Book excerpt: This is at once the biography of an Englishman who became the pioneering charterboat skipper of an American yacht, and a history of the charterboat business in the islands. Morris Nicholson’s story reflects a time now all but vanished in the islands, beginning when they were neglected colonial outposts and a single yacht meant income for the islanders. In no other book is there an account of how skippered yachts, bareboats, and headboats came to sail the Caribbean Sea and became an economic sector. However it is Nicholson’s story—and his stories of others—that drives the narrative and fills it with human interest.