At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies

In 1797 an eruption hurled out pumice, ashes, and sulphureous vapours.  In the great crisis of 1812, indeed, the volcano was quiet, leaving the Souffrière of St. Vincent to do the work; but since then he has shown an ugly and uncertain humour.  Smoke by day, and flame by night—or probably that light reflected from below which is often mistaken for flame in volcanic eruptions—have been seen again and again above the crater; and the awful earthquake of 1843 proves that his capacity for mischief is unabated.  The whole island, indeed, is somewhat unsafe; for the hapless town of Point-à-Pitre, destroyed by that earthquake, stands not on the volcanic Basse Terre, but on the edge of the marine Grande Terre, near the southern mouth of the salt-water river.  Heaven grant these good people of Guadaloupe a long respite; for they are said to deserve it, as far as human industry and enterprise goes.  They have, as well, I understand, as the gentlemen of Martinique, discovered the worth of the ‘division of labour.’  Throughout the West Indies the planter is usually not merely a sugar-grower, but a sugar-maker also.  He requires, therefore, two capitals, and two intellects likewise, one for his cane-fields, the other for his ‘ingenio,’ engine-house, or sugar-works.  But he does not gain thereby two profits.  Having two things to do, neither, usually, is done well.  The cane-farming is bad, the sugar-making bad; and the sugar, when made, disposed of through merchants by a cumbrous, antiquated, and expensive system.  These shrewd Frenchmen, and, I am told, even small proprietors among the Negroes, not being crippled, happily for them, by those absurd sugar-duties which, till Mr. Lowe’s budget, put a premium on the making of bad sugar, are confining themselves to growing the canes, and sell them raw to ‘Usines Centrales,’ at which they are manufactured into sugar.  They thus devote their own capital and intellect to increasing the yield of their estates; while the central factories, it is said, pay dividends ranging from twenty to forty per cent.  I regretted much that I was unable to visit in crop-time one of these factories, and see the working of a system which seems to contain one of the best elements of the co-operative principle.

But (and this is at present a serious inconvenience to a traveller in the Antilles) the steamer passes each island only once a fortnight; so that to land in an island is equivalent to staying there at least that time, unless one chooses to take the chances of a coasting schooner, and bad food, bugs, cockroaches, and a bunk which—but I will not describe.  ‘Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda’ (down the companion) ‘e passa.’

I must therefore content myself with describing, as honestly as I can, what little we saw from the sea, of islands at each of which we would gladly have stayed several days.

As the traveller nears each of them—Guadaloupe, Dominica, Martinique (of which two last we had only one passing glance), St. Vincent, St. Lucia, and Grenada—he will be impressed, not only by the peculiarity of their form, but by the richness of their colour.

All of them do not, like St. Kitts, Guadaloupe, and St. Vincent, slope up to one central peak.  In Martinique, for instance, there are three separate peaks, or groups of peaks—the Mont Pelée, the Pitons du Carbet, and the Piton du Vauclain.  But all have that peculiar jagged outline which is noticed first at the Virgin Islands.

Flat ‘vans’ or hog-backed hills, and broad sweeps of moorland, so common in Scotland, are as rare as are steep walls of cliff, so common in the Alps.  Pyramid is piled on pyramid, the sides of each at a slope of about 45°, till the whole range is a congeries of multitudinous peaks and peaklets, round the base of which spreads out, with a sudden sweep, the smooth lowland of volcanic ash and lava.  This extreme raggedness of outline is easily explained.  The mountains have never been, as in Scotland, planed smooth by ice.  They have been gouged out, in every direction, by the furious tropic rains and tropic rain-torrents.  Had the rocks been stratified and tolerably horizontal, these rains would have cut them out into tablelands divided by deep gullies, such as may be seen in Abyssinia, and in certain parts of the western United States.  But these rocks are altogether amorphous and unstratified, and have been poured or spouted out as lumps, dykes, and sheets of lava, of every degree of hardness; so that the rain, in degrading them, has worn them, not into tables and ranges, but into innumerable cones.  And the process of degradation is still going on rapidly.  Though a cliff, or sheet of bare rock, is hardly visible among the glens, yet here and there a bright brown patch tells of a recent landslip; and the masses of debris and banks of shingle, backed by a pestilential little swamp at the mouth of each torrent, show how furious must be the downpour and down-roll before the force of a sudden flood, along so headlong an incline.

