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caused this disease to run amuck on the quiet, idyllic island of Trinidad, where hibiscus and bougainvillea bloomed in the sun, anthuriums in the shade, and where, in the dry season, the hills were aflame with gold and crimson blossoms from the branches of the flamboyant and dotted with the brilliant reds, yellows, pinks, and whites of the poui rising beneath a sky dazzling blue, clouds white and fluffy as new cotton.
    A man could feed his family with what he hunted and fished in those days. For if you saw Trinidad from the height of an airplane, what you saw was an island floating in the delta of the Orinoco, a sliver cut off from the rain forests of the Amazon, its flora and fauna stranded with the divide. There, unlike any other island in the Caribbean chain, agouti, deer, tattou, lapp, manicou, and cats ferocious as tigers ran wild; fish and crustaceans—shrimp, lobster, crab, oyster—everyday table food.
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sent in scouts. Everything they could find in the Amazon, they could find here, and there were swampy mangroves, too, and sea the color of turquoise, beaches ringed with coconut fronds and the leaves of wide sea-almond trees.
    It was greed that caused the epidemic. Slavery had been abolished and the Africans, scarred by nightmares of the horrors of the plantation, had fled to the cities. Left with no workers to cut the sugarcane, process it into sugar, and ferment the juices into alcohol, for which they had developed an addiction, the British raked the slums of their continental colonies in the east. Five acres of land after five years, they promised, if the workers wanted to stay, or passage back home. Thousands came from India. They came with the disease.
    At first the nuns treated the patients topically with chaulmoogra oil from the seeds of tropical trees in Asia belonging to the genus Hydnocarpus, and with cod liver oil from codfish, but the oils did not work. The disease still gutted faces, lopped off limbs. So they injected the oils, once a day, in the afternoons, and startled birds from their evening roosts when bloodcurdling screams from children, full-grown women and men, too, rent the air. Then, from late afternoon until well after the sun had set below the horizon, the sky was filled with the frantic flapping of wings, and as far away as Cocorite across the sea, street dogs howled and tears sprang from the eyes of villagers.
    They ran away. They would not stay, the ones subjected to these treatments. The cure to them, the searing pain of those injections, was a million times worse than the disease. So the epidemic spread. The nuns gave the colonial government a choice: a colony in Chacachacare or the end of Trinidad. The British sent in troops. One of the nuns’ diary dated May 10, 1922, records the day:
    At 6 a.m., the patients were seized with horror when the news spread throughout the wards that the whole place was surrounded and cordoned off by policemen on foot and on horseback. A dead silence set in . . . since it was impossible to escape, all had to be resigned to their fate. Some were sobbing, others fainted, and others again were seized with fits. The sisters could hardly bear the sight of the distress. Even the policemen were moved with compassion. A crowd of onlookers gathered outside to see the patients being escorted by policemen to the Cocorite pier, where a steamer was waiting to take them to Chacachacare.
    The sons and daughters of slave owners who had got rich on the cotton plantations on Chacachacare did not sob and faint, but it was no less difficult to pry them away from their vacation homes. Chacachacare was Crown land; it belonged to the British royal family. When the governor issued the order, the vacationers were obliged to leave. They were compensated, of course. Even today, the descendants of some of these slave-owning families hold rights to large plots of seafront land on the offshore islands. Ninety years they were given in exchange for a meager fee, and for