The lesson of the Bahama out-islands is like a joke. Here, big dreams drown in the sea. Fortunes are plundered. In all of history, these islands' isolation have encouraged small dreams, and punished grand ones. Big projects from yesterday exist, but skeletoned and cracking. At one time, the Bahama Government’s big plan was to turn the Out-Island regions into sisal farms; tapping into the American demand for rope products. The joke is not lost on literature. The small armada of books about the Bahamas out-islands concerns big money development turned to shit (Wind from the Carolinas) or small money dreams turned to gold (Out-Island Doctor). The lesson is that the Bahama out-islands humble big projects. If they don't settle into the pace and culture of the people, they go belly up.
A few miles away, here at Treasure Cay harbor, a hundred Haitian migrant workers huddle under tin scrap roofs. It’s all mud and filth and smoke and cramped quarters. Ten, maybe twelve people live together in shacks the size of a boxcar. Ordinarily, in stories about the Bahamas, these third-world ghosts living tucked behind the marinas are forgotten. But in this sad tale, their lives are of imminent importance. So while we discuss big money millionnaires and lavish yachts, remember that the migrant workers and their leaking roofs are also central to this story.
I decided not to give the developers of the Discovery Land Company their answer. They were a golf course development company. Golf courses remain among the leading causes of coral reef destruction in the world. And the coral reef which Guana Cay hugs is one of the most intact, and beautiful, reef systems on Earth. Even when big golfers and marlin-fishermen in fancy yachts hear about this development, they understand how wrong it is. Everybody is saying, ‘How could this happen!’
The matter of Baker's Bay at the north end of Guana Cay, was for me, over. Little did I know that in the meantime, the staff of the Discovery Land Company engaged in a series of extremely questionable practices. In the end, they convinced the Bahamian Government to allow them to develop a golf course on the abandoned Disney site, adjacent to the Bahamas' most important coral reef, and one of Abaco's most fertile sea turtle nesting and foraging areas.
