Bond shook him by the hand.
‘Good morning, Captain,’ said Quarrel. Coming from the most famous race of seamen in the world, this was the highest title he knew. But there was no desire to please, or humility, in his voice. He was speaking as mate of the ship and his manner was straightforward and candid.
That moment defined their relationship. It remained that of a Scots laird with his head stalker; authority was unspoken and there was no room for servility.
After discussing their plans, Bond took the wheel of the little car Quarrel had brought up from Kingston and they started on up the Junction Road, leaving Strangways to busy himself with Bond’s requirements.
They had got off before nine and it was still cool as they crossed the mountains that run along Jamaica’s back like the central ridges of a crocodile’s armour. The road wound down towards the northern plains through some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, the tropical vegetation changing with the altitude. The green flanks of the uplands, all feathered with bamboo interspersed with the dark, glinting green of breadfruit and the sudden Bengal fire of Flame of the Forest, gave way to the lower forests of ebony, mahogany, mahoe and logwood. And when they reached the plains of Agualta Vale the green sea of sugar-cane and bananas stretched away to where the distant fringe of glittering shrapnel bursts marked the palm-groves along the north coast.
Quarrel was a good companion on the drive and a wonderful guide. He talked about the trap-door spiders as they passed through the famous palm-gardens of Castle-ton, he told abovit a fight he had witnessed between a giant centipede and a scorpion and he explained the difference between the male and female paw-paw. He described the poisons of the forest and the healing properties of tropical herbs, the pressure the palm kernel develops to break open its coconut, the length of a humming-bird’s tongue, and how crocodiles carry their young in their mouths laid lengthways like sardines in a tin.
He spoke exactly but without expertise, using Jamaican language in which plants’strive’ or ‘quail’, moths are ‘bats’, and ‘love’ is used instead of ‘like’. As he talked he would raise his hand in greeting to the people on the road and they would wave back and shout his name.
‘You seem to know a lot of people,’ said Bond as the driver of a bulging bus with ROMANCE in large letters over the windshield gave him a couple of welcoming blasts on his wind-horn.
‘I bin watching Surprise for tree muns, Cap’n,’ answered Quarrel, ‘ ‘n I been travelling this road twice a week. Everyone soon know you in Jamaica. They got good eyes.’
By half-past ten they had passed through Port Maria and branched off along the little parochial road that runs down to Shark Bay. Round a turning they suddenly came on it below them and Bond stopped the car and they got out.
The bay was crescent shaped, perhaps three-quarters of a mile wide at its arms. Its blue surface was ruffled by a light breeze blowing from the north-east, the edge of the Trade Winds that are born five hundred miles away in the Gulf of Mexico and then go on their long journey round the world.
A mile from where they stood, a long line of breakers showed the reef just outside the bay and the narrow untroubled waters of the passage which was the only entrance to the anchorage. In the centre of the crescent, the Isle of Surprise rose a hundred feet sheer out of the water, small waves creaming against its easterly base, calm waters in its lee.
It was nearly round, and it looked like a tall grey cake topped with green icing on a blue china plate.
They had stopped about a hundred feet above the little cluster of fishermen’s huts behind the palm-fringed beach of the bay and they were level with the flat green top of the island, half a mile away. Quarrel pointed out the thatched roofs of the wattle-and-daub shanties among the trees in the centre of the island. Bond examined them through Quarrel’s binoculars. There was no sign of life except a thin wisp of smoke blowing away with the breeze.