As Carty had told me, the Anguilla Day race began at Sandy Ground and ended there the same afternoon, with music thumping from the beach bars of Johnno's and Pumphouse. Clouds of smoke bloomed from split-barrel grills arrayed with slabs of ribs and quartered chickens. Lanky young Anguillans came to flirt and cheer the winners. They promenaded up and down the beach in skintight, color-coordinated outfits. Empty green beer bottles soon littered the sand.
Anguilla's race boats are beautiful, in a gawky way. With their small, bare hulls and their oversize sails, which swing up jauntily on extended booms, they look clumsy and graceful at the same time, like the long-beaked pelicans that sweep over the island's coves.
I drove with the caravan about halfway around the island. Revelers bumped along the dirt roads closest to the water, blasting their sound systems and kicking up dust. At each stop, bets were made, beers were popped, and the swaying sails of the oddly elegant boats slid by. Eventually, traffic came to a halt in a parched gully. Vans began careening into ditches to get ahead of other vans careening into ditches. We were jammed, bumper to bumper, too far inland to see the boats. A large truck spun its wheels and began sliding backward down a hill toward me, and that was enough. When we came back to the main road, I peeled off, opting to watch the rest of the race in comfort like the tourist that I was.
Malliouhana (and its restaurant, run by two-star French chef Michel Rostang) sits on a bluff overlooking the sandy curve of Mead's Bay. The resort is the ideal spot from which to watch the race's final run to Sandy Ground. There were hotels on Anguilla before Malliouhana, such as, low-key Rendezvous Bay Hotel & Villas, which is owned by Jeremiah Gumbs, another leader of Anguilla's independence movement. But Malliouhana was the island's first real luxury resort-the kind that attracts people with full sets of Vuitton luggage. As a respite from the dust and exhaust fumes, I ordered oeufs à la neige. The classic floating island, a pristine milk-poached meringue cloaked in caramel, was set before me, adrift in crème anglaise. Behind it were the salt ponds, the startling blue sea, and the swooping pelicans. The dish looked like it had been beamed down from another planet.
The flotilla pushed from the west, trailing V's across the water. As the boats drew closer, honks, shouts, and music wafted up from the beach-the caravan had caught up with me. Waiters leaned over the restaurant's rail. The small boats with their giant sails plowed through the swells just below. Above, on guest-room balconies, chambermaids laughed or simply gasped. There had been an upset. The favorite, UFO, had been overtaken. De Chan, an underdog, would win.
"Poor UFO, they ganged up on her," James Ronald Webster told me the next day. He had watched the race from the balcony that runs across the front of his large white house just above Sea Feathers Bay.
Webster is a slim man with a gentle, lined face and flecks of gray in his mustache. He offered me a chair. Sparkling waves washed over the reefs below us.
He didn't need much prodding to discuss the revolution. You could tell he'd told the stories many times: Blowing conch shells to disrupt a meeting of visiting officials from St. Kitts. Climbing a tamarind tree to pull down the reviled flag of joint statehood. Whacking a machete to chop the generator cord that powered the record player and the lights at a beauty pageant that had been planned for the statehood celebrations. "That caused what you'd call a ruckus," he said.
On May 30, 1967, the day now commemorated as Anguilla Day, Webster and his men surrounded the police station and ejected the St. Kitts forces-13 cops-from the island. "We had the whole shoreline covered with men and women, boys and girls. We did not know what we were doing. We just did what we thought had to be done."
In the months that followed, Anguilla voted to secede from the union with St. Kitts. Then, almost two years later, when negotiations with the British failed, Anguilla reluctantly declared itself an independent republic. This promptly brought a British invasion consisting of some 300 paratroopers. The Anguillans put up no resistance, but the sight of British soldiers digging foxholes in the island's rocky soil is said to have mystified and delighted the Anguillan children.
It took 11 more years of arbitration before Anguilla was granted its original wish: to separate from St. Kitts but stay attached to Great Britain. Today, Anguilla remains a dependent British Overseas Territory (while St. Kitts and Nevis are a single independent nation). Around the same time, Anguilla's fortunes also began to change. During the decades of neglect and turmoil, most visitors to the Caribbean passed Anguilla by. The mass-market tourism of the 1960s and '70s went to other islands. But with the political situation stabilized, the island could profit from its previous lack of development. It was unspoiled, its beaches pure. When Malliouhana opened in 1984, soon followed by the splendid Cap Juluca, Anguilla began to draw the fashionable crowd that likes to be there first.
Webster said that when he was growing up "the land was barren. We were just deserted here, like animals." His parents grew potatoes, corn, and peas in small pockets of soil, relying on whatever rain fell. Eight of his fifteen siblings died in childhood. He left Anguilla when he was ten years old to work at a farm on St. Martin. "It sounds funny now, but in those days no one blinked an eye." A lot has changed fast. In 1967, there still were few paved roads, no electricity, piped water, or phones. Now, private jets zoom in daily, carrying CEOs and movie stars to fully wired villas staffed with maids and chefs. I told Webster I'd enjoyed a lot of excellent food while on Anguilla. He said he mostly ate chicken and lots of local fish. "You fry them, you boil them, and when you are done there is no better dish in the world."
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