Six Months in the West Indies Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BARBADOS. Landing History Bridge Town Hole Town Speight's?Oistin's?Codrington College. How a man's heart swells within him, when, after sea and sky and sky and sea for nearly a month, he first sees the kindly land beckon to him over the salt waves! And that land tropical ! Carlisle Bay sleeping like an infant, and countenanced like the sky on a June morning, the warrior pendants, the merchant signals, the graceful gleaming boats, the dark sailors, the circling town, the silver strand, and the long shrouding avenues of immortal palms greenly fringing the blue ocean ! It is a beautiful scene in itself, but thrice beautiful is it to the weary mariner who deeply feels that land was made for him. I was present when the first Protestant bishop arrived in the bay,and the landing was a spectacle which I shall not easily forget. The ships of war were dressed and their yards manned, and salutes fired; this was pretty and common; but such a sight as the Carenage presented very few have ever witnessed. Onthe quay, on the mole, on boats, on posts, on house-tops, through doors and windows, wherever a human foot could stand, was one appalling mass of black faces. As the barge passed slowly along, the emotions of the multitude were absolutely tremendous; they threw up their arms and waved their handkerchiefs, they danced, and jumped, and rolled on the ground, they sang, and screamed, and shouted, and roared, till the whole surface of the place seemed to be one huge grin of delight. Then they broke out into a thousand wild exclamations of joy and passionate congratulations, uttered with such vehemence that, new as it was then to me, it made me tremble, and gave me a deep sense of the nervous irritability and violent feelings of a people with whom I was becoming for the first time acqua...Read More