But in strange contrast with the ragged outline, and with the wild devastation of the rainy season, is the richness of the verdure which clothes the islands, up to their highest peaks, in what seems a coat of green fur; but when looked at through the glasses, proves to be, in most cases, gigantic timber.  Not a rock is seen.  If there be a cliff here and there, it is as green as an English lawn.  Steep slopes are gray with groo-groo palms, [15 - Acrocomia.] or yellow with unknown flowering trees.  High against the sky-line, tiny knots and lumps are found to be gigantic trees.  Each glen has buried its streamlet a hundred feet in vegetation, above which, here and there, the gray stem and dark crown of some palmiste towers up like the mast of some great admiral.  The eye and the fancy strain vainly into the green abysses, and wander up and down over the wealth of depths and heights, compared with which European parks and woodlands are but paltry scrub and shaugh.  No books are needed to tell that.  The eye discovers it for itself, even before it has learnt to judge of the great size of the vegetation, from the endless variety of form and colour.  For the islands, though green intensely, are not of one, but of every conceivable green, or rather of hues ranging from pale yellow through all greens into cobalt blue; and as the wind stirs the leaves, and sweeps the lights and shadows over hill and glen, all is ever-changing, iridescent, like a peacock’s neck; till the whole island, from peak to shore, seems some glorious jewel—an emerald with tints of sapphire and topaz, hanging between blue sea and white surf below, and blue sky and white cloud above.

If the reader fancies that I exaggerate, let him go and see.  Let him lie for one hour off the Rosseau at Dominica.  Let him sail down the leeward side of Guadaloupe, down the leeward side of what island he will, and judge for himself how poor, and yet how tawdry, my words are, compared with the luscious yet magnificent colouring of the Antilles.

The traveller, at least so I think, would remark also, with some surprise, the seeming smallness of these islands.  The Basse Terre of Guadaloupe, for instance, is forty miles in length.  As you lie off it, it does not look half, or even a quarter, of that length; and that, not merely because the distances north and south are foreshortened, or shut in by nearer headlands.  The causes, I believe, are more subtle and more complex.  First, the novel clearness of the air, which makes the traveller, fresh from misty England, fancy every object far nearer, and therefore far smaller, than it actually is.  Next the simplicity of form.  Each outer line trends upward so surely toward a single focus; each whole is so sharply defined between its base-line of sea and its background of sky, that, like a statue, each island is compact and complete in itself, an isolated and self-dependent organism; and therefore, like every beautiful statue, it looks much smaller than it is.  So perfect this isolation seems, that one fancies, at moments, that the island does not rise out of the sea, but floats upon it; that it is held in place, not by the roots of the mountains, and deep miles of lava-wall below, but by the cloud which has caught it by the top, and will not let it go.  Let that cloud but rise, and vanish, and the whole beautiful thing will be cast adrift; ready to fetch way before the wind, and (as it will seem often enough to do when viewed through a cabin-port) to slide silently past you, while you are sliding past it.

And yet, to him who knows the past, a dark shadow hangs over all this beauty; and the air—even in clearest blaze of sunshine—is full of ghosts.  I do not speak of the shadow of negro slavery, nor of the shadow which, though abolished, it has left behind, not to be cleared off for generations to come.  I speak of the shadow of war, and the ghosts of gallant soldiers and sailors.  Truly here

‘The spirits of our fathers
Might start from every wave;
For the deck it was their field of fame,
And ocean was their grave,’

and ask us: What have you done with these islands, which we won for you with precious blood?  What could we answer?  We have misused them, neglected them; till now, ashamed of the slavery of the past, and too ignorant and helpless to govern them now slavery is gone, we are half-minded to throw them away again, or to allow them to annex themselves, in sheer weariness at our imbecility, to the Americans, who, far too wise to throw them away in their turn, will accept them gladly as an instalment of that great development of their empire, when ‘The stars and stripes shall float upon Cape Horn.’

But was it for this that these islands were taken and retaken, till every gully held the skeleton of an Englishman?  Was it for this that these seas were reddened with blood year after year, till the sharks learnt to gather to a sea-fight, as eagle, kite, and wolf gathered of old to fights on land?  Did all those gallant souls go down to Hades in vain, and leave nothing for the Englishman but the sad and proud memory of their useless valour?  That at least they have left.

However we may deplore those old wars as unnecessary; however much we may hate war in itself, as perhaps the worst of all the superfluous curses with which man continues to deface himself and this fair earth of God, yet one must be less than Englishman, less, it may be, than man, if one does not feel a thrill of pride at entering waters where one says to oneself,—Here Rodney, on the glorious 12th of April 1782, broke Count de Grasse’s line (teaching thereby Nelson to do the same in like case), took and destroyed seven French ships of the line and scattered the rest, preventing the French fleet from joining the Spaniards at Hispaniola; thus saving Jamaica and the whole West Indies, and brought about by that single tremendous blow the honourable peace of 1783.  On what a scene of crippled and sinking, shattered and triumphant ships, in what a sea, must the conquerors have looked round from the Formidable’s poop, with De Grasse at luncheon with Rodney in the cabin below, and not, as he had boastfully promised, on board his own Fills de Paris.  Truly, though cynically, wrote Sir Gilbert Blane, ‘If superior beings make a sport of the quarrels of mortals, they could not have chosen a better theatre for this magnificent exhibition, nor could they ever have better entertainment than this day afforded.’

