NARRATIVE OF THE CRUISE 131 



lonesome, and time had flown. But how good a piece of beef- 

 steak w^ould taste! We beat up and down outside the city of 

 Bridgetown all night, awaiting dawn and the pilot. By eight 

 o'clock we were riding at anchor opposite the Yacht and Aquatic 

 Clubs in Carlisle Bay, with a swarm of native coin-divers around 

 us, and bum-boats nosing their way through the canoes to our 

 ladder. 



With the arrival of our mail hopeless indecision seized us. 

 Would we rather stretch our legs on the coral roads for a change, 

 or busy ourselves in the great heaps of letters that had been ac- 

 cumulating here for months.^ It took almost a day merely to 

 sort out this mass of letters, magazines, and newspapers. The 

 invitation could not be refused of fresh food and fruit waiting 

 for us ashore, and most of the men scrambled into the boats to 

 spend a few hours on land. We were at once ofi'ered guest-mem- 

 berships in the numerous Bridgetown social and athletic clubs, 

 whose privileges we enjoyed to the utmost during the following 

 two weeks. Among these were the Bridgetown Club, Yacht- 

 Club, Savannah Club, and Aquatic Club. They offered splendid 

 places to dine, dance, play tennis, or swim; and all the other 

 facilities for diversion ashore. We were given a hearty wel- 

 come wherever we turned. 



Barbados offered a sharp contrast to Iceland, our last island. 

 There we had found a population which was purely Nordic. In 

 fact, more than ninety-nine percent were of Icelandic stock. 

 But here we found one white man to eleven negroes! Barbados 

 was to be our only "black" island; for the Polynesians we met in 

 the Pacific are more similar to the white race than to the negro. 



It was always interesting to wander up and down the coral- 

 paved lanes with their pastel-tinted walls, listening to the soft 

 voices of these light-hearted natives. Gigantic negresses, 

 balancing their fantastic wares on their heads, mingle their musi- 

 cal street cries with the braying of the donkeys. One had diffi- 

 culty in deciding whether it is the donkeys or the women who are 

 the island's beasts-of -burden. Should one be thirsty, there is 

 always a walking "soda-fountain" nearby. For some of these 

 negresses carry great tanks on their heads, full of a native drink 



