Customer Reviews

Glory Days & Tragedy

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Detailed and engaging. Therold Prudent subtly reveals man's search for meaning and the culture which helps create that meaning. One sees that the drama of youthful dreams begins the path to our destiny. A good source for literary analysis for the classroom.

"On February the 14th, 1985, the winds whistle over an open pasture where the waters of Gros Islet Marina flow deep into the land. At the water's edge, a fishing vessel, manned by six youths, is quietly set afloat into the Marina. The captain and co-captain are no more than 20 years old, while the rest of the crew range in age from thirteen to nineteen."
Thus starts an epic voyage that will end in tragedy with only one survivor. This is a really wonderful story about a real life event. It follows in the tradition of great "cast-adrift" stories, but the navigators in question are all from the small fishing village of Gros Islet in St. Lucia. Some are young fishermen, three are school kids, kicked out of school for the day because of rowdy behavior. It is a tragic story, but one with light and optimistic moments, and by concentrating at the end on the survivor (whose troubles are far from over when he staggers ashore and collapses in Columbia), it is book that will affect you emotionally, but leave you on a high note. I have read quite a few "adrift" accounts, and none have left me with such a feel for the humanity and simple kindness of the characters as this.
The first part of this book paints a picture of Gros Islets as experienced by the author as a child. Some of the main preoccupations are school, church, and sports, especially cricket. During this section we meet and watch the main characters growing up.
This is a tragic tale of young men pushed into a situation for which they were totally unequipped in both knowledge and gear. What is even sadder is even today many fishermen loose their lives this way in the Caribbean every year (I heard about 4 boats that were lost from one island alone last year, one with six people on board). It has always amazes me that fishermen will go far offshore with a single outboard, no radio, no flares, and sometimes a cell phone (but often without bothering to make sure it is fully charged).
Given that fishermen may well end up at sea with little water, a broken outboard and no other means of propulsion, our Caribbean education and fishing traditions completely fail to provide them with the knowledge they need to survive, even though the methods have been known since 1952 when Bombard set off on a 62-day voyage across the Atlantic without food or water. He lived off what the sea provided, along with the rainwater he caught, just to show mariners that they could survive indefinitely at sea.
These young men had at most half a gallon of water with them, when that ran out they started drinking saltwater. Drinking saltwater alone, is a sure recipe for disaster causing dehydration and ultimately, sickness, hallucinations, madness and death. The behavior of the youths in this voyage who went crazy, attacked their mates and swam away from the boat, is the same as in other similar sea stories where salt water was drunk.
This young group also had the means to survive; they caught fish and dried them in the sun as a food source. They needed instead to eat the fish whole and raw, and to squeeze the blood and juices out of them and drink it. Such juices are not very salty and can provide the much needed fluids. It is sad that such simple knowledge is not part of our maritime culture.
Religion plays a role in this story, even the boat's name is "IN GOD WE TRUST", and Therold himself regards the emergence of Kennedy Phillip (the survivor) as a miracle. I find this attitude interesting in light of Therolds early attitude towards the church.
"Father "H" may not know this but those marble steps are from the contributions of many who have since died in extreme poverty, after donating all their land and money to the Church. In fact, I have sometimes wished that someone would tell him about the sacrifices that were made, and about the many lives that were affected, instead of feeding him the gossip about the private lives of fellow parishioners. Maybe they can begin by telling him the story of Mr. Styles, and how his mother had left her only son to languish as a pauper, after giving her property and all her money to the efforts of constructing the church".
Therold himself, who had received communion, was thrown out of the Catholic Church, because his mother left the Catholics to join the Seventh Day Adventists, and this angered the priest who was apparently intent on passing the sins he perceived in the mother onto the son. At some points Therold sees with clarity that the role of the church, and that of the English colonial administration were often far from benign. Yet at the same time the Catholic tradition was such a dominant force in his youth it colors all his perceptions:
"Among "the wise (meaning communicants) is a very old woman who stands with a pink and purple mushware (head-band) over her head. She is barefoot and seems to walk in a state of absolute absorbtion. By this time I am not the only one who is distracted; so are George, Kennedy, Ronnie, and countless other children who know her quite well. In fact the whole church knows about her and what we know is not pretty at all. Today in the house of the Lord, and in broad daylight, the proxy of the devil is at work."
Therold and his friends think that is that this is an evil women working obeah with religious sacraments, a charge that could easily be based on nothing more than that she is very strange, possibly the result of a psychiatric problem. We have burnt witches for less.
Ultimately Therold comes to terms with the Catholic Church and sees the newer priests as being more in touch and community minded. If he has given thought to, and struggled with, such issues as: the subservient role of women in the church, and how they face the same kind of lack of opportunities as did black people in the earlier colonial times, or to the effect the ban on contraception has on the fight against aids, he does not mention it here.
Was Therold right in considering Kennedy's survival a miracle? If God wanted a miracle, why not save all - a little change in the currents or winds would have done it. Giving God the credit for anything good and never the blame for anything bad lacks logic. It is a bit like having a tailor in town, and every time he sews a wonderful suit that fits perfectly, praise the tailor. Every-time he produces an ill-fitting or badly sewn garment; blame the thread or the sewing machine.
Therold's book is a great tribute to Kennedy and his crew, and by extension to all the other Caribbean fishermen who have been lost at sea, whose life and death struggles have gone unregistered except by a small story in the local paper. Walcott's Omerous is a tribute to St. Lucia fishermen at the poetic and mythical level, this book does it in a down-to-earth simple story.