People were on the move, only not too fast. Most of the faces here were dark, with women in sarong-like garments but longer than Dorothy Lamour’s, and many of the men were bare-chested, ripplingly muscled, perspiration-oiled; both genders often carried baskets and other objects on their heads (despite frequent elaborate straw hats), perfectly balanced, making a way of life out of a childhood expression: Look, Ma, no hands.

As I strolled away from the wharf, duffel bag in hand (not on my head), I glanced back at the harbor, its choppy blueness irresistible to the eye. A strip of land at the immediate horizon (inelegantly named Hog Island, I later learned) defined the harbor; a lighthouse on the tip of the island made a white silhouette against the sky.

A few small sleek white yachts were searching in vain for the fabled Bahamian breezes, while two native schooners were gliding in, as if engaged in a lazy race. Unlike the rich man’s pleasure craft, these had a rough-hewn look, were sorely in need of paint and bore sails of patchwork rags. I thought they were fishing ships, but on closer look I could spot bins laden with brainlike objects that my brain finally discerned as sponges. So they were fishing ships, in a way, though I didn’t relish a fillet of one of their catches.

Another vessel, laden with baskets of fresh vegetables and fruit, drifted by with a colored contingent of young and old, from a granny sitting in a rocking chair to a giggling teenage girl whose nut-brown bare-chested beau was singing her a calypso chantey amidst goats, chickens, sheep and a cow, together on a sloop perhaps twenty-five feet long.

Anchored along the wharf, looking rather lonely, was a ferrystyle sight-seeing craft near a sign that said, glass bottom boat-sea gardens ferry-paradise beach. Perhaps fifteen passengers-including some attractive young women, who looked to be either British or American, with some off-duty RAF and Army boys mixed in-sat around the glass well of the boat, looking impatient, while the portly white white-haired “captain,” dressed in blazer and cap like a roadshow Captain Andy from Show Boat, paced the dock, casting about for more riders.