By Earl Bousquet

I sailed the world and circumnavigated the globe within five years on the Geest (Banana Boat) ships that transported Windward Islands bananas to the English port of Barry, in Wales.
As a St. Mary’s College (SMC) student, my dad, a senior pilot at the Harbor Master’s Department, would ensure I got a pick to make a voyage to Barry every year during the July-August holidays, during which, as the youngest sailor on the ship (in an age when Child Labor didn’t seem to matter), my tasks were as a ‘deck boy’ -washing dishes, cleaning toilets and assisting from time to time with chipping and painting and other tasks reserved for sailors my age from the islands.
But my main mission at sea, as dictated by my dad, was to “Go to sea, to see where to go!” -meaning to explore the world and see how it turns before deciding what I wanted to do in life.
With all male members of my family having followed my father and his brothers’ footsteps and sailed the seas and remained, it was expected I would have some day returned home as captain of a ship, even a naval warship. But I was more interested in reading and writing and photographing almost everything every day.
My dad always taught me -his eldest son with my mum- that “Reading makes the man…” and ensured he brought me newspapers he’d ask for on almost every ship so I could “read how the world lives elsewhere…”
He’d also ensure I listened to the BBC News -with him- on our home’s Pye and Grundig radios at 7am every day, always reminding presenters spoke “perfect English” and “anyone who makes a mistake will get fired!”
I therefore entered and ended school as a daily follower of world affairs -also through international newspapers and magazines, including TIME, then available at The VOICE Bookshop on Bridge Street, or Sunshine Bookshop on Brazil Street.
I also thereafter carried my news-reading habits whenever going to sea, with selected books, newspapers and other reading materials -and I kept a daily diary.
Every Sunday I would have to ensure all West Indian cabins, toilets and laundry, kitchen and pantry, were spotless and sparkling clean for the weekly ‘inspection’ by the captain and other senior officers to ensure all sailors (West Indian and British) observed cleanliness protocols.
What I didn’t know was that two captains (David Boon and Peter Groves) who knew I kept a diary used to take them and peruse my entries -and apparently with pleasure, as each later confessed to my dad.
Boon told him I was “more of a writer than a sailor” and encouraged me to enroll with the Royal Naval Academy to do a GCE (General Certificate of Examinations) in English Language.
I’d been excised from SMC thanks to my radicalism among students who’d formed the Students Revolutionary Movement (SRM) to discuss and spread literature about Black Power from the USA and Socialism in Cuba.
We’d hide the books within larger school texts to read during class breaks and folded the larger Granma newspaper from Cuba inside any copy of The VOICE we could lay our hands on -including times we’d have to inform a careless reader The VOICE (that was meant to hide the Granma) was ‘up-side down’.
Leaving college without a GCE was a regret for my father, who knew I excelled in English Language and Literature, History, Arithmetic and Geometry (I hated Algebra), Geography, Agricultural Science (but not Chemistry or Physics).
I scored high marks in my annual three term reports and was an excellent Sea Scout, but was among a growing bunch of radical students considered by the Irish Presentation Brothers who ran the SMC as ‘too radical’ for their liking, most of us also ending-up in a special classroom built on the field just outside the Principal’s Office.
We called it ‘The Cage’, where the boys with the most ‘detentions and caning’ recommended by teachers through ‘pink slips’ that served as licenses for ‘corporal punishment’ -being whipped with wooden ‘canes’ carefully selected by the administrator of punishment, in most cases, the Principal.
My unscholarly departure from SMC and my father’s insistence I had to ‘go to sea to see where to go’ ensured that my five years sailing the seven seas and flying skies between to catch or leave ships in European capitals prepared me for who and where I am today.
Like I did at every port of call while sailing, now back home in 1974 and 1975, I’d read every issue of The Voice and Crusader newspapers on Saturdays and pay special attention to the editorials and the ‘Letters’ columns.
The Saturday editorials (by Crusader Publisher George Odlum and Voice Publisher Michael Gordon) were battles and exchanges of wit and wiles, the two newspapers representing contrasting local political views supportive and in opposition to the thinking of the leaders of the two major political parties, SLP and UWP.
The Crusader also featured two interesting political columns -‘Cocky & Stocky’ and ‘Queek Quak’ that highlighted the week’s politics in poetry and prose, the former reflecting a weekend debate between two friends who each supported one of the two parties and the latter a poetic mix of paragraphs that told entire stories in two or three sentences.
I suspect that the article that won me the selection as Crusader Editor was one entitled ‘Once and For All…’ in which I exposed how my father, contracted by Geest as the only pilot of their ships into and out of Saint Lucia, was being ‘warned’ by senior UWP politicians employed at Geest Industries Ltd. that my association with Odlum and The Crusader could threaten his job.
I warned this would be the first and last time I would write and talk about that unfortunate situation -and the rest is history.
Yesterday, I emerged late from bed, observing my 49th year as an eternal scribbler, a chronic Caribbean chronicler chronicling how the world turns -and how everything happening everywhere is related in a shared planet equally inhabited by Humankind.
My 49th anniversary also followed the 140th anniversary of The VOICE, where I also served as a consultant in the editor’s chair, after also having previously been editor of The Star newspaper, alongside yet another local bard, Rick Wayne.
I can’t qualify for any of those jobs in today’s world where paper certificates, doctoral and master’s degrees and knowledge of ever-changing Information Technology (IT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), as all I have is a GCE O-Level English Language course.
But in an age where reading and writing are becoming endangered by the immediacy of online communication through multiple platforms, simultaneously, I have also seen the technological advancement in tools of reporting (all wrapped into a cell phone) render too-many colleagues too-lazy to remember that footwork yields more than just phone calls or consulting search engines.
Newspapers have gone online and public broadcasting is now a thing of the distant past, while the only way to access information is to register with a cable company or steal a free online link not meant for this part of the world, in exchange for everything we don’t even know about ourselves.
We can no longer just turn a radio or TV set on an immediately access information and entertainment like used to be when I grew up linking to read, listen and write.
I will continue to advocate for a return to public broadcasting in a nation where less than a quarter of the online population uses broadband for information and the vast majority of Saint Lucians at home don’t live on Facebook.
I will also continue to hold that these times require a totally new approach to journalism training and professional organization around issues affecting the art of writing and the eternal necessity for reading.
I will continue to forever appreciate all I learned working with the best writers of and in English at The Crusader, VOICE and Star newspapers and from my association with colleagues in radio at The BBC and Radio Antilles and my many stints sharing my skills regionally and internationally.
But for me, today starts the year-long road to my 50th anniversary of every day doing what I love after having taken my father’s sound advice to ‘Go to sea to see where to go…’ I made by choice half-a-century ago -and have never regretted!