Slow fans, shady verandas, and goat stew with a dash of scotch bonnet…Henry Shukman explores Nevis, Antigua, and Jamaica and discovers a Caribbean where time almost stands still

At 5:30 in the evening, all you really need in the Caribbean is a Carib beer and a west-facing view. The rest happens by itself. It's as if a magic shawl falls over the sea and all of the islands at that hour, banishing history, banishing trouble.

The Caribbean skyline is the natural home of the cumulus cloud. Fantasy mountain ranges hover on the horizon as the sun swells like a drop of molten glass—misshapen, distended, slipping down, and finally zipping itself away, leaving a faint green stain like smoke.

In Charlestown, the two-hundred-year-old capital of Nevis, the Mark Twain has docked at the quay and unloaded. A lone frigate bird that had been patrolling the port has gone to roost. A crab creeps under a dockside pallet. And Constable Ermentine takes down three flags from their poles: the St. Kitts and Nevis's, the Air and Sea Ports Authority's, and the island of Nevis's. Meanwhile, an artillery of talk starts up from a gang of fishermen under a gazebo by the dock.

"What are they fighting about?" I ask Ermentine.

"No, no. They ain't fighting, they just talk so. Each man want to get his point across." She shrugs. "Maybe they talking about the cricket."

The West Indies are in the middle of a match in Barbados and are not doing well. Of all the colonial legacies of the British here, cricket seems to rouse the most passion.

The boats that are coming in are in. The three-quarter moon, just about bright enough to read by, is up. Here and there—on walls, on stones, on disused paving slabs, on anything that offers a human a perch—people are sitting still. Not moving, just being. All seems well in this world. It's incredible that this peaceful place could have had a violent past of slavery, warfare, greed, and cruelty. In my contemplative sunset state, I reflect that perhaps that's how the human race is: muddling on between a calamitous history and an uncertain future.

Growing up in England in the '70s and '80s gave me—like most Brits—a strange relationship with the Caribbean. On the one hand, the islands produced heroes like Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, and Peter Tosh, and legends like Jagger and Bowie loved to party there. The Rastas' music was full of spiritual passion—reggae was maybe the best music in the world at the time. But on the other hand, there was the unspeakable slaving history for which England was primarily responsible. (Every so often as a treat at school, a master would shout, "Scramble!" and scatter a handful of candy. We'd all grab what we could, not knowing that we were acting out how slaves used to be sold by the "scramble": A gun would go off and all the planters would grab for the strongest-looking slaves.) Was it okay to be English and to like the Caribbean, to want to go there? Or was that like a German making a pilgrimage to Hitler's birthplace in Austria? Should the planter's chair be abolished? Weren't those extendable arms perfectly designed for a weary jack-booted foot, after all?