which is left to leeward, is a long, low, ragged island, of the same form as St. Thomas’s and the Virgins, and belonging, I should suppose, to the same formation.  But Saba rises sheer out of the sea some 1500 feet or more, without flat ground, or even harbour.  From a little landing-place to leeward a stair runs up 800 feet into the bosom of the old volcano; and in that hollow live some 1200 honest Dutch, and some 800 Negroes, who were, till of late years, their slaves, at least in law.  But in Saba, it is said, the whites were really the slaves, and the Negroes the masters.  For they went off whither and when they liked; earned money about the islands, and brought it home; expected their masters to keep them when out of work:  and not in vain.  The island was, happily for it, too poor for sugar-growing and the ‘Grande Culture’; the Dutch were never tempted to increase the number of their slaves; looked upon the few they had as friends and children; and when emancipation came, no change whatsoever ensued, it is said, in the semi-feudal relation between the black men and the white.  So these good Dutch live peacefully aloft in their volcano, which it is to be hoped will not explode again.  They grow garden crops; among which, I understand, are several products of the temperate zone, the air being, at that height pleasantly cool.  They sell their produce about the islands.  They build boats up in the crater—­the best boats in all the West Indies—­and lower them down the cliff to the sea.  They hire themselves out too, not having lost their forefathers’ sea-going instincts, as sailors about all those seas, and are, like their boats, the best in those parts.  They all speak English; and though they are nominally Lutherans, are glad of the services of the excellent Bishop of Antigua, who pays them periodical visits.  He described them as virtuous, shrewd, simple, healthy folk, retaining, in spite of the tropic sun, the same clear white and red complexions which their ancestors brought from Holland two hundred years ago—­a proof, among many, that the white man need not degenerate in these isles.

Saba has, like most of these islands, its ‘Somma’ like that of Vesuvius; an outer ring of lava, the product of older eruptions, surrounding a central cone, the product of some newer one.  But even this latter, as far as I could judge by the glass, is very ancient.  Little more than the core of the central cone is left.  The rest has been long since destroyed by rains and winds.  A white cliff at the south end of the island should be examined by geologists.  It belongs probably to that formation of tertiary calcareous marl so often seen in the West Indies, especially at Barbadoes:  but if so, it must, to judge from the scar which it makes seaward, have been upheaved long ago, and like the whole island—­and indeed all the islands—­betokens an immense antiquity.