Si. Vincent ^ Cape de Verde. 15 



On the afternoon of the 22nd the high land of San Antonio, 

 the most northerly of the Cape dc Verde Islands, hove in sight, 

 far away on our starboard bow ; but the evening closing in thick 

 and dark, and this group being almost without lighthouses, the 

 captain decided on laying-to until next morning. When about 

 twenty miles off, we received a visit from a good-sized hawk, 

 evidently out on a foraging tour; he hovered for awhile about 

 our mastheads, reconnoitring our decks, and then soared away. 



As we sailed along the east coast of San Antonio (the largest 

 island of the Cape de Verde group), we observed a small outlying 

 island rock, composed of closely packed vertical columnar masses 

 of rock (probably basaltic), which, from their artificial appearance, 

 reminded one forcibly of the Giant's Causeway, or of the Staffa 

 Columns. The hills of the main island, which sloped up majes- 

 tically from a low rocky beach to peaks five or six thousand feet 

 high, were clothed with herbage, whose varying tints of green, to 

 which the shadows of the secondary peaks added dusky patches 

 of brown, created a most pleasing landscape. 



We reached the harbour of Porto Santo, St. Vincent, on the 

 afternoon of the 23rd of October, and soon after the anchor was 

 dropped, those of us who could leave the ship proceeded to land. 

 As we approached the beach, we were greatly struck by a con- 

 trivance, new to most of us, for carrying coals from the yard 

 where it is stowed to the shipping wharves, a distance of nearly 

 a quarter of a mile, — a row of posts, like those used for telegraph 

 wires, placed about four yards apart, and supporting on iron 

 rollers a long endless wire, to which are hung at intervals large 

 metal buckets containing the coal. There is an incline from the 

 depot to the wharf, and consequently, as the full buckets travel 

 down to the lower end of the circuit, and are canted so as to 

 discharge their contents, the empty buckets pass up the incline 

 back to the coalyard, and so a circuit is completed. Most of 

 the large passenger steamers traversing the South Atlantic find 

 St. Vincent a convenient place to stop at to replenish their 



