Travel
The West Indies THE call of the West Indies upon the traveller is something more than the call of sun and warmth in a season of cold anti
gloom. ..To the attractions of climate are added beauties of
scenery which can hardly be surpassed, a variety of races, of colours, of forms of government which constantly keep interest awake and provoke enquiry, and a wealth of historical and romantic associations, through which names like Colum- bus, Drake and Hawkins, Rodney, Nelson and Cochrane echo like a musical refrain. The West Indies are not a compact group of similar islands. They stretch in a long curve from Florida to Venezuela, just reaching north of the tropic line in the Bahamas and down to within ten degrees of the gquator in Trinidad. The outer line of the "lesser Antilles" repre- sents the summits of a volcanic range, two peaks in which, Mont Pele'e in Martinique and the Soufriere in St. Vincent, have been in active operation with disastrous results to life and property within the past thirty years. Farther to the east; and first to be reached by vessels following the path of the "North-east trades" which were the determining factor of sea-routes in sailing-ship days, comes Barbados, with little about it on first approach to suggest the tropics, and much that is reminiscent of the Isle of Wight. Barbados is listen. sively and aggressively British, and boasts a purely elective House of Assembly and a mace which claims to have come from Westminster. It is densely populated, and life there is a struggle for existence as profoundly unlike the life of tranquil ease and placid acceptance of nature's gifts which is generally associated—perhaps oftener in fancy than reality—with "tropic isles." It is still the sugar island par excellence, but sugar is no longer a source of easy wealth or an industry which finds in the windmill a sufficient motive-power. The Windward and Leeward Islands—names once more reminiscent of sailing days—offer greater attractions of real tropical scenery, water of an intense deep blue, landlocked inlets, densely-wooded hills. In St. Lucia, Dominica and Nevis tropical beauty reaches a climax unsurpassed elsewhere. Variety of scenery is matched by the variety of political allegiance. Great wars are no longer waged for the ownership of West Indian islands, but Martinique, Guadeloupe and Marie Galante are still French, St. Eustatius and Saba still Dutch, and the United States have taken St. Thomas and St. Croix from Denmark—for money and not by the sword. Trinidad, the southernmost West Indian island, is a piece detached from South America and looks across a narrow bit of sea to the mountains of Venezuela. Here there is something else to see besides sugar and cocoa, for Trinidad boasts the famous pitch-lake whose possibilities appealed to Sir Walter Raleigh and Admiral Cochrane and whose resources are yet unexhausted, and it remains the one great oil-field of our Colonial Empire. On the American continent itself lies British Guiana, generally accounted as belonging to the West Indies, - with its low-lying coastland where sugar and rice are the prevailing interest and its great interior of river, waterfall and forest, undeveloped and hardly explored. Jamaica, biggest of all the British West Indian islands, with mountains and bracing uplands as a change from the heat of Kingston lies more than a thousand miles from Trinidad, surpassing it in size and rivalling it in beauty. Common to all the British West Indies is an intense devotion to the Imperial connexion, and a hospitality Which loses no opportunity of welcoming the visitor from Great Britain.
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