Alone on Eleuthera Island With Mrs. Wright

Mrs. Wright was standing at the end of the two-mile-long road, lined with palm trees, that leads out of the Cotton Bay Club when I swung by in my rented car.

Mrs. Wright is much too reserved a person to have had her thumb out, but she was obviously in need of a ride. “Where to?” I asked.

She replied with her own question: “Where you going?”

I told her I wanted to see places on Eleuthera that I had missed on my previous visit a couple of years earlier. At that time I had concentrated on the northern end of this long, skinny island, where the pineapples grow in rich, red earth, and on the spill-off islands of Harbour Island--with its legendary powdery pink beach--and Spanish Wells, whose clapboard houses look as if they’d been transferred from a New England fishing village.

“I was on my way home,” said Mrs. Wright. When I told her I’d be happy to drop her off, she said, “No hurry. Let’s go.”

And so I found myself with an instant tour guide.

Mrs. Theazel Wright, like the rest of her friendly fellow Eleutherans, is inordinately proud of her island. I mean, they actually wave to you as you pass, a startling social gesture these days.

I was to find on my excursion last spring that giving people such as Mrs. Wright a lift pays off beyond measure, for they cannot wait to fill you in on the various colorful and intimate aspects of this most densely populated--and perhaps most interesting--of the Bahamas’ Family Islands, blessed as it is with miles of unspoiled beaches, green forests and rolling hills.

The only caveat is that you do have to listen rather carefully, for the Eleutherans’ lilting but tumbling words tend to run into one another, as though they were unable to control their enthusiasm.

Mrs. Wright lives in a small pastel concrete block house that her husband built out in the boondocks, but her job takes her into a rather more sumptuous world as housekeeper at the magnificent retreat that California industrialist Edgar Kaiser built. It stands in 50 wooded acres atop a hill overlooking the Cotton Bay Club’s 77 sandy-pink cottages and rooms and its 18-hole Robert Trent Jones golf course, where the 15-handicap Kaiser used to play with guests such as then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations George Bush. Rates start at $250 per night, double occupancy.

Kaiser dubbed his house “The Carousel” because the hues of the tangled vegetation that surround it--wild orchids, ixora, frangipani, bougainvillea, dwarf poinciana, Star of Bethlehem, Bahamian dogwood--were reproduced in the interior design. Blues and greens predominate, with handmade ceramic tiles on the floor and island paintings on the walls.

Mrs. Wright takes care of the six bedrooms in the house that the Cotton Bay Club acquired early in 1990, nine years after Kaiser’s death, and rents out for about $2,000 a day. If that sounds as steep as the winding road that leads down to The Carousel’s private beach, with its sun deck and chickee hut among the casuarina trees, general manager Ron Lindemann reasons that six compatible couples would happily share the cost for the privilege of wallowing in such secluded luxury.

Cotton Bay--once a private club owned by Pan Am founder Juan Trippe, who would fly in his well-heeled friends by 727 Yankee Clipper for a weekend of golf--is situated toward the southern end of Eleuthera, 12 miles from the Rock Sound Airport, which is one of three landing spots on the island.

Rock Sound is a pretty little settlement of blue- and green-painted homes with gardens of poinsettia, hibiscus and orange marigolds, where fishing boats are tied up along the seashore. Mrs. Wright told me to drive a mile east, where we came upon Ocean Hole, a large inland lake purportedly 600 feet deep, and connected by tunnels to the sea. Steps have been cut into the coral so that visitors can climb down and feed the rainbow fish that find their way in from the sea . . . and return to it at will.

Happily, Mrs. Wright seemed in no great hurry to get home, so we drove north to Tarpum Bay, where we met one of Eleuthera’s more colorful characters--a bearded Scots-Irish expatriate painter named G. MacMillan Hughes, whose works I had seen hanging in The Carousel.

The paintings, all sea-oriented with mermaids preponderant (and for sale in his gallery), are striking in themselves, but Hughes’ most astonishing accomplishment is the stone castle in which he lives and which he built himself.

Triangular-shaped steps lead from the monumental front gate to his gallery, and pyramidal, circular and arched pieces of sculpture are everywhere. He is fond of taking visitors up to his battlement, from which pennants fly, to take in the breathtaking island view over a glass of wine.

If you’re in Tarpum Bay around lunchtime, Hughes will direct you to Ma Cilla’s nearby five-table restaurant for an inexpensive dish of fresh grouper and crawfish. You cannot miss her place; there’s a sculpted mermaid on the outside wall, obviously a Hughes inspiration.

And if you decide to overnight in Tarpum Bay before continuing north on your exploration of the island, Hughes will probably recommend the small motel around the corner, Hilton’s Haven. No, it has nothing to do with the worldwide hotel chain; it is run by a local nurse named Mary Hilton, who serves home cooking in the establishment’s small restaurant. There’s a pleasant beach across the road, and you’ll get in and out of Mary’s for about $40 a night.

