David C. Berglund arrived on Anguilla in the 1960s because the island needed a veterinarian and Dave needed somewhere that wouldn’t try to contain him.
He was from Chicago. He flew his own planes. He grew hydroponic lettuce in Quonset huts before anyone had heard of vertical farming. He built furniture from experimental plastic composites because the Caribbean eats wood alive and he decided to teach it to chew on something else.
He catalogued three and a half centuries of shipwrecks in the waters surrounding Anguilla and published them in a book that serious divers still use today.
He was also, according to a British intelligence report compiled before the 1969 invasion of Anguilla, Militant Number Seven.
His crime, apparently, was generosity.
Lending money. Building things. Helping people. Showing up.
The British dossier treated all of it as evidence of subversion. Even his address was rendered as a military grid reference.
Dave thought that was hilarious.
“Keeps the amateurs guessing,” he liked to say.
He spent decades diving Anguilla’s waters the way other men spend decades in libraries — systematically, obsessively, in pursuit of what time had buried.
Ships lost in storms.
Vessels shattered on reef in the dark.
Cargoes that never reached their destinations.
Shipwrecks of Anguilla, 1628–1993 became the record he left behind: three hundred and sixty-five years of maritime history documented by a veterinarian from Chicago who understood something most historians miss.
The sea remembers what the land forgets.
Dave belonged to a certain disappearing class of Caribbean expatriate — brilliant, eccentric, self-reliant men who arrived on islands before globalization polished away their rough edges. Men who could repair engines, navigate reefs, improvise solutions from scraps, and somehow acquire obscure aircraft parts on islands with barely functioning docks.
Men who became local legends almost by accident.
He never entirely stopped building things.
Weeks before skin cancer finally caught him, he was still building model airplanes and emailing me requests for Dremel bits.
Buccaneer to the end.
The full story of David C. Berglund — veterinarian, diver, hydroponic pioneer, shipwreck historian, alleged revolutionary operative, and one of the most extraordinary Americans ever to wash up on a Caribbean shore — appears in What the Island Asked of Me.