It was a land of plenty. A mini-paradise set in a benign corner of the Caribbean. Then came a hurricane called Ivan that went through the island like a buzz saw. Now Grenada is pinning its future on lavish developments—and that, finds Kevin Doyle, is generating a storm of another kind

Some islands, like some people, don't need much company. It's not that they lack social graces or don't know how to be a proper host. On the contrary, they can be generous, interesting, engaging, and ready and able to show a visitor a very good time. They just don't send out many invitations because they're perfectly content to be left alone. Until now, Grenada has been one of these.

For most of its history, Grenada has been a land of plenty and then some, where fishermen haul in nets that strain under the weight of tuna, mackerel, dolphin, and grouper, and where the volcanic soil is so rich and the climate so encouraging that farmers need do little more than wish for a crop to make it spring from the ground. While neighboring islands covered their coasts with hotels to draw tourist dollars, Grenada's self-sufficiency has left it largely unchanged for centuries. In its mountainous, lush interior, red cacao pods hang heavy from tree limbs, waterfalls cascade into crystalline swimming holes, lakes fill ancient volcanic craters, and wild monkeys stuff themselves on sweet bananas and papaya. It's an island that awakens senses you didn't even know you had. The labels in your spice rack—ginger, vanilla, saffron, cinnamon, clove, and allspice—are a catalog of what you'll find growing wild on Grenada's soaring green hillsides. But more than any other condiment, nutmeg is what really puts the spice in the Spice Island.

Although most of us think of it as little more than a light-brown dusting on our rice pudding or eggnog, nutmeg is in fact a spice over which undeclared wars have been fought and which through the centuries has been used to ward off evil spirits, as a cure for the plague. Today, it is used not only in food but also in cosmetics and pharmaceuticals and even to lubricate jet engines. It has a narcotic effect when eaten in large quantities and was so popular in eighteenth-century Europe that members of the upper class carried miniature silver graters wherever they went, for those moments when they might need a nutmeg fix.

Though nutmeg originated in Indonesia's Moluccan Islands, the French and the English planted it throughout their empires in the greedy hope that it would grow. But from South America to the South Seas, the only place the warm, sweet spice flourished was Grenada. As recently as 2004, more than thirty percent of the world's nutmeg came from Grenada and a third of the island's 90,000 inhabitants relied on the spice for their livelihood. Which made the terrible thing that happened that year all the more terrible.

Lying just below the southern edge of the hurricane belt, Grenada had not seen a serious storm in more than fifty years when, on the afternoon of September 7, 2004, Hurricane Ivan slammed into the island with a ferocity as merciless and destructive as an army of chain saws. Within twenty-four hours, thirty-seven people were dead, most of the country lay in shambles, and ninety percent of its nutmeg trees were on the ground. "Ivan was a devil," local guide and conservationist Mandoo Seales tells me as we drive through the forested mountainous interior of the island. "Ivan ripped into this area at about 160 miles per hour, but it was the fifteen mini twisters that did the most damage. They tore up trees and shredded them like spaghetti. It will take a century for it to return to what it was, so you can imagine the hell some people are going through."