Yon lovely roadstead of Dominica—there it was that Rodney first caught up the French on the 9th of April, three days before, and would have beaten them there and then, had not a great part of his fleet lain becalmed under these very highlands, past which we are steaming through water smooth as glass.  You glance, again, running down the coast of Martinique, into a deep bay, ringed round with gay houses embowered in mango and coconut, with the Piton du Vauclain rising into the clouds behind it.  That is the Cul-de-sac Royal, for years the rendezvous and stronghold of the French fleets.  From it Count de Grasse sailed out on the fatal 8th of April; and there, beyond it, opens an isolated rock, of the shape, but double the size, of one of the great Pyramids, which was once the British sloop of war Diamond Rock.

For, in the end of 1803, Sir Samuel Hood saw that French ships passing to Fort Royal harbour in Martinique escaped him by running through the deep channel between Pointe du Diamante and this same rock, which rises sheer out of the water 600 feet, and is about a mile round, and only accessible at a point to the leeward, and even then only when there is no surf.  He who lands, it is said, has then to creep through crannies and dangerous steeps, round to the windward side, where the eye is suddenly relieved by a sloping grove of wild fig-trees, clinging by innumerable air-roots to the cracks of the stone.

So Hood, with that inspiration of genius so common then among sailors, laid his seventy-four, the Centaur, close alongside the Diamond; made a hawser, with a traveller on it, fast to the ship and to the top of the rock; and in January 1804 got three long 24’s and two 18’s hauled up far above his masthead by sailors who, as they ‘hung like clusters,’ appeared ‘like mice hauling a little sausage.  Scarcely could we hear the Governor on the top directing them with his trumpet; the Centaur lying close under, like a cocoa-nut shell, to which the hawsers are affixed.’ [16 - Naval Chronicles, vol. xii. p. 206.]  In this strange fortress Lieutenant James Wilkie Maurice (let his name be recollected as one of England’s forgotten worthies) was established, with 120 men and boys, and ammunition, provisions, and water, for four months; and the rock was borne on the books of the Admiralty as His Majesty’s ship Diamond Rock, and swept the seas with her guns till the 1st of June 1805, when she had to surrender, for want of powder, to a French squadron of two 74’s, a frigate, a corvette, a schooner, and eleven gunboats, after killing and wounding some seventy men on the rock alone, and destroying three gunboats, with a loss to herself of two men killed and one wounded.  Remembering which story, who will blame the traveller if he takes off his hat to His Majesty’s quondam corvette, as he sees for the first time its pink and yellow sides shining in the sun, above the sparkling seas over which it domineered of old?  You run onwards toward St. Lucia.  Across that channel Rodney’s line of frigates watched for the expected reinforcement of the French fleet.  The first bay in St. Lucia is Gros islet; and there is the Gros islet itself—Pigeon Rock, as the English call it—behind which Rodney’s fleet lay waiting at anchor, while he himself sat on the top of the rock, day after day, spy-glass in hand, watching for the signals from his frigates that the French fleet was on the move.

And those glens and forests of St. Lucia—over them and through them Sir John Moore and Sir Ralph Abercrombie fought, week after week, month after month, not merely against French soldiers, but against worse enemies; ‘Brigands,’ as the poor fellows were called; Negroes liberated by the Revolution of 1792.  With their heads full (and who can blame them?) of the Rights of Man, and the democratic teachings of that valiant and able friend of Robespierre, Victor Hugues, they had destroyed their masters, man, woman, and child, horribly enough, and then helped to drive out of the island the invading English, who were already half destroyed, not with fighting, but with fever.  And now ‘St. Lucia the faithful,’ as the Convention had named her, was swarming with fresh English; and the remaining French and the drilled Negroes made a desperate stand in the earthworks of yonder Morne Fortunée, above the harbour, and had to surrender, with 100 guns and all their stores; and then the poor black fellows, who only knew that they were free, and intended to remain free, took to the bush, and fed on the wild cush-cush roots and the plunder of the plantations, man-hunting, murdering French and English alike, and being put to death in return whenever caught.  Gentle Abercrombie could not coax them into peace: stern Moore could not shoot and hang them into it; and the ‘Brigand war’ dragged hideously on, till Moore—who was nearly caught by them in a six-oared boat off the Pitons, and had to row for his life to St. Vincent, so saving himself for the glory of Corunna—was all but dead of fever; and Colonel James Drummond had to carry on the miserable work, till the whole ‘Armée Française dans les bois’ laid down their rusty muskets, on the one condition, that free they had been, and free they should remain.  So they were formed into an English regiment, and sent to fight on the coast of Africa; and in more senses than one ‘went to their own place.’  Then St. Lucia was ours till the peace of 1802; then French again, under the good and wise Nogués; to be retaken by us in 1803 once and for all.

