Lawrence flies to Haiti with the plan of making his leather satchels and handbags, after reading in the New York Times that under Duvalier's young heir foreigners are being encouraged to set up businesses there, using the cheap local labour. In the next seat is a churchman from Indianapolis who suggests he set up shop on a missionary outpost in the south, where he will be given a disused Red Cross station to live in and install a crafts factory, as long as teaches the local peasants a trade. Soon Lawrence has hired four former sugar cane cutters and two unemployed tailors, as well as a charming housekeeper, a protégée of the Episcopalian church, charged by the Haitian mission priest with caring for Monsieur Laurent "as if he is your husband", which Sophilia does with almost excessive zeal... Lawrence learns to speak creole with gusto, setting out every afternoon on his small white horse "Blanc" to explore the farms and hills of the Momonce River valley, where he makes many friends. He attempts to revive the former Red Cross "nutrition center", seeing that many of the children have orange-hair and swollen bellies due to severe protein deficiency. The self-styled humanitarian, as a gesture of good will towards his neighbours, pays for the gruel out of his own pocket, but the venture ends in a fiasco when, to save money until a handbag payment arrives from his customer in New York, he has the porridge made with salt which - even in the land of sugar cane - is much cheaper than the sugar they prefer. A mob of parents gathers outside his gate to angrily accuse not him, the "Blanc", but his housekeeper, "Madame Blanc", of secretly pocketing the difference... Lawrence's mother comes from New York to paint but, finding the rural life too primitive, moves to the coastal town of Jacmel to run a craftwork outlet in a ramshackle but beautiful wooden house... Lawrence's cook/mistress, afraid of being sent to take care of his mother on the coast lest a potential rival usurp her place by his side, enlists the help of a voodoo priest to make him marry her but to no effect... Lawrence's mother's innocent flirtation with the libidinous priest sours when, after she rejects his advances, the man plots to have Lawrence deported and his workshop "expropriated" by Duvalier's dreaded "Tonton Macoute" henchmen, on the orders of the very Interior Minister who was supposed to be legalizing his situation. Lawrence flees in the night in a loaded truck to Jacmel where he sets up his workshop in more civilized circumstances, selling his wares to adventurous and well-heeled tourists in his Indigo Boutique. But the atmosphere in Haiti sours with "communist" rebels in the hills trying to oust Baby Doc, casting suspicion on foreigners who live too close to the peasants. So with heavy hearts mother and son get out with whatever they can and head for their next stop, the supposedly safer port of Cartagena de Indias, in Colombia. The next years find our happy, but often hapless hero recovering from the burglary of his handbag factory which leaves him without "even a stone to sharpen our knives on", and then finding his heaven on the island of San Andres, a Colombian possession where the natives, descendants of Jamaican slaves, still speak a lilting version of Queen Victoria's English. He falls in love with a sinewy and up-and-coming island girl he plans to marry, but after she balks at sharing his picturesque house on stilts they break off their engagement. Worst of all, he and Joan run out of money, and after desperately asking for some from Edward in Vancouver they take off for the more peaceful, "but much less charming" island of Grand Cayman. Two dull but profitable years later they are on Sint Maarten, where they soon decide that the best place for them to live and sell their original leather goods - and now pen-and-ink postcards as well - is the pristine and very exclusive French island visible on the horizon, Saint Barth.