ST. LUCIA, ST. VINCENT, THE GKENADINES, AND GRENADA 363 



in the trend of the larger Caribbees, but offering an end- 

 less variety in shape and configuration. Kingsley has 

 summarized their essential features as follows : 



On leaving St. Vincent, the track lies past the Grenadines. For 

 sixty miles, long low islands of quaint forms and euphonious 

 names Becquia, Mustique, Canonau, Carriacou, lie de Rhone- 

 rise a few hundred feet out of the unfathomable sea, bare of wood, 

 edged with cliffs and streaks of red and gray rock, resembling, 

 says Dr. Davy, the Cyclades of the Grecian Archipelago ; their 

 number is counted at three hundred. The largest of them all is 

 not eight thousand acres in extent, the smallest about six hundred. 

 A quiet, prosperous race of little yeomen, besides a few planters, 

 dwell there ; the latter feeding and exporting much stock, the 

 former much provisions, and both troubling themselves less than of 

 yore with sugar and cotton. They build coasting- vessels, and trade 

 with them to the larger islands ; and they might be, it is said, if 

 they chose, much richer than they are if that be any good to them. 



The steamer does not stop at any of these little sea-hermitages, 

 so that we could only watch their shores ; and they were worth 

 watching. They had been, plainly, sea-gnawn for countless ages, 

 and may, at some remote time, have been all joined in one long 

 ragged chine of hills, the highest about one thousand feet. They 

 seem to be, for the most part, made up of marls and limestones, 

 with trap-dikes and other igneous matters here and there. And 

 one could not help entertaining the fancy that they were a speci- 

 men of what the other islands were once, or at least would have 

 been now, had not each of them had its volcanic vents to pile up 

 hard lavas thousands of feet aloft, above the marine strata, and so 

 consolidate each ragged chine of submerged mountain into one 

 solid conical island, like St. Vincent at their northern end, and at 

 their southern end that beautiful Grenada to which we were fast 

 approaching, and which we reached, on our outward voyage, at 

 nightfall, running in toward a narrow gap of moon-lit cliffs, be- 

 yond which we could discern the lights of a town. 



The beautiful island of Grenada is the most southern of 

 the Caribbean chain. It is eighteen miles long and seven 

 miles broad, and contains one hundred and thirty-three 

 square miles two more than St. Vincent. It is surmounted 



