Author Archives: Pete Brand

This story is fiction and any resemblance to actual persons or situations is purely coincidental. All rights to this and any part of it is reserved by the author, Leonard A. Brand, Jr. , whose pen name is Pete Brand, … Continue reading →

          Back when we had been on the island for less than a year and I had begun building Island House Hotel, I drove up there every weekday to supervise the construction, and drove back down every afternoon. We were … Continue reading →

          The only shop in the village, a half-mile or so below the hotel was Ma Nicko’s. Ma was short for Madam. It was about eight feet wide and eight feet deep and did not have a vast amount of … Continue reading →

          When August (Gus) Smith came to Dominica to settle at the end of W.W.II he was not unfamiliar with the island. His parents had come for the winter over many years, renting a house and escaping the cold weather … Continue reading →

Dominica is famous for its giant land frogs which deposit their eggs in foam hidden in hollows or cranies but not in water. They are found nowhere else. The French, in the early days of colonization, found them delicious. Early … Continue reading →

          We had been invited to an old country estate in Martinique for Sunday dinner. It was well worth the trip. Martinique still has many of the original estate houses built by the French Colonists in a time when slave … Continue reading →

We had no screen on most of the downstairs of our residence, the Tree House. Our hotel rooms were all screened, as was the main building because tourists expected it. The only mosquito we had was a small bush mosquito … Continue reading →

Our housekeeper at the Tree House lived in a small room at the southeast corner of our home. The entrance was from the outside and to come to work she would have to go outside and walk around to the … Continue reading →

          Quite a number of us were returning from Antigua race week, a wonderful, once a year event held two islands north of Dominica. We were on John Fleek’s thirty-foot sloop, Intermezzo. Tommy Coulthard was sailing in tandem on his … Continue reading →

After Hurricane David (August 1979, the most powerful of this century’s hurricanes to that date) passed through and over us I was alone and stranded in vast array of uprooted tropical forest trees. They were draped like jackstraws over the … Continue reading →