Near the opening of Lawrence Scott's Witchbroom (1992), the narrator captures something of the significance of Trinidad's westerly oriented development. In contemplating the history of the New World, the narrator refers repeatedly to the two channels, the Bocas del Dragón and the Boca de la Sierpe, as the primary shipping routes into the Gulf of Paria, where travellers must land either on Trinidad's western fringe or on the South American mainland—“by the Boca de la Sierpe as did Columbus and his caravels; or from the north which brought the ghost ship through the Bouche du Dragon”—so depicting the link between “the archipelago”, “the island of Kairi” (an Amerindian name for Trinidad) and “the continent of Bolivar”. A little later on, the narrator recalls the island's colonial past from a perspective filtered by events in the Gulf of Paria, “the burning ships of Apadoca, the Spanish admiral” in surrender to the British in the late eighteenth century, “the ships … full of black human cargo” and the “Fatel Rozack from Calcutta” bringing indentured East Asians to Trinidad. “All come”, the narrator chimes solemnly, “through the channels of the Serpent's Mouth and through the Dragon's teeth into the Gulf of Sadness”.

This excerpt from Scott echoes a recurring geographical trope in V. S. Naipaul's work whereby the Gulf of Paria represents an aquatic meeting place—or “tidalectic” (“tidal dialectic”) as Kamau Brathwaite and, more recently, Elizabeth DeLoughrey have theorized—between the Orinoco and the Atlantic, connecting Trinidad to the South American mainland. As Rob Greenberg has illustrated, the Gulf occupies a resonant place in Naipaul's writing, its mingling of fresh water from the Orinoco River and salt water from the Atlantic symbolic of the New World and its hybridity. In The Middle Passage, The Loss of El Dorado and A Way in the World, Naipaul highlights “the frothy white line” in which these different, conflicting waters meet and, in doing so, draws attention to the tidal world that connects the island to the continent and extends beyond nations.