The Marine was a 200 room hotel built in 1887 in Hastings, Barbados about 2 miles from Bridgetown. The hotel featured some very elaborately detailed cast iron balustrades, large wrap-around patios and a magnificent ballroom. Today, on the sites of both the Marine and Pomroy Hotels is the PomMarine Hotel, a teaching Hotel attached to the Barbados Community College.
Lowry refers to the hotel in his novel Ultramarine; " ' Talking about cows, all round the West Indies I been, Barbados, Bridgetown, that's hot stuff...All the grape trees coming down to the water's edge, you want to stay at the Colonial in the Milk Market there - nigger orchestra. The Marine's no good - that is, if you got money. I had. That was during the war. I tried the Marine, and the Balmoral. And then I went to the Colonial.....' " (Pg. 174).
There is no record whether Lowry visited the hotel on his 1929 trip to the Caribbean en route to the USA to visit Conrad Aiken.
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