A COLONY, FOKTKE8S, AND PEISON. 187 



Indies, and bringing about the honourable peace of 1783. Yon lovely roadstead of Dominica: 

 there Rodney caught up with the French just before, and would have beaten them so much 

 the earlier but for his vessels being becalmed. In that deep bay at Martinique, now lined 

 with gay houses, was for many years the Cul-de-sac Royal, the rendezvous and stronghold 

 of the French fleet. That isolated rock hard by, much the shape and double the size of 

 the great Pyramids, is Sir Samuel Hood's famous Diamond Rock,* to which that brave 

 old navigator literally tied with a hawser or two his ship, the Centaur, and turned the 

 rock into a fortress from whence to sweep the seas. The rock was for several months 

 rated on the books of the Admiralty as " His Majesty's Ship, Diamond Rock." She had 

 at last to surrender, for want of powder, to an overwhelming force two seventy-fours 

 and fourteen smaller ships of war but did not give in till seventy poor Frenchmen were 

 lying killed or wounded, and three of their gun-boats destroyed, her own loss being- only two 

 men killed and one wounded. Brave old sloop of war ! And, once more, those glens 

 and forests of St. Lucia remind us of Sir John Moore and Sir Ralph Abercrombie, who 

 fought, not merely the French, but the " Brigands " negroes liberated by the Revolution 

 of 1792. 



But the good ship must proceed; and as British naval interests are under consideration, 

 let her bows be turned to Bermuda a colony, a fortress and a prison, and where England 

 owns an extensive floating dock, dock-yards, and workshops, f Trollope says that its 

 geological formation is mysterious. "It seems to be made of soft white stone, composed 

 mostly of little shells so soft, indeed, that you might cut Bermuda up with a hand-saw. 

 And people are cutting up Bermuda with hand-saws. One little island, that on which 

 the convicts are established, has been altogether so cut up already. When I visited it, 

 two fat convicts were working away slowly at the last fragment/' Bermuda is the crater 

 of an extinct volcano, and is surrounded by little islets, of which there is one for every 

 day of the year in a space of twenty by three miles. These are surrounded again by 

 reefs and rocks, and navigation is risky. 



Were the Bermudas the scene of Ariel's tricks ? They were first discovered, in 1522, 

 by Bermudez, a Spaniard; and Shakespeare seems to have heard of them, for he 

 speaks of the 



" Still vexed Bermoothes." 



Trollope says that there is more of the breed of Caliban in the islands than of Ariel. 

 Though Caliban did not relish working for his master more than the Bermudian of 

 to-day, there was an amount of energy about him entirely wanting in the existing 

 islanders. 



There are two towns, St. George and Hamilton, on different islands. The former is 

 the head-quarters of the military, and the second that of the governor. It is the 

 summer head-quarters of the admiral of the station. The islands are, in general, 

 wonderfully fertile, and will, with any ordinary cultivation, give two crops of many 



*" Naval Chronicles," vol. xii. 



t Other islands of the West Indies, as St. Thomas's, which is a kind of leading "junction" for mail 

 steamers, and St. Domingo so intimately connected with the voyages of Columbus will be mentioned hereafter. 



