Even the landscape of Barbados is especially compelling for Brits. Like many an earlier traveler, I'm reminded of Devon and Somerset—particularly in the north of the island, where cattle and horses graze (sometimes with egrets on their backs) over gentle green hills. It's lumpier here than in England, and less zealously tended, with both livestock and country folk looking a little insolated and aimless. But it's so mild, on the skin and on the eye. Almost alone in the vast archipelago that swings up in an arc all the way from South America to the Virgin Islands, Barbados is not the tip of a volcano. Rather, it's a flattish outcrop of coral and limestone still covered with swaying sugarcane. It rains a lot—every day we are here. Although, crucially unlike in Britain, where cold showers tend to be grimly unremitting daylong affairs, in Barbados the downpours are brief, exciting, and loud, each burst like a load of gravel crashing down off a dump truck. Barbados is definitely cooler than other islands—though not cooler in the way of Jamaica, with its vivid history of protest politics and music. A constant breeze blows over this easternmost of the Caribbean islands: the famous trade winds that travel thousands of miles, bringing Saharan dust to coral shores in one of the longest uninterrupted passages of wind on earth.

There are, however, no direct flights to Africa, despite the human as well as climatic links. The majority of visitors to Barbados continue to come from Britain—thirty-nine percent, compared with twenty-three percent from the United States—although the Americans are gaining ground. Of course: It's a mere hop to Bridgetown from New York—four hours, the same as from New York to Bridgehampton on any Friday in August. We enjoy a holiday from American culture, even while we're glad to pay in dollars, use our common language, and find familiar brands in the supermarkets—including, I notice, those featuring our own house slaves, Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima. (Barbados has a savory counterpart in Aunt May's Bajan Pepper Sauce, emblazoned with a mammy in a head scarf: Aunt J before her makeover.) Furthermore, I, for one American, would always fill my sinking dinghy with British fellow travelers: low-key good sports, most of them, with an evolved sense of (gallows) humor.

But gone is the glamour of the original Anglo-American jet set that loaned Barbados its cachet in the sixties and seventies and which is so much associated with the Sandy Lane hotel, the creation of Ronald Tree (an American-born Brit, conservative MP, and adviser to Winston Churchill). Tree went to Barbados when he lost his parliamentary seat, and built himself Heron Bay, a house of coral on the west coast, modeled on Palladio's Villa Maser, in the Veneto. Then, in 1961, he built the Sandy Lane, also on the west coast, so all his friends could come too. And come they did: Averell and Pamela Harriman, Bill and Pat Packard, Anthony and Clarissa Eden, Jack and Drue Heinz... The island is rich with great houses, and not just the plantation great houses.