I tell this little story at some length, as an instance of what these islands have cost us in blood and treasure.  I have heard it regretted that we restored Martinique to the French, and kept St. Lucia instead.  But in so doing, the British Government acted at least on the advice which Rodney had given as early as the year 1778.  St. Lucia, he held, would render Martinique and the other islands of little use in war, owing to its windward situation and its good harbours; for from St. Lucia every other British island might receive speedy succour.  He advised that the Little Carenage should be made a permanent naval station, with dockyard and fortifications, and a town built there by Government, which would, in his opinion, have become a metropolis for the other islands.  And indeed, Nature had done her part to make such a project easy of accomplishment.  But Rodney’s advice was not taken—any more than his advice to people the island, by having a considerable quantity of land in each parish allotted to ten-acre men (i.e. white yeomen), under penalty of forfeiting it to the Crown should it be ever converted to any other use than provision ground (i.e. thrown into sugar estates).  This advice shows that Rodney’s genius, though, with the prejudices of his time, he supported not only slavery, but the slave-trade itself, had perceived one of the most fatal weaknesses of the slave-holding and sugar-growing system.  And well it would have been for St. Lucia if his advice had been taken.  But neither ten-acre men nor dockyards were ever established in St. Lucia.  The mail-steamers, if they need to go into dock, have, I am ashamed to say, to go to Martinique, where the French manage matters better.  The admirable Carenage harbour is empty; Castries remains a little town, small, dirty, dilapidated, and unwholesome; and St. Lucia itself is hardly to be called a colony, but rather the nucleus of a colony, which may become hereafter, by energy and good government, a rich and thickly-peopled garden up to the very mountain-tops.

We went up 800 feet of steep hill, to pay a visit on that Morne Fortunée which Moore and Abercrombie took, with terrible loss of life, in May 1796; and wondered at the courage and the tenacity of purpose which could have contrived to invest, and much more to assault, such a stronghold, ‘dragging the guns across ravines and up the acclivities of the mountains and rocks,’ and then attacking the works only along one narrow neck of down, which must be fat, to this day, with English blood.

All was peaceful enough now.  The forts were crumbling, the barracks empty, and the ‘neat cottages, smiling flower gardens, smooth grass-plats and gravel-walks,’ which were once the pride of the citadel, replaced for the most part with Guava-scrub and sensitive plants.  But nothing can destroy the beauty of the panorama.  To the north and east a wilderness of mountain peaks; to the west the Grand Cul-de-sac and the Carenage, mapped out in sheets of blue between high promontories; and, beyond all, the open sea.  What a land: and in what a climate: and all lying well-nigh as it has been since the making of the world, waiting for man to come and take possession.  But there, as elsewhere, matters are mending steadily; and in another hundred years St. Lucia may be an honour to the English race.

We were, of course, anxious to obtain at St. Lucia specimens of that abominable reptile, the Fer-de-lance, or rat-tailed snake, [17 - Craspedocephalus lanceolatus.] which is the pest of this island, as well as of the neighbouring island of Martinique, and, in Père Labat’s time, of lesser Martinique in the Grenadines, from which, according to Davy, it seems to have disappeared.  It occurs also in Guadaloupe.  In great Martinique—so the French say—it is dangerous to travel through certain woodlands on account of the Fer-de-lance, who lies along a bough, and strikes, without provocation, at horse or man.  I suspect this statement, however, to be an exaggeration.  I was assured that this was not the case in St. Lucia; that the snake attacks no oftener than other venomous snakes,—that is, when trodden on, or when his retreat is cut off.  At all events, it seems easy enough to kill him: so easy, that I hope yet it may be possible to catch him alive, and that the Zoological Gardens may at last possess—what they have long coveted in vain—hideous attraction of a live Fer-de-lance.  The specimens which we brought home are curious enough, even from this æsthetic point of view.  Why are these poisonous snakes so repulsive in appearance, some of them at least, and that not in proportion to their dangerous properties?  For no one who puts the mere dread out of his mind will call the Cobras ugly, even anything but beautiful; nor, again, the deadly Coral snake of Trinidad, whose beauty tempts children, and even grown people, to play with it, or make a necklace of it, sometimes to their own destruction.  But who will call the Puff Adder of the Cape, or this very Fer-de-lance, anything but ugly and horrible: not only from the brutality signified, to us at least, by the flat triangular head and the heavy jaw, but by the look of malevolence and craft signified, to us at least, by the eye and the lip?  ‘To us at least,’ I say.  For it is an open question, and will be one, as long as the nominalist and the realist schools of thought keep up their controversy—which they will do to the world’s end—whether this seeming hideousness be a real fact: whether we do not attribute to the snake the same passions which we should expect to find—and to abhor—in a human countenance of somewhat the same shape, and then justify our assumption to ourselves by the creature’s bites, which are actually no more the result of craft and malevolence than the bite of a frightened mouse or squirrel.  I should be glad to believe that the latter theory were the true one; that nothing is created really ugly, that the Fer-de-lance looks an hideous fiend, the Ocelot a beautiful fiend, merely because the outlines of the Ocelot approach more nearly to those which we consider beautiful in a human being: but I confess myself not yet convinced.  ‘There is a great deal of human nature in man,’ said the wise Yankee; and one’s human nature, perhaps one’s common-sense also, will persist in considering beauty and ugliness as absolute realities, in spite of one’s efforts to be fair to the weighty arguments on the other side.

