My Dear Sir Arthur Gordon, To whom should I dedicate this book, but to you, to whom I owe my visit to the West Indies?  I regret that I could not consult you about certain matters in Chapters XIV and XV; but you are away again over sea; and I can only send the book after you, such as it is, with the expression of my hearty belief that you will be to the people of Mauritius what you have been to the people of Trinidad. I could say much more.  But it is wisest often to be most silent on the very p

At last we, too, were crossing the Atlantic.  At last the dream of forty years, please God, would be fulfilled, and I should see (and happily, not alone) the West Indies and the Spanish Main.  From childhood I had studied their Natural History, their charts, their Romances, and alas! their Tragedies; and now, at last, I was about to compare books with facts, and judge for myself of the reported wonders of the Earthly Paradise.  We could scarce believe the evidence of our own senses when they tol

I had heard and read much, from boyhood, about these ‘Lesser Antilles.’  I had pictured them to myself a thousand times: but I was altogether unprepared for their beauty and grandeur.  For hundreds of miles, day after day, the steamer carried us past a shifting diorama of scenery, which may be likened to Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples, repeated again and again, with every possible variation of the same type of delicate loveliness. Under a cloudless sky, upon a sea, lively yet not unpleasantly ro

It may be worth while to spend a few pages in telling something of the history of this lovely island since the 31st of July 1499, when Columbus, on his third voyage, sighted the three hills in the south-eastern part.  He had determined, it is said, to name the first land which he should see after the Blessed Trinity; the triple peaks seemed to him a heaven-sent confirmation of his intent, and he named the island Trinidad; but the Indians called it Iere. He ran from Punta Galera, at the north-eas

The first thing notable, on landing in Port of Spain at the low quay which has been just reclaimed from the mud of the gulf, is the multitude of people who are doing nothing.  It is not that they have taken an hour’s holiday to see the packet come in.  You will find them, or their brown duplicates, in the same places to-morrow and next day.  They stand idle in the marketplace, not because they have not been hired, but because they do not want to be hired; being able to live like the Lazzaroni of

30 th December 1869. My Dear-----, We are actually settled in a West Indian country-house, amid a multitude of sights and sounds so utterly new and strange, that the mind is stupefied by the continual effort to take in, or (to confess the truth) to gorge without hope of digestion, food of every conceivable variety.  The whole day long new objects and their new names have jostled each other in the brain, in dreams as well as in waking thoughts.  Amid such a confusion, to describe this place as a

Early in January, I started with my host and his little suite on an expedition to the islands of the Bocas.  Our object was twofold: to see tropical coast scenery, and to get, if possible, some Guacharo birds (pronounced Huáchӑro), of whom more hereafter.  Our chance of getting them depended on the sea being calm outside the Bocas, as well as inside.  The calm inside was no proof of the calm out.  Port of Spain is under the lee of the mountains; and the surf might be thundering along the norther

I have seen them at last.  I have been at last in the High Woods, as the primeval forest is called here; and they are not less, but more, wonderful than I had imagined them.  But they must wait awhile; for in reaching them, though they were only ten miles off, I passed through scenes so various, and so characteristic of the Tropics, that I cannot do better than sketch them one by one. I drove out in the darkness of the dawn, under the bamboos, and Bauhinias, and palms which shade the road betwee

We were, of course, desirous to visit that famous Lake of Pitch, which our old nursery literature described as one of the ‘Wonders of the World.’  It is not that; it is merely a very odd, quaint, unexpected, and only half-explained phenomenon: but no wonder.  That epithet should be kept for such matters as the growth of a crystal, the formation of a cell, the germination of a seed, the coming true of a plant, whether from a fruit or from a cutting: in a word, for any and all those hourly and mom

The road to the ancient capital of the island is pleasant enough, and characteristic of the West Indies.  Not, indeed, as to its breadth, make, and material, for they, contrary to the wont of West India roads, are as good as they would be in England, but on account of the quaint travellers along it, and the quaint sights which are to be seen over every hedge.  You pass all the races of the island going to and from town or field-work, or washing clothes in some clear brook, beside which a solemn

I had a few days of pleasant wandering in the centre of the island, about the districts which bear the names of Naparima and Montserrat; a country of such extraordinary fertility, as well as beauty, that it must surely hereafter become the seat of a high civilisation.  The soil seems inexhaustibly rich.  I say inexhaustibly; for as fast as the upper layer is impoverished, it will be swept over by the tropic rains, to mingle with the vegas, or alluvial flats below, and thus enriched again, while

I had heard and read much of the beauty of mountain scenery in the Tropics.  What I had heard and read is not exaggerated.  I saw, it is true, in this little island no Andes, with such a scenery among them and below them as Humboldt alone can describe—a type of the great and varied tropical world as utterly different from that of Trinidad as it is from that of Kent—or Siberia.  I had not even the chance of such a view as that from the Silla of Caraccas described by Humboldt, from which you look

The last of my pleasant rides, and one which would have been perhaps the pleasantest of all, had I had (as on other occasions) the company of my host, was to the Cocal, or Coco-palm grove, of the east coast, taking on my way the Savanna of Aripo.  It had been our wish to go up the Orinoco, as far as Ciudad Bolivar (the Angostura of Humboldt’s travels), to see the new capital of Southern Venezuela, fast rising into wealth and importance under the wise and pacific policy of its president, Señor Da

Next day, like the ‘Young Muleteers of Grenada,’ a good song which often haunted me in those days, ‘With morning’s earliest twinkle Again we are up and gone,’ with two horses, two mules, and a Negro and a Coolie carrying our scanty luggage in Arima baskets: but not without an expression of pity from the Negro who cleaned my boots.  ‘Where were we going?’  To the east coast.  Cuffy turned up what little nose he had.  He plainly considered the east coast, and indeed Trinidad itself, as not worth l

When I arrived in Trinidad, the little island was somewhat excited about changes in the system of education, which ended in a compromise like that at home, though starting from almost the opposite point. Among the many good deeds which Lord Harris did for the colony was the establishment throughout it of secular elementary ward schools, helped by Government grants, on a system which had, I think, but two defects.  First, that attendance was not compulsory; and next, that it was too advanced for

Dear ---, I have been to the races: not to bet, nor to see the horses run: not even to see the fair ladies on the Grand Stand, in all the newest fashions of Paris viâ New York: but to wander en mufti among the crowd outside, and behold the humours of men.  And I must say that their humours were very good humours; far better, it seemed to me, than those of an English race-ground.  Not that I have set foot on one for thirty years; but at railway stations, and elsewhere, one cannot help seeing what

The ‘provision grounds’ of the Negroes were very interesting.  I had longed to behold, alive and growing, fruits and plants which I had heard so often named, and seen so often figured, that I had expected to recognise many of them at first sight; and found, in nine cases out of ten, that I could not.  Again, I had longed to gather some hints as to the possibility of carrying out in the West Indian islands that system of ‘Petite Culture’—of small spade farming—which I have long regarded, with Mr.

At last we were homeward bound.  We had been seven weeks in the island.  We had promised to be back in England, if possible, within the three months; and we had a certain pride in keeping our promise, not only for its own sake, but for the sake of the dear West Indies.  We wished to show those at home how easy it was to get there; how easy to get home again.  Moreover, though going to sea in the Shannon was not quite the same ‘as going to sea in a sieve,’ our stay-at-home friends were of the sam