CHAP. IV.] ST. THOMAS TO BERMUDAS. 317 
roads, and dotted with white-roofed houses, churches, and school- 
houses. 
The principal crops raised are potatoes, tomatoes, and onions, 
for the New York market. These are of the very best quality, 
but they are raised in comparatively small quantity, owing part- 
ly to the scarcity of labor, and partly to the patchy distribution 
of fertile soil and the want of a sufficient supply of manure. 
Arrowroot—the starch of Maranta arundinacea—was at one 
time a principal article of export; but the quantity produced 
has been steadily decreasing of late years. What is made is 
certainly excellent, and fetches a much higher price than the 
West Indian arrowroot, which is driving it out of the market. 
The starch is contained in a long jointed tuber, or rather rhi- 
zome or under-ground stem, which springs from the crown of 
the root of the Maranta. This, when it is ripe, is a foot or 
so in length, slightly flattened, and about an inch in diameter. 
When fresh, it is covered with a brownish skin; but this sep- 
arates in drying from the tuber; which is white and semi-trans- 
parent, and little else than a mass of starch. Fragments of 
the rhizome, or small shoots which are sent off along with the 
rhizomes, are planted about the month of May, and they send 
up a stem three feet high, with handsome iris-like leaves. 
In about ten months each plant yields ten or twelve, some- 
times as many as eighteen or twenty, tubers. These are par- 
tially dried and the skin removed, and then, after being care- 
fully washed, they are ground in a mill worked by horses or 
oxen, into a coarse pulp. The pulp is passed, with an abun- 
dance of cold water, through sieves gradually diminishing in 
mesh, until the starch passes through free from fibre or other 
impurity. The greater part of the water is then poured off, as 
much of the remainder as possible forced out by a hand-press, 
and the cake of starch broken up and dried in shallow wooden 
trays exposed to a current of air, when it falls into the well- 
known snowy, glistening powder. The best arrowroot costs at 
I.—21 
