About the Author
Born and raised in California, photojournalist Roger LaBrucherie began his exploration of islands in the late 1960s, when he undertook his training and service as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.
His formal education as an economist and lawyer at Harvard College and Stanford University has enabled him to bring an unusually deep and analytical approach to his subjects. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that his works are as highly acclaimed for their commitment to the research and accuracy of their texts as they are for the beauty of their visual presentations.
Among the islands he has covered to date are: Bermuda, Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, as well as the Hawaiian Islands.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
"Floating at the edge of their crystalline blue sea, they lie in a sweeping gem-like arc stretching from South America to Florida, these islands called the West Indies. Seemingly too small and fragile to have long withstood the pounding waves of the vast Atlantic, their presence has nonetheless sheltered and defined the waters of the Caribbean Sea for tens of millions of years. The tops of mighty undersea mountains, the islands owe their existence to plate tectonics, the glacially-slow movement of the enormous segments of rock which form the earth s crust. Along the line of the bulging curve where the Caribbean Plate joins the American Plate, a combination of volcanic, folding, and scraping forces have lifted the sea floor to form the chain of the Lesser Antilles. Barbados itself, however, is little more than a half million years old, vastly younger than the other Windward Islands, which are volcanic in origin. Barbados base is not volcanic, but rather was uplifted by the scraping and folding of the sea floor as one plate overrode the other. Then, as the level of the sea rose and fell over the eons in response to the changing size of the polar ice caps,and periodic upliftings of the island contin- ued, a coral reef some 250 feet thick was added to the top of this undersea mountain formed from the skeletal remains of count- less coral polyps. Later still, after the top of this mountain was lifted above the level of the sea, the central part of the island was tilted, so that the surface rises gently away from the West Coast to about the middle of the island, where it reaches Barbados highest elevation at Mt. Hillaby (1116'). There the coral cap breaks, and the island falls dramatically toward the Atlantic shore in the precipitous slopes of the Scotland District, where tropical rains borne by the trade winds have ceaselessly eroded the underlying sedimentary rock. Where the coral cap remained, however, as it did over most of the island, the porous limestone rock absorbed those rains, carving the surface into a landscape of rolling hills traversed here and there by deep gullies, and concealing huge caverns carved by subterranean streams and rivers carrying the rainfall to the sea. Wind and current, and later, birds of passage, brought seeds, and in time a dense forest including the cabbage palm, destined to become one of the symbols of Barbados covered the moister parts of the island. As this lush paradise took form, birds and insects, carried perhaps by fierce winds from neighboring islands or the South American continent, reached the island and made it their home. At great intervals, lizards, iguanas, one species of tree frog, and a handful of mammals notably the raccoon overcame incredible odds, survived a driftwood-aided sea journey and established themselves on the island. And so, over the vastness of unrecorded time, this island world took shape, pristine in its protecting sea. Worlds away, perhaps 400,000 years ago, the earliest beings we call humans were evolving and spreading across Africa, Asia, and Europe. Only much later, perhaps twelve thousand years before Christ, did the first Asian tribes venture across the land bridge which from time to time linked Siberia with Alaska, and begin spreading throughout the Americas. Just when the first of these continental peoples began explor- ing the islands of the Caribbean it is impossible to say with precision, but extensive archaeological evidence suggests that a people of the Arawak culture who made their home in the Saladero- Barrancas region of the Orinoco River valley of Venezuela had settled the Lesser Antilles, including Barbados, around the time of Christ. The Arawaks were at home on the sea, travelling and trading up and down the island chain in large dugout canoes, some of which were capable of carrying forty men or more. This facility with sea travel meant that no island was culturally isolated from its neighbors, and the culture the Arawaks developed was to a great extent common throughout the entire Caribbean basin. Thus, much of what is known about the Amerindian culture on Barbados is derived from artifacts found not only on Barbados itself, but from the artifacts and anthropological evidence of other islands throughout the Caribbean. (One aspect of the Amerindian culture on Barbados does appear to be unique to the island, however: since the island lacked a native stone of sufficient hardness for tool-making, the Arawaks fashioned a wide variety of tools from the conch shells which they found in abundance in the surrounding waters.) --Excerpt from Chapter Two: Beginnings
