All along the coast on November 19, Garifuna Settlement Day, the Garinagu reenact and celebrate their arrival in their new communities. Early in the morning, the ladies of Punta Gorda, many dressed in traditional full skirts and head scarves of checked gingham, lead the parade to the dock waving cassava and palm fronds. They are accompanied by young men playing mahogany drums and turtle shells. Everyone greets those "arriving" on the boats, offers thanks and praise, and then wends their way to the Catholic church for Mass.

Four days later, in Livingston, Guatemala, the celebrations were still going on. Called La Buga, or "mouth of the great river" in Garifuna, Livingston is accessible only by boat or private plane. It was founded in 1802 by a buyei, or priest, who led people here from Roatan, in Honduras, and from Punta Gorda, in Belize. The night we arrived, there was a huge party in the cavernous town hall that lasted easily five hours. A gray-haired man, his face lit up with joy, introduced himself: Harvey had traveled sixty miles for this event. "Garifuna culture was being lost," he said, "but this, this—I love this."

Back aboard the Long Gone, there was a jumble of sacred and profane moments: A sea turtle raised a pale speckled arm in greeting as we slid past; the sink wouldn't drain; a big fish took the hook we were trailing from the back of the boat, then snapped it off, leaving us with just a piece of metal lure. In the next day's good wind, we flew across the water, zigging and zagging above fingers of reef; leaning over, I could watch the geography changing beneath us—the depth reader charted it: from 350 feet to 19, to 15, to 200 in a matter of minutes.

We were bound for Belize's Hunting Caye, a small island with a white sand beach, a couple of little thatched shelters, the Sapodilla Cayes Marine Reserve office where we would check in, and a coast guard station. By the evening of the second day, when we were safely harbored off its silken Halfmoon Beach, our engine would no longer speak to us at all.

The delay allowed us to take the dinghy to shore and confer with the people in the office and the officers of the peace. We also met Orlando Usher, whom Cynthia and I had noticed the day before standing alone in his old dory, a dugout canoe, on the sea, looking into the water. Orlando, a master fisherman, is fifty-six, a slight man with a natural wispy beard and cheeks like polished walnuts bridged by a finely cut nose. He was wearing a black beret, black rubber boots, and a black, pink, and purple women's windbreaker that was too big for him. With his deep knowledge of the area, his easy silence, and his unexpected humor, he's like a cross between a gnome and a sprite. He lives by himself in a tent on Hunting Caye. It turns out that he and Mark, our captain, are cousins—through the Youngs, an old Belizean family.