Even Barbadoes in its palmiest days was not richer than Dominica is certain some day to be. Acres of the most fertile country in the world lie fallow within the confines of this island, whose name is written large in Britain’s naval history. Virgin forests of wild fruit trees still cover vast tracts of a country which one day will be claimed by English husbandmen. Like Jamaica, Dominica cries out for men—new men, new energy, new enterprise. In England we associate our West Indian islands with only a dead prosperity. In the West Indies one encounters ample evidence of present wealth and great promise of future riches.
Antigua is a British sugar island—a hundred square miles of gently undulating country, which in appearance is more English than West Indian. From a tourist standpoint it is famous for the beauty of its white-sanded bays, and for the old naval dockyards at Elizabeth Harbour.
St. Kitts, or St. Christopher, to give the oldest West Indian Colony its full and dignified title, is an island of an area of only sixty-eight square miles. Almost every acre of the land is well planted with flourishing sugar cane. Adjoining St. Kitts is its sister colony, Nevis. Only a strait three miles in width separates the two islands. Nevis is chiefly interesting by reason of the fact that in a once-stately mansion known as Montpelier, Nelson was married to a rich widow of the island.
Trinidad, the most southernly and the second largest island of the British group is, in a way, the most remarkable of all. Port of Spain, the capital, ranks with Kingstown, Jamaica, as an extraordinary example of the actual wealth of the Indies. Only a few cities on the mainland, capitals of gigantic South American States, exceed Port of Spain in size and importance and wealth. Yet this chief town of Trinidad is the capital of an island only fifty-five miles in length—the capital of a sea-girt country which might easily be pocketed by many of the Southern republics. In many ways Port of Spain is vastly superior to all the towns of its neighbouring continent. Life there is safer; in Port of Spain there are no cut-throats—no quick-fingered rascals of the revolver-shooting fraternity. The climate of Trinidad is more salubrious than that of any of the inland countries; and in its towns more attention is paid to the comfort, health, and convenience of residents and visitors. Yet, for our purpose, Trinidad may be counted as a South America in miniature.
One notices, in the tangled undergrowth in the forests, in the ever-brilliant foliage of the wooded heights and green valleys, a something that one had not noticed in the other islands. The place is indescribably foreign. It is not like the countries we have already seen, yet it is not unlike them. Trinidad is a West Indian island, but in appearance it more closely resembles the South American mainland than any of its sister-lands in the Caribbean group. Naturally so, since the salt-water isthmus that separates the land from Venezuela at one point only measures seven miles. Save for that seven miles of blue sea, Trinidad would be a part of the romantic continent whose imprint and
