66 S T. J A G O. 
the commanding officer of the troops, a raw-boned Scotch. 
Serjeant, six feet high, who had served in the American army, 
and his wife, a slender diminutive Irish woman. All these 
wore an aspect so sickly and so wan, so full of misery and 
woe, that, with all the rank and importance Vv^hich they 
held on the island, we could not help considering them as the 
most deplorable objects of compassion ; as creatures that, as 
the poet observes, 
" Meagre and lank with fasting grown, 
" And nothing left but skin and bone, 
" They just keep life and soul together." 
The clergy were people of colour, and some of them per- \ 
fectly black. The officers of justice, of the customs, and 
other departments in the civil and military services, the troops, 
the peasantry, and the traders, were all blacks, or at least so 
very dark that they would scarcely be supposed to have any 
mixture of European blood in their veins. Yet most of them, 
aspire to the honour of Portugueze extraction, and are proud 
of tracing their origin to a race of heroes who, disdaining the 
restraint of laws at home, contrived to get themselves trans- 
ported abroad, where their free and ungovernable spirits 
could exert themselves without controul. The Cape de Verd 
islands were to Portugal what Botany Bay is to England, an 
asylum for convicted criminals. 
Whether this cluster of eighteen or twenty islands, of which 
St. Jago is the principal, be the Gorgades, the Gorgones, or 
the Hesperides, of the ancients, or none of them (which k 
