"No hate. No crime," says Elson Hackshaw, who meets me at the dock and offers to show me around. "That's why I like it here. I haven't left the island in four years." Hackshaw, who has coal-black skin and pale-blue eyes, wears a striped polo shirt pulled (barely) over an expansive belly, yellow sweatpants, and sandals; his ride is a pickup truck with a CB radio, which he uses to chat with his wife as we drive.

Like most natives of Bequia, Hackshaw is a mélange of Norwegian, Portuguese, and Scottish, mixed with African as a result of the slave trade. I've asked him to drive me to Park Bay, on the Atlantic side of the island, site of Orton "Brother" King's Old Hegg Turtle Sanctuary, started in 1995 to raise endangered hawksbill hatchlings rescued from neighboring islands. The turtles are nurtured at Old Hegg until they are three years old and then are released into the sea.

The sanctuary sits at the edge of an old coconut plantation. As we pull in, an elderly woman is burning coconut husks in a small grill, readying coals to bake breadfruit. Under a nearby metal roof, several hundred endangered hawksbills live in neat man-made ponds. The wild Atlantic pounds the coast just fifty feet away.

Brother King comes out of his adjoining house wearing a frayed cap, a worn blue-and-white flowered flannel shirt, and sun-faded khakis. He is patrician handsome, tan, and leathery. "These are the most intelligent migratory animals on the planet," says King. "Put the babies into the ocean and even if they travel a thousand miles they'll swim back here to the beach where they were born to lay their eggs. Incredible, don't you think?"

King is frustrated that he can't get more help protecting the turtles. "I've had the prime ministers of Antigua and Dominica come here and tell me how important my work is, but I can't get a government anywhere to help protect them, either with laws or with money. All I can do is try to change the attitude of the kids. We bring all the schoolchildren here on field trips. We talk to them about returning the turtles to the wild so that the population can grow again, and we hope that they won't turn out to be turtle hunters. But it's hard. Once I had a magistrate visiting whose job it was to enforce the laws of the land, and he asked me if he could buy one of my turtles for soup. I joked with the policeman who'd driven him here, 'Arrest this man!' But I was serious. How am I going to change attitudes, and laws, if the lawmakers and law enforcers don't take this seriously?"

I spend the rest of the afternoon camped out under some palm trees at the Frangipani Hotel, on Admiralty Bay. The Frangipani is owned by a former prime minister and has been in the same family for more than a hundred years. Talk at the bar is of the weather (hurricanes) and politics ("you know what that Bush mon need, mon…he needs to smoke a big spliff!"). A water taxi named Phat Shag pulls up, and its driver orders a glass of chilled red wine. Dive boats are returning from their day-trips. A bikinied woman dives off the back of a catamaran. A heavyset woman walks by under an umbrella, its hot-pink nylon contrasting sharply with the sea.