302 HOMEJVAIW BOUND. 



The loftier were now mere mounds of almost barren earth ; 

 the lower were often, like " Fallen Jerusalem," mere long 

 earthless moles, as of minute Cyclopean masonry. But what 

 had destroyed their vegetation, if it ever existed ? Were 

 thev not, too, the mere remnants of a submerfjed and 

 destroyed land, connected now only by the coral shoals ? 

 So it seemed to us, as we ran out 'past the magnificent harbour 

 at the back of Virgin Gorda, where, in the old war times, the 

 merchantmen of all the West Indies used to collect, to be 

 conveyed homeward by the naval squadron, and across a 

 shallow sea white Avith coral beds. We passed to leeward of 

 the island, or rather reef, of Anegada, so low that it could 

 only be discerned, at a few miles' distance, by the breaking 

 surf and a few bushes ; and then plunged, as it were, suddenly 

 out of shallow white water into deep azure ocean. An 

 upheaval of only forty fathoms would, I believe, join all these 

 islands to each other, and to the great mountain island of 

 Porto Eico to the west. The same upheaval would connect 

 Avith each other Anguilla, St. ^Martin, and St. Bartholomew, 

 to the east. But Santa Cruz, though so near St. Thomas's, and 

 the Virgin Gordas to the south, would still be parted from 

 them by a gulf nearly 2,000 fathoms deep a gulf which 

 marks still, probably, the separation of two ancient con- 

 tinents, or at least two archipelagos. 



Much light has been thrown on this curious problem 



