The four-engine Convair 440, battered by time, made a circle over the city and began to land. Jean looked around at the familiar landscape: the endless ocean, the endless mangroves stretching along the shore, and the narrow asphalt strip of the Plain Road stretching to the east. The trees gleamed in the sun, huge, tangled clumps of dark green foliage, some over a hundred feet tall. The daily three-foot low tide revealed their thick, twisted roots, strong enough to withstand the constant battle of waves and gusts of wind. For reasons unknown from a geological point of view, at the end of the peninsula, two long arcing strips of sandbanks, reminiscent of the giant horns of a stag beetle or the claws of an earwig, extended from the shore into the sea. Between them, on the main shore of this bay, is a port. On both sides of the shallows the surface of the sea was covered with breakers, as Shannon noted, but inside there was complete calm...