These Fer-de-lances, be that as it may, are a great pest in St. Lucia.  Dr. Davy says that he ‘was told by the Lieutenant-Governor that as many as thirty rat-tailed snakes were killed in clearing a piece of land, of no great extent, near Government House.’  I can well believe this, for about the same number were killed only two years ago in clearing, probably, the same piece of ground, which is infested with that creeping pest of the West Indies, the wild Guava-bush, from which guava-jelly is made.  The present Lieutenant-Governor has offered a small reward for the head of every Fer-de-lance killed: and the number brought in, in the first month, was so large that I do not like to quote it merely from memory.  Certainly, it was high time to make a crusade against these unwelcome denizens.  Dr. Davy, judging from a Government report, says that nineteen persons were killed by them in one small parish in the year 1849; and the death, though by no means certain, is, when it befalls, a hideous death enough.  If any one wishes to know what it is like, let him read the tragedy which Sir Richard Schomburgk tells—with his usual brilliance and pathos, for he is a poet as well as a man of science—in his Travelsin British Guiana, vol. ii. p. 255—how the Craspedocephalus, coiled on a stone in the ford, let fourteen people walk over him without stirring, or allowing himself to be seen: and at last rose, and, missing Schomburgk himself, struck the beautiful Indian bride, the ‘Liebling der ganzen Gesellschaft;’ and how she died in her bridegroom’s arms, with horrors which I do not record.

Strangely enough, this snake, so fatal to man, has no power against another West Indian snake, almost equally common, namely, the Cribo. [18 - Coluber variabilis.]  This brave animal, closely connected with our common water-snake, is perfectly harmless, and a welcome guest in West Indian houses, because he clears them of rats.  He is some six or eight feet long, black, with more or less bright yellow about the tail and under the stomach.  He not only faces the Fer-de-lance, who is often as big as he, but kills and eats him.  It was but last year, I think, that the population of Carenage turned out to see a fight in a tree between a Cribo and a Fer-de-lance, of about equal size, which, after a two hours’ struggle, ended in the Cribo swallowing the Fer-de-lance, head foremost.  But when he had got his adversary about one-third down, the Creoles—just as so many Englishmen would have done—seeing that all the sport was over, rewarded the brave Cribo by killing both, and preserving them as a curiosity in spirits.  How the Fer-de-lance came into the Antilles is a puzzle.  The black American scorpion—whose bite is more dreaded by the Negroes than even the snake’s—may have been easily brought by ship in luggage or in cargo.  But the Fer-de-lance, whose nearest home is in Guiana, is not likely to have come on board ship.  It is difficult to believe that he travelled northward by land at the epoch—if such a one there ever was—when these islands were joined to South America: for if so, he would surely be found in St. Vincent, in Grenada, and most surely of all in Trinidad.  So far from that being the case, he will not live, it is said, in St. Vincent.  For (so goes the story) during the Carib war of 1795-96, the savages imported Fer-de-lances from St. Lucia or Martinique, and turned them loose, in hopes of their destroying the white men: but they did not breed, dwindled away, and were soon extinct.  It is possible that they, or their eggs, came in floating timber from the Orinoco: but if so, how is it that they have never been stranded on the east coast of Trinidad, whither timber without end drifts from that river?  In a word, I have no explanation whatsoever to give; as I am not minded to fall back on the medieval one, that the devil must have brought them thither, to plague the inhabitants for their sins.

Among all these beautiful islands, St. Lucia is, I think, the most beautiful; not indeed on account of the size or form of its central mass, which is surpassed by that of several others, but on account of those two extraordinary mountains at its south-western end, which, while all conical hills in the French islands are called Pitons, bear the name of The Pitons par excellence.  From most elevated points in the island their twin peaks may be seen jutting up over the other hills, like, according to irreverent English sailors, the tips of a donkey’s ears.  But, as the steamer runs southward along the shore, these two peaks open out, and you find yourself in deep water close to the base of two obelisks, rather than mountains, which rise sheer out of the sea, one to the height of 2710, the other to that of 2680 feet, about a mile from each other.  Between them is the loveliest little bay; and behind them green wooded slopes rise toward the rearward mountain of the Souffrière.  The whole glitters clear and keen in blazing sunshine: but behind, black depths of cloud and gray sheets of rain shroud all the central highlands in mystery and sadness.  Beyond them, without a shore, spreads open sea.  But the fantastic grandeur of the place cannot be described in words.  The pencil of the artist must be trusted.  I can vouch that he has not in the least exaggerated the slenderness and steepness of the rock-masses.  One of them, it is said, has never been climbed; unless a myth which hangs about it is true.  Certain English sailors, probably of Rodney’s men—and numbering, according to the pleasure of the narrator, three hundred, thirty, or three—are said to have warped themselves up it by lianes and scrub; but they found the rock-ledges garrisoned by an enemy more terrible than any French.  Beneath the bites of the Fer-de-lances, and it may be beneath the blaze of the sun, man after man dropped; and lay, or rolled down the cliffs.  A single survivor was seen to reach the summit, to wave the Union Jack in triumph over his head, and then to fall a corpse.  So runs the tale, which, if not true, has yet its value, as a token of what, in those old days, English sailors were believed capable of daring and of doing.

