Episode 6: Antigua and Barbuda — Where Every Beach Has a Story

There is a beach in Barbuda called Princess Diana Beach. It is pink-tinged, quiet, and so beautiful that Diana called it the finest she had ever seen — three months before she died. In 2017, Hurricane Irma destroyed 95 percent of Barbuda's structures. The beach survived. The island had to be rebuilt.This is Antigua and Barbuda. Two islands. 442 square kilometres. A population of 98,000. And a history of sugar, slavery, cricket, and hurricane that is both particular to this corner of the Caribbean and entirely universal to the story of the Atlantic world.Ray takes you through 350 years of British colonial rule — the enslaved people who worked the sugar estates, the resistance of Prince Klass who planned an uprising and paid for it with his life, the labour movement of 1939 that produced V.C. Bird and eventually independence in 1981. We trace the story of cricket as identity — how a game imported by colonisers was transformed into an instrument of pride by the colonised, producing from a country of under 100,000 people four of the greatest players in the history of the sport: Andy Roberts, Viv Richards, Richie Richardson, and Curtly Ambrose.We meet Jamaica Kincaid, whose essay A Small Place is the most honest book ever written about what Caribbean tourism costs and who pays. We eat fungee and pepperpot, ducana and saltfish, and Barbudan lobster grilled on the beach. We sail into English Harbour — where Nelson called it a vile hole and is now UNESCO-listed. And we stand at Codrington Lagoon as thousands of frigate birds wheel overhead.Know what you're standing on.New episodes every Monday at 7pm. Next week — Argentina.