News ws ao West Indian Health Resort. 289 
into the sea, leaving asmall sandy bay on each hand ; upon the rocky extremity 
whereof I stood, whilst a tall negro man stepped down off it into the water, 
which was rather above his chin deep there. He then stooped down, and took 
up some sand that was very warm when he gave it into my hand, affirming the 
spring at the bottom of the sea under him to be so wondrous hot, that he could 
scarce venture to set his foot upon it. And give me leave to acquaint you, that the 
negro’s feet are grown so callous by constantly travelling over hard rocks, 
that they can have little feeling in them. In short, that stream must be hot 
indeed. 
“37. A new hot spring was, in 1718, discovered in windward parish, upon 
clearing of a wood in order to plant the ground with sugar canes, just above 
camp ground ; but I was never at the trouble of paying it a visit hearing that it 
was nothing extraordinary. It was, no doubt, always before known to the 
negroes who frequented those woods. Black-Rock Pond is about a quarter of a 
mile distant northwards from Charlestown : the water whereof is milk warm, 
occasioned, no doubt, by a mixture of these hot with cold springs, and yet it 
yields excellent fishes in their kind, viz., silver-fishes, slimguts, and the best 
eeles in the world perhaps. Silver-fish has a bright deep body of about eight 
inches long, which tastes like an English Whiting. Slimgut has a large head, 
in too great size to its body, which may be from two-and-twenty inches long : 
it eats like our gudgeon, and is not unlike them in colour. Their eeles have no 
rank taste at all, which makes them so much admired. For a further account 
of this pond, see paragraphs 9, 10, 11 and 12 of my first letter. ” 
Coleridge and Dr. Davy inform us that the waters still ran on in the nine- 
teenth century, though the Bath House was gradually losing its power of 
attracting visitors to the island. 
Henry Nelson Coleridge, who accompanied his kinsman, the first Bishop 
of Barbados, to the West Indies, in 1825, visited Nevis in that year. In his 
delightful little volume, Sta Months in the West Indies in 1825, Coleridge makes 
mention of the mineral springs in the following terms : 
“ To the south of the town, at halfa mile’s distance, are situated the mineral 
baths on a rising ground near the margin of the sea. The establishment is 
very large, and can afford, as I was told, accommodation for forty or fifty 
boarders. An invalid with a good servant might take up his quarters here 
with more comfort than in any other house of public reception in the West In- 
dies. At present the thing does not answer, the building being in fact too large 
and the depreciation of colonial produce rendering it difficult to afford a 
mineral spring illness. There are three spacious plunge baths on terraces 
one above the other, and varying in their temperature from 50° to 100° Fah- 
renheit. The lowest and largest is now given up to the boarders and others 
as a turtle crawl. There the poor, flat, gawky creatures flounce about till they 
become sulphuretted to a certain culinary degree, which is known by the eatable 
beginning to lose his equilibrium, and, instead of lying level on the water, to 
sink half his body edgeways under, and leave the other half an upright semi- 