At the back of these two Pitons is the Souffrière, probably the remains of the old crater, now fallen in, and only 1000 feet above the sea: a golden egg to the islanders, were it but used, in case of war, and any difficulty occurring in obtaining sulphur from Sicily, a supply of the article to almost any amount might be obtained from this and the other like Solfaterras of the British Antilles; they being, so long as the natural distillation of the substance continues active as at present, inexhaustible.  But to work them profitably will require a little more common-sense than the good folks of St. Lucia have as yet shown.  In 1836 two gentlemen of Antigua, [19 - Breen’s St. Lucia, p. 295.] Mr. Bennett and Mr. Wood, set up sulphur works at the Souffrière of St. Lucia, and began prosperously enough, exporting 540 tons the first year.  ‘But in 1840,’ says Mr. Breen, ‘the sugar-growers took the alarm,’ fearing, it is to be presumed, that labour would be diverted from the cane-estates, ‘and at their instigation the Legislative Council imposed a tax of 16s. sterling on every ton of purified sulphur exported from the colony.’  The consequence was that ‘Messrs. Bennett and Wood, after incurring a heavy loss of time and treasure, had to break up their establishment and retire from the colony.’  One has heard of the man who killed the goose to get the golden egg.  In this case the goose, to avoid the trouble of laying, seems to have killed the man.

The next link in the chain, as the steamer runs southward, is St. Vincent; a single volcano peak, like St. Kitts, or the Basse Terre of Guadaloupe.  Very grand are the vast sheets, probably of lava covered with ash, which pour down from between two rounded mountains just above the town.  Rich with green canes, they contrast strongly with the brown ragged cliffs right and left of them, and still more with the awful depths beyond and above, where, underneath a canopy of bright white clouds, scowls a purple darkness of cliffs and glens, among which lies, unseen, the Souffrière.

In vain, both going and coming, by sunlight, and again by moonlight, when the cane-fields gleamed white below and the hills were pitch-black above, did we try to catch a sight of this crater-peak.  One fact alone we ascertained, that like all, as far as I have seen, of the West Indian volcanoes, it does not terminate in an ash-cone, but in ragged cliffs of blasted rock.  The explosion of April 27, 1812, must have been too violent, and too short, to allow of any accumulation round the crater.  And no wonder; for that single explosion relieved an interior pressure upon the crust of the earth, which had agitated sea and land from the Azores to the West Indian islands, the coasts of Venezuela, the Cordillera of New Grenada, and the valleys of the Mississippi and Ohio.  For nearly two years the earthquakes had continued, when they culminated in one great tragedy, which should be read at length in the pages of Humboldt. [20 - Personal Narrative, book v. cap. 14.]  On March 26, 1812, when the people of Caraccas were assembled in the churches, beneath a still and blazing sky, one minute of earthquake sufficed to bury, amid the ruins of churches and houses, nearly 10,000 souls.  The same earthquake wrought terrible destruction along the whole line of the northern Cordilleras, and was felt even at Santa Fé de Bogota, and Honda, 180 leagues from Caraccas.  But the end was not yet.  While the wretched survivors of Caraccas were dying of fever and starvation, and wandering inland to escape from ever-renewed earthquake shocks, among villages and farms, which, ruined like their own city, could give them no shelter, the almost forgotten volcano of St. Vincent was muttering in suppressed wrath.  It had thrown out no lava since 1718; if, at least, the eruption spoken of by Moreau de Jonnés took place in the Souffrière.  According to him, with a terrific earthquake, clouds of ashes were driven into the air with violent detonations from a mountain situated at the eastern end of the island.  When the eruption had ceased, it was found that the whole mountain had disappeared.  Now there is no eastern end to St. Vincent, nor any mountain on the east coast: and the Souffrière is at the northern end.  It is impossible, meanwhile, that the wreck of such a mountain should not have left traces visible and notorious to this day.  May not the truth be, that the Souffrière had once a lofty cone, which was blasted away in 1718, leaving the present crater-ring of cliffs and peaks; and that thus may be explained the discrepancies in the accounts of its height, which Mr. Scrope gives as 4940 feet, and Humboldt and Dr. Davy at 3000, a measurement which seems to me to be more probably correct?  The mountain is said to have been slightly active in 1785.  In 1812 its old crater had been for some years (and is now) a deep blue lake, with walls of rock around 800 feet in height, reminding one traveller of the Lake of Albano. [21 - Dr. Davy.]  But for twelve months it had given warning, by frequent earthquake shocks, that it had its part to play in the great subterranean battle between rock and steam; and on the 27th of April 1812 the battle began.

A negro boy—he is said to be still alive in St. Vincent—was herding cattle on the mountain-side.  A stone fell near him; and then another.  He fancied that other boys were pelting him from the cliffs above, and began throwing stones in return.  But the stones fell thicker: and among them one, and then another, too large to have been thrown by human hand.  And the poor little fellow woke up to the fact that not a boy, but the mountain, was throwing stones at him; and that the column of black cloud which was rising from the crater above was not harmless vapour, but dust, and ash, and stone.  He turned, and ran for his life, leaving the cattle to their fate, while the steam mitrailleuse of the Titans—to which all man’s engines of destruction are but pop-guns—roared on for three days and nights, covering the greater part of the island in ashes, burying crops, breaking branches off the trees, and spreading ruin from which several estates never recovered; and so the 30th of April dawned in darkness which might be felt.

