as not to meet even a little one, the terrible fer-delance sometimes reaches a length of seven feet. There is, I believe, no cure for its bite, and its presence here has certainly had a deterrent effect upon the coming of both white and black settlers to the island. There is another snake much more formidable in appearance, but, fortunately, not so in fact, that one meets everywhere. It is a constrictor about eleven feet in length when full-grown, and is called the "chicken-head." It is quite black, with yellow markings, and is, I think, a close cousin of our black snake at home. The capital and chief port of the island is Castries, on the northwest coast of the island, and at the head of the deep, spacious bay of the same name. The harbour is only a third of a mile across at its entrance, but it runs inland for a mile and a half, with an average width of three-quarters of a mile, and is entirely surrounded and protected by hills. This ideally situated port, whether for military or commercial purposes, is, or perhaps I should say was, the chief fortress and bulwark of British naval power in the West Indies. All the headlands north of the harbour entrance are fortified in the unobtrusive modern way, and gun-pits abound. However, they are more dangerous to the unwary pedestrians than to hostile shipping, as most of the guns have been removed.

Castries is always pointed out as an illustration and, indeed, as a revelation of the new British policy in the West Indies. At the time of the Venezuela squabble between England and the United States, in 1895, Castries was the scene of great military activity; some barracks were built, and others were planned, capable

of housing thirty thousand men at least; everything seemed to indicate that the port was destined to develop into a great military centre; then came the Salisbury-Olney correspondence, and its peaceful outcome. Those who maintain that to-day England has placed her American possessions under the protection of the Monroe Doctrine, point to the deserted and dismantled appearance of this fortress as proof of the correctness of their position.*

The Dutch possessions in the West Indies have dwindled to Curaçao, Bonaire, and Ouruba, all lying near the South American coast. We have already mentioned Saba and Statia, which are practically comprised in the Virgin group. The area of all the Dutch possessions does not exceed five hundred square miles, or the population fifty thousand. The island of Curaçao is at once the largest, two hundred and ten square miles in area, as well as strategically the most valuable. The seat of the Dutch administration is in Curaçao, where the Governor resides, and where he is kept in countenance by an occasional visit from a Dutch man-of-war. Each of the outlying dependencies is ruled by an administrator appointed by the Queen, and sent out from Holland. These islands were conquered and settled by the Dutch West India Company, that had so much to do with the early history of Manhattan Island. The English captured Curaçao in 1807, but in 1815, in the general liquidation after the Napoleonic wars, it was ceded back to Holland. Willemstad, the capital, is a smugglers' paradise, and a rendezvous of revolutionists and political stormy

*Statistics concerning the trade and the population of the Dutch islands are given in Appendix H, page 456.

petrels from all over the West Indian and South American world. Duties are next to nothing, the local government good and efficient, and the place should have become, as a distributing-point, the Hongkong of the West. It has not done so, however, and probably never will, the Venezuelans and the Colombians being what they are commercially. The Dutch, however, cling to the place with a very wise appreciation of what its value would be now to a world power, and of how greatly this value will be enhanced when the Panama Canal, only distant forty hours' easy steaming, is completed. During the blockade of the Venezuelan ports by Germany, England, and Italy in 1903, the Germans made themselves very much at home in Curaçao. They tested its advantages as naval station by actual experience, and there can be no doubt that they would like to secure permanent possession. This, and the ownership of Saint Thomas, are some of the minor questions that will be decided on that day of struggle to which the German naval officers drink every night with their toast: "Am tag' ("on or to the day").

The harbour of Curaçao, this Naboth's vineyard of the West Indian powers, is a landlocked lagoon that runs into three points. In it and upon an artificial island behind moat and portcullis the worthy Governor lives. His mise-en-scène smacks of the seventeenth century, but he himself is generally a very able and clever man, with modern, up-to-date ideas. The entrance to the harbour by the forts is so narrow that sentinels can hail one another across the water without raising their voices. The inlet is deep and straight, and widens out into a very capacious harbour, but I

imagine, without the expenditure of much money in improvements, access to this harbour would be dangerous, and perhaps impossible, to battleships of the first class.

There is no place quite like Curaçao in the world, and there is no wonder that the people of this peculiar ocean port should, in the course of many centuries, have hewn out a language of their own. Everybody who is educated, of course, can speak English, and the official speech is Dutch, but when the islanders are at home or in the market-place, wherever they are at ease, they speak papiamento, which has been described as a pepper-pot" of a language composed of Dutch, English, Indian, Spanish, and, above all, Hebrew words and roots. The commerce of the place is largely in the hands of Portuguese Hebrews, who came here several hundred years ago from Holland.

Margarita, the pearl island, is the most considerable of the Venezuelan islands. It lies off Cumana, the mainland port, and is near enough to Trinidad to be disagreeable at times. It was once the seat of lucrative pearl fisheries, but now the oyster beds are only fished on a small scale. Here, as everywhere else, the Venezuelans have killed, or, at all events, invalided the goose that laid the golden egg. Margarita has an area of four hundred and fifty square miles, the climate of the coast is pleasant, and that of the interior very healthy. There are two small mountain ranges, one of which in peaks, and even in long, open plateau, reaches a height of four thousand feet. I am making this statement on information which I believe to be reliable, my personal knowledge of the island being limited to what you can see from a passing

steamer. During the blockade of 1903, the Germans landed here, and not only the coast line, but even the interior, was most carefully and thoroughly surveyed by them. There can be no doubt of the healthfulness and the strategic value of this island. Margarita may play a great rôle in the next West Indian war. Today it is most difficult of access, and its population dwindling, those who remain are poverty-stricken; and those who do work are robbed of what little they may acquire by the Venezuelan tax collectors.

The winds and the waves of the West Indies have in almost all my wanderings received me in the kindest fashion. If you want to know what seafaring life was in these waters in the picturesque days, you must turn to the stirring pages of "Tom Cringle's Log." During the Spanish war I lay three days on board a brokendown torpedo boat in the Bahama Channel, during which the conviction was forced upon me that my fighting element was not the sea. Again, on a commercial vessel, one of those ancient death-traps which have at last vanished from these seas, I had an experience which contributed to the conviction I hold that no man has sailed into the heart or the centre of a West Indian hurricane and survived to tell the tale. Off the Bermudas we ran into a good gale, and for twenty-four hours, battened down and close-hauled, if you will, and with ports screwed tight, the ship down below a steaming cauldron, and on deck pandemonium, we ran before it. For a time the barometer was stationary, and gave us no indication of what was coming; then it sank lower and lower, swift-moving tongues of clouds enveloped the ship on every side, the gale became unsteady, now coming from one direction, now