What more do you need to identify my Mysterious Island?

Certainly, click, I hope you get
more details and hints and clues.

Hmmm, this is turning out to be quite the Mysterious Island. Well, I guess that's because it's a very small island and not very much goes on there these days.

In particular, this island has been spared daily invasions of giant cruise liners, so it gets tourists, but only about 10 or (maximum) 20 at a time. (The ghastly cruise ships show up at other islands and disgorge 1000 tourists all over the place -- sometimes 2 or 3 ships at a time, so as many as 3000 tourists at a time. Like a plague of locusts with credit cards.)

Not very much goes on on Mysterious Island these days. Absolutely no crime, no gunfire, no violence, no gangs. No special segregation/separation to keep the tourists and the natives apart. No parts of the island tourists are warned to stay out of by night or day. Everywhere you go -- including the windsock airport -- you run into chickens and roosters and goats and donkeys. And little green lizards.

But 250 years ago this little island was one of the busiest merchant and commercial centers in the Caribbean, with a huge bustling harbor and stone waterfront, ships from Europe and the Americas constantly sailing in and out buying and selling all sorts of goods. My Mysterious Island was a place of wealth and prosperity.

After a century or two, all that ended instantly. One great power got very angry at my little island, sent in a naval fleet, used cannon and gunpowder to blow up the stone wharfs and docks along the waterfront, and led the merchants away in chains -- a very Biblical revenge from which the island's economy never recovered.

Even today, 230 years later, when a native speaks the name of the admiral who destroyed their prosperity, you can hear a hiss to the pronounciation and see a dark cloud spread over the speaker's face. The admiral is the island's great historical villain.

There's the "extinct" volcano. Except, as I suspected, maybe it's not excinct. Two vulcanologists I found on the Web have studied the volcano and recommend that the island prepare for the day the extinct volcano might wake up again. But so far, no hints, no itty-bitty earthquakes. But this is the volcano that created and shaped the island.

35 kilometers behind my island (photo top right) you can see another, smaller island, even more obscure and less well-known. But it's earned a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for a Famous Special Something that I just absolutely love, but which scares the living crap out of just about everyone who encounters it. (The woman next to me was practically weeping.) I don't know why. Perfectly safe, and they can prove it.

My island and the smaller island behind it are world-renowned SCUBA diving sites with coral reefs rich with rare marine life. Most of my hotel's guests were there for the diving. If one nice fellow is true to his word, I should be receiving some of his remarkable underwater photographs, and I'll be thrilled to post them as soon as I do.

My ancient hotel (on the beach above the white arrow) is at the bottom of a tall cliff, and a very formidable cobblestone foot path, built by and primarily used by African slaves to haul cargo from the sea up to the town, leads to the island's capital, a happy, pleasant, charming little town named for the royal family of the Euro colonial power.

Every island schoolchild has to learn the Euro language -- and then promptly stops speaking it and forgets it. Everybody on the island speaks English. But all official government business is conducted and recorded in the Euro lingo.

Slavery ended on this island six months after Abraham Lincoln ended slavery in the United States.

Okay, that's enough. Somebody -- Sherlock Holmes, Herr Kommissar Berlach, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Judge Dee, Adrian Monk, Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe -- ought to be able to claim the pizza and identify my Mysterious Island.