With the World's Great Travellers II by CHARLES MORRIS

Author:CHARLES MORRIS [LEIGH, CHARLES MORRIS AND OLIVER H. G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

Many of the people whom we met, however, were leaving the place, though not so much for any reason of this kind as on account of a prophecy of the worthy bishop, “that before the new moon the whole district of San Salvador, with the ruins of the city, would be swallowed up.” But, unluckily for the bishop’s character as a prophet, the prediction was not fulfilled.

SCENES IN TRINIDAD AND JAMAICA.

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.

[Froude is scarcely known as a traveller, his reputation being founded in another field of literature, that of history. Yet he is the author of two works of travel,—“Oceana,” from which we have elsewhere given a selection, and “The English in the West Indies,” from which our present selection is derived. He visited most of the British West Indies, and has given picturesque descriptions of them all. We append some extracts from his account of Trinidad.]

Trinidad is the largest, after Jamaica, of the British West Indian Islands, and the hottest absolutely after none of them. It is square-shaped, and, I suppose, was once a part of South America. The Orinoco River and the ocean-currents between them have cut a channel between it and the mainland, which has expanded into a vast shallow lake known as the Gulf of Paria. The two entrances by which the gulf is approached are narrow, and are called bocas, or mouths,—one the Dragon’s Mouth, the other the Serpent’s. When the Orinoco is in flood the water is brackish, and the brilliant violet hue of the Caribbean Sea is changed to a dirty yellow; but the harbor which is so formed would hold all the commercial navies of the world, and seems formed by nature to be the depot one day of an enormous trade.

[Landing was made at Port of Spain, the capital, so called when Trinidad was a Spanish possession, and Mr. Froude found pleasant quarters in the house of a friend.]

The town has between thirty and forty thousand people living in it, and the rain and the Johnny crows [a black vulture that acts as scavenger] between them keep off pestilence. Outside is a large savanna or park, where the villas are of the successful men of business. One of these belonged to my host, a cool, airy habitation, with open doors and windows, overhanging portico, and rooms into which all the winds might enter, but not the sun. A garden in front was shut off from the savanna by a fence of bananas. At the gate stood as sentinel a cabbage-palm a hundred feet high; on the lawn mangoes, oranges, papaws, and bread-fruit-trees, strange to look at, but luxuriantly shady. Before the door was a tree of good dimensions, whose name I have forgotten, the stem and branches of which were hung with orchids which G—— had collected in the woods.

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