DESMOND BAGLEY
Bahama Crisis
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1980
Copyright © Brockhurst Publications 1980
Cover layout design Richard Augustus © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Desmond Bagley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008211332
Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008211349 Version: 2017-07-05
CONTENTS
To Valerie and David Redheadwith much affection
My name is Tom Mangan and I am a Bahamian – a white Bahamian. This caused some comment when I was up at Cambridge; it is surprising how ill-informed even supposedly educated people can be about my home islands. I was told that I could not be a Bahamian because Bahamians are black; that the Bahamas are in the Caribbean, which they are not; and many confused the Bahamas with Bermuda or even Barbados. For these reasons and because an understanding of the geographical and political nature of the Bahamas is essential to my story it seems to me that I must describe them and also give a brief account of my family involvement.
The Bahamas are a chain of islands beginning about fifty miles off the coast of Florida and sweeping in an arc 500 miles to the south-east to a similar distance off the coast of Cuba. They consist of 700 islands (called cays locally, and pronounced ‘keys’) and about 2000 lesser rocks. The name