About the Author
Born and raised in California, photojournalist Roger LaBrucherie began his exploration of islands in the late 1960s, when he undertook his training and service as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. His formal education as an economist and lawyer at Harvard College and Stanford University has enabled him to bring an unusually deep and analytical approach to his subjects. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that his works are as highly acclaimed for their commitment to the research and accuracy of their texts as they are for the beauty of their visual presentations. Among the islands he has covered to date are: Bermuda, Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, as well as the Hawaiian Islands.

Excerpted from Bermuda, A World Apart by Roger A. LaBrucherie. Copyright © 1996. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
"For a very, very long time for time beyond mea- sure there was nothing. Nothing but the wind and the waves. For aeons, the dark waves rolled and the wild winds swept over that deep, nameless sea. Then in the midst of those aeons, and far below the floor of the sea itself, fiery red lava from deep within the earth found a fissure in the earth's crust and began surging upward. As it breached the sea floor and came in contact with cold seawater, the outside of the molten flow cooled and hardened. But so hot was the lava at its core that the flow continued its upward surge, and layer upon layer of fresh lava spread over and built upon lava that had hardened before. And so, little by little, a mountain began to grow on the bottom of the sea. It would grow for a very long time, this un- derwater volcano, for here the sea was nearly three miles deep, and the volcano was unpredictable, at times adding to its bulk for years, at other times lying dormant for long intervals. And then one day, there came the crack and sizzle of fiery hot lava meeting air and water together, as the mountain at long last thrust above the surface of the sea. And in that moment, the island that would come to be known as Bermuda was born." -- Excerpt from Chapter Two: A World is Born.

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