Green Turtle Cay , The Abaco's 

A little more than a hundred miles north of Nassau, and some hundred and seventy from the restless shores of Miami, the Abaco islands lie upon the pale sea like a chain of quiet thoughts. Marsh Harbour on Great Abaco has grown into a busy little mart; Treasure Cay has taken on the polished air of a mainland resort, with its long pale beach and its golf. But Green Turtle Cay, reached by a short crossing from the Treasure Cay ferry dock—ten minutes or so over water of that astonishing turquoise which first startles and then soothes the northern eye—keeps still the aspect and the spirit of its late-eighteenth-century birth.

The cay itself is a slender thing, some three miles long and scarcely half a mile across, an uneven coast of deep bays and sounds, of gentle hills and secluded inlets, of coral gardens in water so shallow that a man may wade far out and still see the sand beneath his feet. The shells upon its beaches and offshore bars are among the finest in the Bahamas. A traveller of today comes, as of old, for the water-life: for bonefish flats, for reefs alive with colour, for the quiet of Gillam Bay’s horseshoe of white sand, and for Coco Bay, where the water lies calm and palm-lined and the green turtles themselves still rise, as if the island had not forgotten the creature that gave it a name. He comes also, if he has a boat or will hire one, to the neighbouring cays—Fiddle Cay to the north, No Name and Pelican to the south—where the world falls away to sand and scrub and, on one of them, those improbable swimming pigs that have become a small modern pilgrimage.

Yet the heart of the place remains New Plymouth, at the southern tip of the cay: an eighteenth-century settlement that has the flavour of an old New England sailing port. It was peopled in the last decades of that century by British Loyalists who, after the American war, chose exile rather than a new allegiance. Their descendants, and the descendants of those who came with them in bondage, form the island’s people still. The names Lowe and Sawyer, McIntosh and Cooper, are heard as commonly now as then. In the old Abaco manner the island was once famed for its boat-building, and pineapple gardens covered many an acre; those days have passed. Fishing, a few modest services, and a small, unobtrusive tourist trade now sustain this restful place. Once the settlement numbered some eighteen hundred souls; today four or five hundred keep the streets and the harbour.

New Plymouth occupies a little peninsula, a harbour at one end, and at the other the ferry-dock looking inward upon Black Sound. As one draws near in the Green Turtle Ferry it is as though one were entering some forgotten fishing village on the north-eastern coast of colonial America. Much of the original masonry was fashioned from lime burned out of crushed conch shell—so strong in alkali, the old records say, that it burned the masons’ hands. Clapboard houses with pretty trimmings line the narrow streets; many have front porches where, in the evening, people sit to take the breeze. On every immaculate way one still finds the old request to keep the cay clean, and the people obey with a thoroughness that leaves a dweller of great cities silent with wonder. A walk through the village—and it may be walked from end to end in ten minutes—takes one along tidy paved ways that are little more than broad sidewalks, past whitewashed picket fences enclosing private gardens all ablaze with flowers. The houses stand neat and well-appointed, their dormers and gingerbread work painted in white and in those soft, delicious pastels that the tropical light loves to linger upon. There are several stores, a handful of eating-houses, a museum of uncommon interest, and churches of different communions. Parliament Street is the principal thoroughfare. Hens still cluck in the dust.

The modern traveller will soon discover that the island’s true carriage is the golf cart. What was once a long, hot walk around Black Sound is now a rattling, pleasant circuit of a few minutes, though the old warning still holds: the roads of Green Turtle branch and wander, and a stranger who trusts his first impression will find himself, more than once, at the back of some place he did not mean to reach. From New Plymouth the carts run out toward White Sound, where most of those who come for the water have always gathered. The Green Turtle Club, begun in the nineteen-sixties by an Englishman who saw in that shore the most beautiful place he had ever known, remains a family house of entertainment, with its marina and its quiet rooms under the trees. Bluff House, perched on the highest ground of the cay and running from White Sound across to the Sea of Abaco, has passed through storm and change of owners; new hands have lately taken it with a promise to restore the old house upon the bluff and not to lose the charm that first drew people there. Just beyond these two, Coco Bay still sits in its crescent of shallow water—a family cove now, and a place to watch for turtles.

Hurricane Dorian, which in the autumn of 2019 laid so heavy a hand upon Abaco, did not spare the cay. Houses were stripped, the museum wounded, the ordinary life of the settlement interrupted as if by a sudden winter. The visitor of today will see that the island has, in the main, gathered itself together again. Roofs are on; the ferry runs; the gardens have come back into flower. Some work of restoration continues, as it must after so great a blow, and the Albert Lowe Museum—housed in one of the oldest dwellings, a white building with green trim near the New Plymouth Inn—opened its front room once more after the storm and keeps, as it can, the pictures, the shells, the relics of first settlement, and the ship models made by Albert Lowe, whose son Alton, a painter of the Abacos, founded the place in his father’s honour. Alton’s pictures of island people and their ways have appeared upon the postage stamps; his gallery, too, suffered in the hurricane. Across the way the Loyalist Memorial Sculpture Garden, dedicated in November of 1987, still offers its quiet testimony: twenty-four bronze busts arranged in the pattern of the Union Jack about a central group of figures, one light and one dark, a remembrance of those who came in exile and of those who came in bondage, and of the single community they made.

Miss Emily’s Blue Bee Bar, on Parliament Street, is known far beyond the island for the Goombay Smash, that fruity rum drink whose secret Miss Emily Cooper kept to herself and which her family keeps still. Miss Emily is gone; her granddaughter now guards the unmarked jug. The bar is a simple room, bright blue without, the walls papered with the cards of off-islanders who have come, year upon year, to taste the original thing. Imitations of the Smash are served throughout the Bahamas; none, those who know the place will tell you, is the same. One drinks it slowly. It is as potent as it is delicious.

Evening life on the cay has always been a modest affair. Where once the hilltop at the edge of town drew the dancers on weekend nights, the traveller now finds the waterfront at sunset—Pineapples, Sundowners, the decks of the clubs—where the light goes down over the harbour and, later, a little music or a karaoke Monday may start up. The stars, when one steps away from the lamps, are what they have always been: a black sky sown with millions of shimmering points, undimmed by any city.

Life on the cay rises to a kind of festival only at certain seasons: on New Year’s Day, when the people still remember the capture of “Bunce,” that shadowy figure of the old Abaco woods; in the spring, when the fishing boats go out in tournament; and in early July, for the sailing. The pleasantest months for a visitor are those from November to May, when the air is kinder and the sea more often at rest. For the rest of the year a deep harmony and well-being brood over the island. One steps into a manner of living shaped not by the passing fancies of high-rolling visitors, but by the modest needs and long-settled customs of Green Turtle Cay’s own peaceful inhabitants. The air at night is like velvet. It is a wonder that such places still exist upon the earth.