Eleuthera, which is 100 miles long and shaped like a praying mantis, was named by a group of Europeans--who came to be known as the Eleutheran Adventurers--seeking religious freedom in the mid-17th Century. They called the island after the Greek word for freedom. It was close to Governor’s Harbour, roughly halfway up the island, that the group first landed.

The settlement of Governor’s Harbour is made up of only a half-dozen blocks situated on the crescent-shaped Cupid’s Bay. Here, the mail boat M/V Harley and Charley ties up to deliver mail and unload household necessities brought in from Nassau. In turn, it takes back the islanders’ pineapples and vegetables for sale in the country’s capital on New Providence Island.

Governor’s Harbour is also where one of those ubiquitous Club Meds is located. When full, Club Med can swell Eleuthera’s population of 10,000 by another thousand, though its visitors are usually content to confine themselves to their sprawling, self-contained village.

Some time after the Eleutheran Adventurers had set foot on Governor’s Harbour, they started quarreling among themselves. Soon after, a group led by the expedition’s leader, William Sayle, a former governor of Bermuda, sailed round the top of the island, where they were shipwrecked and took refuge in what was to become known as Preacher’s Cave, where they held religious services. The cave, and the altar where they worshiped, is still there.

Indeed, Eleuthera is made up, to a large extent, of those original adventurers and their slaves, and of the Loyalists--English sympathizers who fled the United States after the Revolutionary War--who followed them. You’ll find the late 18th-Century Loyalist Cottage on Harbour Island, a settlement of clapboard houses with picket fences that look as if they have survived from those times. (Spanish Wells was named for the Spaniards who stopped there for fresh water on their way home from the New World.)

At Gregory Town, just below what would be the throat of the praying mantis that represents the island, there is a challenge for the adventurous soul who doesn’t mind going underground for kicks: subterranean, bat-haunted caves, complete with stalagmites and stalactites, supposedly dug by pirates to hide their loot, though that may well be an Eleutheran flight of fancy.

Paths do lead, however, from the entrance to the sea and through a huge cavern. Somewhere along the way, a local told me, is a pond where blind fish that have made their way in from the sea swim in the darkness. Were they blind when they came in, or did they become sightless in the opaque gloom of the cave?

It is not a speleological experience that I checked out personally--the top and bottom of it is that I am not only acrophobic, but bathophobic (fear of the underground)--and anyone venturing to do so would be well advised to take a guide along, plus a flashlight with extra batteries.

My friend Joe Edwards and his wife Penny live just outside Gregory Town in a house they built themselves atop a 180-foot hill. It even has a widow’s walk from which they can survey their land rolling down to the sea. It took them more than a year because all of the materials and furniture bought in Miami had to be brought into nearby Hatchet Bay by freighter.

Joe had worked in Nassau for many years, and when it came time to retire he choose Eleuthera over all of the islands, and not only for its topographical features. “It’s a friendly place,” says Joe. “We can go away for days and never think of locking the doors.” When fire broke out among the trees on his land, the people of Gregory Town rolled out to help him fight it.

Among those firefighters was one of my favorite characters in the Family Islands--or anywhere else, for that matter. The Rev. Joe Guzinski, originally from Philadelphia, is an authority on the world’s orchids. His home and greenhouse contain all of the island’s species, which he is cross-pollinating, and he will happily talk for hours about their seductive beauty.

Father Joe shares his love of these exotic flora with an old friend, actor Raymond Burr, an enthusiastic orchidologist and a longtime visitor to Eleuthera. Just who motivated whom, however, is not quite clear.

Burr, says Father Joe, has been a generous contributor to the upkeep of his St. Gregory’s Roman Catholic Church.

Visitors who know about Father Joe occasionally take a leaf from Perry Mason’s lawbook by buying one of his orchids. The money goes into the church’s coffers.

Now there’s a heavenly way to remember Eleuthera.

GUIDEBOOK: Eleuthera Island

Getting there: Eleuthera is about 200 miles east of Miami, 60 miles from Nassau. For entry, U.S. citizens need a passport or proof of citizenship.

Bahamasair has daily flights to the island from Nassau. Round-trip fare is about $100. From Miami and/or Fort Lauderdale, Pan Am Express, Aero Coach International and USAir have regular service to the island. Round-trip is about $200. The flight takes about 50 minutes.

There are three airports on the island. You would fly to North Eleuthera for Spanish Wells and the classy resorts on Harbour Island; to Governor’s Harbour for Club Med Eleuthera, and to Rock Sound for the Cotton Bay Club.

If you want to get there by mail boat/ferry, the M/V Current Pride, M/V Bahamas Daybreak II, and M/V Harley and Charley all sail to Eleuthera regularly from Potter’s Cay, Nassau. The trip takes about six hours. One-way fare is $25. Call (809) 393-1064.

Accommodations: To make reservations at of Eleuthera’s hotels or resorts, call the Bahamas Reservation Service, (800) 327-0787. You can reach the Cotton Bay Club at (800) 334-3523.

For more information: Contact the Bahamas Family Islands Promotion Board, 1100 Lee Wagener Blvd., Suite 206, Fort Lauderdale, Fla. 33315, (305) 359-8099.