Meanwhile, on that same day, to change the scene of the campaign two hundred and ten leagues, ‘a distance,’ as Humboldt says, ‘equal to that between Vesuvius and Paris,’ ‘the inhabitants, not only of Caraccas, but of Calabozo, situate in the midst of the Llanos, over a space of four thousand square leagues, were terrified by a subterranean noise, which resembled frequent discharges of the loudest cannon.  It was accompanied by no shock: and, what is very remarkable, was as loud on the coast as at eighty leagues’ distance inland; and at Caraccas, as well as at Calabozo, preparations were made to put the place in defence against an enemy who seemed to be advancing with heavy artillery.’  They might as well have copied the St. Vincent herd-boy, and thrown their stones, too, at the Titans; for the noise was, there can be no doubt, nothing else than the final explosion in St. Vincent far away.  The same explosion was heard in Venezuela, the same at Martinique and Guadaloupe: but there, too, there were no earthquake shocks.  The volcanoes of the two French islands lay quiet, and left their English brother to do the work.  On the same day a stream of lava rushed down from the mountain, reached the sea in four hours, and then all was over.  The earthquakes which had shaken for two years a sheet of the earth’s surface larger than half Europe were stilled by the eruption of this single vent.

No wonder if, with such facts on my memory since my childhood, I looked up at that Souffrière with awe, as at a giant, obedient though clumsy, beneficent though terrible, reposing aloft among the clouds when his appointed work was done.

The strangest fact about this eruption was, that the mountain did not make use of its old crater.  The original vent must have become so jammed and consolidated, in the few years between 1785 and 1812, that it could not be reopened, even by a steam-force the vastness of which may be guessed at from the vastness of the area which it had shaken for two years.  So when the eruption was over, it was found that the old crater-lake, incredible as it may seem, remained undisturbed, as far as has been ascertained.  But close to it, and separated only by a knife-edge of rock some 700 feet in height, and so narrow that, as I was assured by one who had seen it, it is dangerous to crawl along it, a second crater, nearly as large as the first, had been blasted out, the bottom of which, in like manner, is now filled with water.  I regretted much that I could not visit it.  Three points I longed to ascertain carefully—the relative heights of the water in the two craters; the height and nature of the spot where the lava stream issued; and lastly, if possible, the actual causes of the locally famous Rabacca, or ‘Dry River,’ one of the largest streams in the island, which was swallowed up during the eruption, at a short distance from its source, leaving its bed an arid gully to this day.  But it could not be, and I owe what little I know of the summit of the Souffrière principally to a most intelligent and gentleman-like young Wesleyan minister, whose name has escaped me.  He described vividly as we stood together on the deck, looking up at the volcano, the awful beauty of the twin lakes, and of the clouds which, for months together, whirl in and out of the cups in fantastic shapes before the eddies of the trade-wind.

The day after the explosion, ‘Black Sunday,’ gave a proof of, though no measure of, the enormous force which had been exerted.  Eighty miles to windward lies Barbadoes.  All Saturday a heavy cannonading had been heard to the eastward.  The English and French fleets were surely engaged.  The soldiers were called out; the batteries manned: but the cannonade died away, and all went to bed in wonder.  On the 1st of May the clocks struck six: but the sun did not, as usual in the tropics, answer to the call.  The darkness was still intense, and grew more intense as the morning wore on.  A slow and silent rain of impalpable dust was falling over the whole island.  The Negroes rushed shrieking into the streets.  Surely the last day was come.  The white folk caught (and little blame to them) the panic; and some began to pray who had not prayed for years.  The pious and the educated (and there were plenty of both in Barbadoes) were not proof against the infection.  Old letters describe the scene in the churches that morning as hideous—prayers, sobs, and cries, in Stygian darkness, from trembling crowds.  And still the darkness continued, and the dust fell.

I have a letter, written by one long since dead, who had at least powers of description of no common order, telling how, when he tried to go out of his house upon the east coast, he could not find the trees on his own lawn, save by feeling for their stems.  He stood amazed not only in utter darkness, but in utter silence.  For the trade-wind had fallen dead; the everlasting roar of the surf was gone; and the only noise was the crashing of branches, snapped by the weight of the clammy dust.  He went in again, and waited.  About one o’clock the veil began to lift; a lurid sunlight stared in from the horizon: but all was black overhead.  Gradually the dust-cloud drifted away; the island saw the sun once more; and saw itself inches deep in black, and in this case fertilising, dust.  The trade-wind blew suddenly once more out of the clear east, and the surf roared again along the shore.

Meanwhile, a heavy earthquake-wave had struck part at least of the shores of Barbadoes.  The gentleman on the east coast, going out, found traces of the sea, and boats and logs washed up, some 10 to 20 feet above high-tide mark: a convulsion which seems to have gone unmarked during the general dismay.

