A Cultural Mystery

One of the most surprising things about Barbadians for me was the general aversion to the sea. It’s a pretty small island, but most of the people I knew did not even know how to swim. And the few adventurous souls who would enter the water simply waded up to their chests. They would panic and flail about if they lost their footing. And they would not enter the water if there was a lot of seaweed in it. One of the reasons given for this fear of the sea was the supposed danger posed by almost every sea creature. The sea turtle, which was “sweet” in a culinary sense, was said to drag swimmers down to the sea floor and drown them. The manta ray was said to whip swimmers to death with its tail. Many fish were thought to be anthropophagous or spiteful. And the surf was believed to be full of vicious eels.

To be sure, all these creatures abounded in the waters of Barbados, and I encountered them all despite the dire warnings of my acquaintances. I never came to any harm and got pretty close to a lot of sea creatures including giant manta rays and enormous sea turtles. The conger eels were downright timid. In fact, the widespread fear of sea creatures was unsupported by any evidence, and most of it was predicated on downright falsehoods.

One effect of this dread of the sea was that the beaches and other tourist areas were rarely visited by Barbadians who were not employed in the tourist industry. There was the tourist Barbados and the non-tourist Barbados, and the overlap was surprisingly small. The tourists could enjoy the beaches and the reefs and the sea without competing for resources and space with many of the locals. Another effect is to suppress the numbers of dark skinned people in tourist areas, something which may be desirable for tourists who fear people from other racial categories and feel uncomfortable around crowds of them.

I am at a loss to account for how the myth of the deadly sea is maintained despite the ease with which it may be disproved and despite the apparent immunity of white tourists to the danger. One social critic I met (in a rum shop, of course) explained that the myth is a holdover from slavery when slaves were discouraged from fleeing by water. This has some plausibility but does not explain its persistence some 170 years after the abolition of slavery. I am fairly sure that the misinformation about the various sea animals is not propagated in the schools but is transmitted as part of an oral tradition. Barbadians are pretty smart and have a first rate system of education, so stupidity is not the answer to the mystery.