it was the tropics-were shanghaied by a barefoot black troubadour bearing a weather-beaten banjo. In tattered shirt and trousers and a wide straw hat and just as wide a smile, he accompanied himself, plinking, plunking on the banjo, beating out rhythm with his knuckles on the instrument’s face as he sang in a jaunty baritone, “Wish I had a needle, so fast I can sew, I sew my baby to my side and down the road we go…”

The tourists stood with their bags in hands, with expressions ranging from delight to annoyance, and when the troubadour tipped his hat and then turned it upside down, they pitched some coins in. I wasn’t part of his audience, but wandered over and flipped in a dime myself.

“Thank you, mon,” he said.

“Always this sticky in July?”

“Always, mon. Even de trees sweat.”

And he was off to find new pigeons.

Warehouses and other stone structures-this one labeled Government Ice House, that one labeled Sponge Exchange, another Vendue House, whatever that was-fronted the water’s edge.