In some years no less than three hurricanes have occurred in the West Indies.  Father Du Tertre, a French missionary in St. Christophe, describes one which he witnessed in 1642,—­a year memorable for three.  During the second of these, more than twenty vessels, laden with colonial produce and just ready to sail for Europe, were wrecked in the harbor, including the ship of De Ruyter, the Dutch Admiral.  The island was swept of houses, trees, cattle, and birds; the manioc and tobacco plants were destroyed, and only one cotton shrub survived.  The shores were covered with dead fishes blown out of the water, and the bodies of ship-wrecked men.  The salt-works were flooded and spoiled, and all the provisions on the island were so damaged that the inhabitants were put on rations of biscuit till the arrival of vessels from France.

Another storm like this desolated Martinique in 1657; and the annals of most of the islands abound in similar narratives.  They are less severe in Hayti, and seldom sweep violently over Cuba.  The word hurricane is a European adaptation of a Carib word, borrowed by the Haytian Indians from the natives of the Antilles.

The inhabitants of Hayti do not agree in the statements which they make concerning their climate.  The commencement of the two seasons, the range of the thermometer, the duration of the different winds, the liability to earthquakes, are subjects upon which the North is at variance with the East, and the West with both.  The most trustworthy notices of these phenomena are held to represent that portion of the island which was formerly occupied by the French.  Still the variations cannot be important over so small an area:  the petty and fitful changes of every day are more noticeable, but the climate has its average within which these local caprices occur.

In another climate the mountains would present a gradation of vegetable growth, from the tropical through the temperate to the northern zone.  And this can be traced in some quarters, where the palm and mahogany are succeeded by resinous trees, of which there are several varieties, till the bare summits show only lichens and stunted shrubs.  But the seasons do not harmonize with this graduated rise of the mountain-chains, and the temperate forms are interrupted, or confined to a few localities.  Yet the people who live upon the mornes, those for instance which are drained by Trois-Rivieres in the northwestern part of the island, are healthier and plumper, and the Creoles have a fresher look, than the inhabitants of the plains.  In the still more elevated regions the cold is frequently so great that people do not like to live there.  Newly imported negroes frequently perished, if they were carried up into the southern range of mountains; and the dependent Creole was forced to abandon places where the slave could not go.