Their connection with the Society of Friends, and indeed the very name of Sturge, is a guarantee that such a work will be carried on for the benefit, not merely of the capitalists, but of the coloured people who are employed.  Already, I am assured, a marked improvement has taken place among them; and I, for one, heartily bid God-speed to the enterprise:  to any enterprise, indeed, which tends to divert labour and capital from that exclusive sugar-growing which has been most injurious, I verily believe the bane, of the West Indies.  On that subject I may have to say more in a future chapter.  I ask the reader, meanwhile, to follow, as the ship’s head goes round to windward toward Antigua.

Antigua is lower, longer, and flatter than the other islands.  It carries no central peak:  but its wildness of ragged uplands forms, it is said, a natural fortress, which ought to be impregnable; and its loyal and industrious people boast that, were every other West Indian island lost, the English might make a stand in Antigua long enough to enable them to reconquer the whole.  I should have feared, from the look of the island, that no large force could hold out long in a country so destitute of water as those volcanic hills, rusty, ragged, treeless, almost sad and desolate—­if any land could be sad and desolate with such a blue sea leaping around and such a blue sky blazing above.  Those who wish to know the agricultural capabilities of Antigua, and to know, too, the good sense and courage, the justice and humanity, which have enabled the Antiguans to struggle on and upward through all their difficulties, in spite of drought, hurricane, and earthquake, till permanent prosperity seems now become certain, should read Dr. Davy’s excellent book, which I cannot too often recommend.  For us, we could only give a hasty look at its southern volcanic cliffs; while we regretted that we could not inspect the marine strata of the eastern parts of the island, with their calcareous marls and limestones, hardened clays and cherts, and famous silicified trees, which offer important problems to the geologist, as yet not worked out. {28}

We could well believe, as the steamer ran into English Harbour, that Antigua was still subject to earthquakes; and had been shaken, with great loss of property though not of life, in the Guadaloupe earthquake of 1843, when 5000 lives were lost in the town of Point-a-Pitre alone.  The only well-marked effect which Dr. Davy could hear of, apart from damage to artificial structures, was the partial sinking of a causeway leading to Rat Island, in the harbour of St. John.  No wonder:  if St. John’s harbour be—­as from its shape on the map it probably is—­simply an extinct crater, or group of craters, like English Harbour.  A more picturesque or more uncanny little hole than that latter we had never yet seen:  but there are many such harbours about these islands, which nature, for the time being at least, has handed