Surprisingly, the leader of the revolution was listed in the phone book. Not that I'd gone to Anguilla, the most northerly of the Caribbean's Leeward Islands, to track down retired revolutionaries. Like most visitors, I'd gone to what is possibly the Caribbean's most upscale isle to nap on a white-sand beach, to swim in water the color of a bright blue cocktail, and to eat well.
I'd also gone to see a boat race. Race days bring a raucous energy to this otherwise tranquil island. Brightly painted wooden hulls with names like UFO, Miss Anguilla, and Satellite are finally put in the water after being fussed over for months in villages around the island. The raising of the mast is often a community event. Those Anguillans who can't get out of work to watch the races stay close to their radios. The tradition goes back to the fishermen who used to chase each other back to harbor at the end of the day, according to Calvert Carty, chairman of the local racing authority. I'd called Carty to get details about the Anguilla Day race, a circumnavigation of the 16-mile-long island. If I went to Sandy Ground early in the morning, he told me, I'd see the start. Then a caravan of local cars would track the race from shore. It was a fun way to see the race-each stop was like a little party-but I should be careful. The driving could get crazy.
After I hung up, I flipped through the phone book. The same names-Carty, Connor, Gumbs, Hodge, and Richardson-kept popping up. When I got to the W's, there he was. James Ronald Webster. I recognized the name because songs about him had been playing on the radio all week long in honor of the revolution's 35th anniversary.
As revolutions go, Anguilla's was a small one. (When the British later invaded, asserting the crown's authority, Time magazine dubbed it the "Bay of Piglets.") But it was epochal to Anguillans. The descendants of slaves, they had been left to scrape together a living from farming and fishing after British planters gave up on growing sugar here. Making matters worse was the island's underdog status in the colonial system. Since 1825 it had been trapped in a sibling relationship with St. Kitts and Nevis, one in which St. Kitts held the power. Twice, in 1872 and again in 1958, Anguilla petitioned for change, but in 1967 Britain reinforced the island's subservience by establishing a joint statehood with St. Kitts. Anguillans were incensed. This time the tiny island rebelled.
I called Webster's number. His wife answered and went to look for him. When she came back, she said he'd be happy to chat-in a few days. She gave me driving directions to Sea Feathers Bay, so called because purple sea fans used to wash up there. The island has many locations with literal names-Snake Point, Goat Cave, Grey Pond, Stoney Ground. Each of them describes Anguilla well.
In the days before I met Webster, I roamed the island, moving from one beach to the next, swimming in the calm water and eating at oceanfront restaurants. Gorgeous, white-sand beaches are Anguilla's chief natural asset. But inland, the dry, flat ground is dotted with tousled scrub oaks. Salt ponds are rimmed with foam, and the metal skeletons of Christmas angels are left standing year round. To create the aura of an oasis, gardeners at the resorts jackhammer holes in the rock and fill them with trucked-in dirt so palm trees can survive. There are a lot of goats.
Because of the flatness, a hot wind sweeps over the island with nothing to stop it. What few clouds exist zoom by and are gone. The sun is a constant presence, pressing on your head and baking the sand beneath your feet.
Not much grows in Anguilla's dry, rocky soil that you would want to eat. But enough lobster, crayfish, tuna, snapper, and mahimahi are pulled from the waters each day to assure a nightly feast. Rarely have I eaten so much seafood that tasted so cleanly and clearly of the ocean. Some restaurants dress it up with tender produce and imported delicacies flown in at great effort and expense. But the memorable meals are the simple ones.
At George's, the tented beachside restaurant at the Cap Juluca resort, a modest piece of tuna was grilled longer than most people would cook it at home, topped with a few slivers of grilled onion, and served in a buttered hamburger bun that was lightly touched to the flame. It was as perfect a sandwich as you could hope to have on any beach. At Tasty's, a turquoise, cement-walled little roadside restaurant, a nugget of stewed pot fish was set on my table as a gift from the chef. Pot fish are the small ones caught in local traps. They are rarely served to tourists but are eaten by Anguillans every day. This one had been sautéed in oil with basil, steamed in fish stock and tomato, and peppered with a touch of Scotch bonnet chile sauce. It was the humblest amuse-bouche I'd ever had, and one of the best.
The Valley, the island's central town, isn't much to speak of-a few banks, some spottily stocked grocery stores, and, on Saturdays, a handful of Anguillan women who sell homemade soups and stews at the side of the road. There are also vendors selling good ribs, across from the People's Market. The heavily salted, flame-crisped baby backs come off the fire with their fat still bubbling, and then they're smeared with dark, peppery sweet sauce from a big, simmering pot.
On the morning of Anguilla Day, everyone in The Valley streamed toward James Ronald Webster Park. By nine, the sun was high, and spectators huddled in the shaded viewing stands or under scraggly trees at the park's perimeter. Most wore T-shirts that said, "Ah We Free/You and Me/35 Years Anguilla Day." Policemen in full regalia marched in the scorching heat while a band played "Edelweiss." Anguilla's chief minister said, "After so much trouble has passed we have our freedom at last." Then he announced good things to come: a $90 million resort project with a golf course, hotel, "fractional residences," and "luxury estate villas." Again the band played "Edelweiss."
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."
We looked out at the water, which reflected so much light it was almost the same as staring at the sun itself. Webster apologized for squinting. He'd had an operation for cataracts. He was supposed to stay out of the glare.
This was a problem I'd heard about. The sun was strong enough on Anguilla to blind you over time.
"It's a beautiful place," Webster said, smiling and squinting. "We live here like brothers and sisters."
He walked me to my car and waited at the fence as I got in. I drove up the road. When I looked in my rearview mirror, he was still there, waving.
As I rolled back to my resort, with its huge, air-conditioned rooms, its marble showers, its irrigated gardens, I passed through acres of wide, empty, arid land, so open and exposed. It looked the way most of Anguilla must have looked 35 years ago. But at moments like this, the island seems eternally serene, a spot in the ocean where even celebrated upheavals ultimately give way to the lapping of the waves.