One man at least, an old friend of John Hunter, Sir Joseph Banks and others their compeers, was above the dismay, and the superstitious panic which accompanied it.  Finding it still dark when he rose to dress, he opened (so the story used to run) his window; found it stick, and felt upon the sill a coat of soft powder.  ‘The volcano in St. Vincent has broken out at last,’ said the wise man, ‘and this is the dust of it.’  So he quieted his household and his Negroes, lighted his candles, and went to his scientific books, in that delight, mingled with an awe not the less deep because it is rational and self-possessed, with which he, like other men of science, looked at the wonders of this wondrous world.

Those who will recollect that Barbadoes is eighty miles to windward of St. Vincent, and that a strong breeze from E.N.E. is usually blowing from the former island to the latter, will be able to imagine, not to measure, the force of an explosion which must have blown this dust several miles into the air, above the region of the trade-wind, whether into a totally calm stratum, or into that still higher one in which the heated south-west wind is hurrying continually from the tropics toward the pole.  As for the cessation of the trade-wind itself during the fall of the dust, I leave the fact to be explained by more learned men: the authority whom I have quoted leaves no doubt in my mind as to the fact.

On leaving St. Vincent, the track lies past the Grenadines.  For sixty miles, long low islands of quaint forms and euphonious names—Becquia, Mustique, Canonau, Carriacou, Isle de Rhone—rise a few hundred feet out of the unfathomable sea, bare of wood, edged with cliffs and streaks of red and gray rock, resembling, says Dr. Davy, the Cyclades of the Grecian Archipelago: their number is counted at three hundred.  The largest of them all is not 8000 acres in extent; the smallest about 600.  A quiet prosperous race of little yeomen, beside a few planters, dwell there; the latter feeding and exporting much stock, the former much provisions, and both troubling themselves less than of yore with sugar and cotton.  They build coasting vessels, and trade with them to the larger islands; and they might be, it is said, if they chose, much richer than they are,—if that be any good to them.

The steamer does not stop at any of these little sea-hermitages; so that we could only watch their shores: and they were worth watching.  They had been, plainly, sea-gnawn for countless ages; and may, at some remote time, have been all joined in one long ragged chine of hills, the highest about 1000 feet.  They seem to be for the most part made up of marls and limestones, with trap-dykes and other igneous matters here and there.  And one could not help entertaining the fancy that they were a specimen of what the other islands were once, or at least would have been now, had not each of them had its volcanic vents, to pile up hard lavas thousands of feet aloft, above the marine strata, and so consolidate each ragged chine of submerged mountain into one solid conical island, like St. Vincent at their northern end, and at their southern end that beautiful Grenada to which we were fast approaching, and which we reached, on our outward voyage, at nightfall; running in toward a narrow gap of moonlit cliffs, beyond which we could discern the lights of a town.  We did not enter the harbour: but lay close off its gateway in safe deep water; fired our gun, and waited for the swarm of negro boats, which began to splash out to us through the darkness, the jabbering of their crews heard long before the flash of their oars was seen.

Most weird and fantastic are these nightly visits to West Indian harbours.  Above, the black mountain-depths, with their canopy of cloud, bright white against the purple night, hung with keen stars.  The moon, it may be on her back in the west, sinking like a golden goblet behind some rock-fort, half shrouded in black trees.  Below, a line of bright mist over a swamp, with the coco-palms standing up through it, dark, and yet glistering in the moon.  A light here and there in a house: another here and there in a vessel, unseen in the dark.  The echo of the gun from hill to hill.  Wild voices from shore and sea.  The snorting of the steamer, the rattling of the chain through the hawse-hole; and on deck, and under the quarter, strange gleams of red light amid pitchy darkness, from engines, galley fires, lanthorns; and black folk and white folk flitting restlessly across them.

The strangest show: ‘like a thing in a play,’ says every one when they see it for the first time.  And when at the gun-fire one tumbles out of one’s berth, and up on deck, to see the new island, one has need to rub one’s eyes, and pinch oneself—as I was minded to do again and again during the next few weeks—to make sure that it is not all a dream.  It is always worth the trouble, meanwhile, to tumble up on deck, not merely for the show, but for the episodes of West Indian life and manners, which, quaint enough by day, are sure to be even more quaint at night, in the confusion and bustle of the darkness.  One such I witnessed in that same harbour of Grenada, not easily to be forgotten.

A tall and very handsome middle-aged brown woman, in a limp print gown and a gorgeous turban, stood at the gangway in a glare of light, which made her look like some splendid witch by a Walpurgis night-fire.  ‘Tell your boatman to go round to the other side,’ quoth the officer in charge.

‘Fanqua!  (François)  You go round oder side of de ship!’

Fanqua, who seemed to be her son, being sleepy, tipsy, stupid, or lazy, did not stir.

‘Fanqua!  You hear what de officer say?  You go round.’

No move.

‘Fanqua!  You not ashamed of youself?  You not hear de officer say he turn a steam-pipe over you?’

No move.

‘Fanqua!’ (authoritative).