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north; and I wondered whether it was true, as Columbus reported, that one could find fresh water on one side of the white line and salt on the other.
    We were approaching South America: a low grey range of hills in the distance. It was impossible to tell where South America ended and where Trinidad began. The hills could even have been another island. There was nothing, apart from the colour of the water, to tell us that we were near a continent. The hills grew higher, a dip became a separation, and we saw the channel. Columbus gave it its name: the Dragon’s Mouth, the treacherous northern entrance to the Gulf of Paria. Venezuela was on our right, a grey haze. Trinidad was on our left: a number of tall rocky islets untidily thatched with green, and beyond them the mountains of the Northern Range blurred in a rainstorm.
    It was from the South, through what he called the Serpent’s Mouth, that Columbus came into the Gulf of Paria in 1498. The strong currents set up by the flood waters of the Orinoco River as they forced their way into the Gulf of Paria delayed him and nearly wrecked his ship. The currents roared continuously, he wrote; and once, in the middle of the night, when he was on deck, he saw ‘the sea rolling from west to east like a mountain as high as the ship, and approaching slowly; and on the top of this rolling sea came a mighty roaring wave … To this day I can feel the fear I then felt.’ When at last he came into the Gulf he found that the water was fresh. It was this that encouraged him to announce his most startling discovery. He had discovered, he wrote Ferdinand and Isabella, the approaches of the terrestrial paradise. No river could be as deep or as wide as the Gulf of Paria; and, from his reading of geographers and theologians, he had come to the conclusion that the earth here was shaped like a woman’s breast, with the terrestrial paradise at the top of the nipple. The fresh water in the Gulf of Paria flowed down from this paradise which, because of its situation, could not be approached in a ship and certainly not without the permission of God.
    Keeping close to Trinidad, hearing the thunder roll around us out of a blue sky, and watching the lightning play on the hills, we swung in a slow wide arc to the left, so that standing amidships on the port deck we could see our wake quickly subsiding to a dimpled glassiness.
    The emigrants gesticulated.
    ‘I hope Immigration keep an eye on these fellers,’ Mr Mackay said. ‘Trinidad is a sort of second paradise to them, you know. Give them the chance and half of them jump ship right here.’
    We took on the pilot. We took on the immigration officials.
    ‘Let them look,’ Mr Mackay said, referring to the emigrants. ‘We have launches here. No damn rowing-boats.’
    Flag fluttering stiffly, the launch marked POLICE in heavy, reassuring white letters raced beside us, its occupants immaculately uniformed.
    ‘It ain’t a bad little island, you know,’ Mr Mackay said. ‘I hear they taking college boys in the police these days,’ Philip said.
    Port of Spain is a disappointing city from the sea. One sees only trees against the hills of the Northern Range. The tower of Queen’s Royal College pierces the greenery; so does the blue bulk of the Salvatori building. At the bauxite loading station at Tembladora the air was yellow with bauxite dust.
    We docked. The emigrants massed on deck and choked their way down the gangplank to get a glimpse of Trinidad (and a few, according to Mr Mackay, to stay).
    ‘Let the small islanders go first,’ he said.
    ‘The prop, man,’ someone whispered in my ear. ‘The old propagandist.’
    It was Boysie.
    In my disembarkation suit and with my typewriter (never to be used) I felt I looked the part.
    Correia was in a temper. The ship’s agent had not arranged for his aeroplane ticket to British Guiana. His angry voice boomed out over the ship, down the gangplank; and I continued to hear it even when he disappeared