James A. Michener · 1989 · sea

James Michener's 1989 novel of the islands, told in episodes across a thousand years - Arawaks and Caribs before Columbus, the buccaneers of Port Royal, the sugar plantations and the trade that fed them, the only successful slave revolution in history, and a modern cruise ship going through it all without noticing any of it.

1. 1
   Barbados

   The sugar islands are where the money was, worked by people brought across the Atlantic in numbers that dwarf the settlement of North America - and Michener sets the plantation chapters here, on an island made entirely by cane.

2. 2
   Port Royal

   Port Royal in its buccaneer years was the richest and most disreputable town in the Americas, until an earthquake dropped most of it into the harbour in 1692 - which the book treats as a judgement nobody heeded.

3. 3
   Cap-Haitien

   In Saint-Domingue the enslaved population rose, beat three European armies and made Haiti - the one slave revolution in history that succeeded, and the reason every other island's planters could not sleep.

4. 4
   Havana

   Cuba runs from Spanish colony through sugar and American money to 1959 - and Michener gives the island its own long section because everything that happened elsewhere in the Caribbean happened here at greater scale.

5. 5
   Port of Spain

   Trinidad, with its Indian indenture, its oil and its carnival, closes the book - and the modern frame, a cruise passenger seeing none of this from a deck chair, is Michener's rather pointed last word.