This is at once the biography of an Englishman who became the pioneering charterboat skipper of an American yacht, and a history of the charterboat business in the islands. Morris Nicholson�s story reflects a time now all but vanished in the islands, beginning when they were neglected colonial outposts and a single yacht meant income for the islanders. In no other book is there an account of how skippered yachts, bareboats, and headboats came to sail the Caribbean Sea and became an economic sector. However it is Nicholson�s story�and his stories of others�that drives the narrative and fills it with human interest.
RICHARD DEY was graduated from Harvard College where he studied under Robert Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bishop, and was Poetry Editor of The Harvard Advocate. As a young man he sailed in the schoolship Tabor Boy, out of Marion, Massachusetts. Dey has worked as a yacht skipper and crewman, commercial fisherman, journalist, editor, and as a professor of maritime literature and history along the Atlantic seaboard and Lesser Antilles. He is the author of Selected Bequia Poems, a book set in the West Indies, and Adventures in the Trade Wind, a history of yacht chartering in the West Indies.