Limekiller!

Perhaps all of this anyway merely echoes what men of boats have been doing since before there were men of books. “Happy he who, like Ulysses, has made a good voyage." The man spent a generation trying to get from one part of Greece to another, and we call this a good voyage? Clearly, rapid transit was not what was had in mind, nor was he the first war veteran in no hurry to see the folks back home. Nowadays Penelope would have acted differently, unshipped her loom and had it stowed aboard the pentacoster, or whatever, before Ulysses could have made the morning tide. What? Not in the Mediterranean — that “tideless, dolorous midland sea” — Well. Whatever.

Fifty years ago if a married man had the urge to go down to the seas once more (or, likelier, for the first time) he had to tell his wife that he was going down to the corner for a bag of rolls; then he would run like Hell. Today, he has only to dream aloud in order for his wife to say, “Yes! Let’s!” Amelia Bloomer, Lucy Stone, Carrie Chapman Catt, did you envision all that lies in this apostrophe-5? “What we would like,” she says… or maybe he. “We heard that we can get a boat built cheaply down here,” he says… or perhaps she. “We thought, maybe, a little bit of land on the coast or on a river or on one of the cayes,” they say. They ask: “What do you think, Mr. Limekiller?”

“ We’ve heard that you have some land for sale, Mr. Limekiller.”

“ They say you know all about the boat situation here, John.”

“ Could we see it, do you suppose, Jack?”

Now, Limekiller does not really want to sell his two acres up at Spanish Point, in the country’s farthest north; nor his three acres on the Warree River in the country’s farthest south; nor his halfacre out at Rum Bogue Caye, nor his equally-small properties along the coast at, respectively, Jack of Nails (north-central) and Flower Bight (south-central) — not unless he should get some irresistible sort of prices for them. for any one of them… all of which he bought for less than a good second-hand van would have cost him. After all, these lands represent his legal raison d’etre for taking people up and down and around about and in-between. At, of course, a reasonable charge. It was Government’s way of giving him permission to make a living without actually having giving it to him.

Given its choice, Government would probably have preferred for foreigners to have sent money in a plain sealed envelope, and stayed back home and not bothered it. Failing that, it would have been satisfied if visiting foreigners had been satisfied with the services which Nationals had to offer, however minimal: foreigners, somehow7, tended not to be satisfied with that. Nationals, unless it wras during certain fishing seasons, w'anted to come back home every night: foreigners usually wanted to keep on going. In short, the emerging nation of British Hidalgo was slowly, very slowly, beginning to emerge into grappling with tourism. There was a gap. a very, very large gap. Limekiller, to an extent, was capable of filling part of it. He was not a better man because he was foreign. It was perhaps unfair that, being foreign, he could take care of other foreigners in ways that Nationals could not… as yet. Very w ell. For as long as “as yet” might last, Limekiller was given a semi-free hand. Maybe one could learn by looking, listening, observing. Maybe some of it would rub off.

Anyway, although it might be a shame that he was making money which a National ought by rights be making, at least he was spending all of it, well, nationally. Better that he be on hand to take visitors where and how they wished be taken than that the visitors should depart a day after they arrived. To be sure there were other foreigners engaged in tourist-taking-care-of, some of them not even (as was Limekiller) citizens of a Commonwealth country; mostly they were from the States, mostly they operated newish and slick and fast, fast motorized boats; they took middle- aged to elderly, and always obviously prosperous, fishermen of the sport sort on gilded tours. This was all easy for local understanding.