to last winter’s work. But I don’t mention this out of grumbling, only as a reason why I am not more out-of-doors: the fact is, I spend my time in-doors very agreeably indeed. The Bishop stands very high in my estimation as a man of imperturbable equanimity among great trials to his temper, and the footing on which all his clergy are with him is a model.… The Bishop’s library is capital—much better than I expected; and as the daily expectation of setting off on the Visitation has kept me from going to work on anything regular, I have been dipping about, to my great amusement.… They say that if the growth of sugar were discontinued the island would produce sustenance enough for a very much larger population, almost without any cultivation. The vegetation is really wonderful. The guinea corn grows near fifteen feet high: and in the sugar crop there seems to be a mass of solid vegetable matter thrown up, as much as there is in a copse of ten years’ growth. It is an impenetrable thicket of rank iris: the cane part is just like the knotty root of an iris straightened out, and rising six or seven feet out of the ground; its colour is the richest yellow-green that can be conceived.
‘Feb. 6.—At anchor off Nevis,—between it and St. Christopher’s, which the Protestants have vulgarised into St. Kitt’s. The Bishop is ashore confirming, and I have stayed to fetch up leeway. Since Monday, Jan. 26, when we started on our voyage, I have been in quite a new state of things…. I have a very uncomfortable hot, dark berth, which I could go into amusing details about, if it was worth the trouble; but “beggars must not be choosers,” as they say, so I may think myself well off to have any berth at all. The first place we got to was Antigua. About seven in the morning I came on deck, and found we were close to it: quite unlike Barbados; it put me in mind of Ithaca, or bits of the Sicilian coast: very beautiful, but on a small scale. While we stood off and on before what seemed an iron-bound coast, a pilot-boat emerged from one-could-not-say-where; and when the pilot was on board, we tacked, and sailed straight against a rock. As we got quite close, it began to appear that the shore was not a continuous
line, but that one rock overlapped another, and between these there turned out to be an entrance about a gun-shot wide, which took us into a beautiful little lake, where there was just room to anchor. You will find it in the map, under the name English Harbour. And now I will not go on bothering with descriptions. We landed at the dockyard, where a file of soldiers were drawn up in compliment to the Bishop, and as he stepped out of the boat the batteries saluted. That part of Antigua is exquisitely beautiful; very deep bays and rocks, and pasture and wood and mountains, put the sugar and the niggers quite out of one’s head. The people seem a superior set to what you have elsewhere. I liked some of the clergy much, and the resident proprietors are said to be, with some exceptions, intelligent gentlemen…. We were at Antigua six days; since that we have been at Montserrat and Nevis, both mountainous on a large scale, and generally lost in cloud. Nevis is not unlike Pantelaria. Yesterday we dined at the President’s,[168] and had turtle for the first time.
To the Rev. John Keble, Feb. 8, 1834.
‘Here I am with the Bishop on his Visitation, so that I have the advantage of a good long sea-voyage and some variety of scenery, both [of] which are good for me, though I cannot say they have as yet produced any perceptible effect. I seem to be just as well and no better than I was last summer; in fact, this is nothing else than a protracted summer, and it is unreasonable to expect more from climate here than from the same climate in England. You will see in my letter to [Newman] how I have employed my time in Barbados, and the length that I am being pulled on in anti-Protestantism. Would not Hammond, and Fell, and the rest of those holy humble men of God have altered the Articles?[169]
‘… [Rose?] seems to think anything better than an open rupture with the State, as sure to entail loss of caste on the clergy. Few men can receive the saying that the clergy have no need to be gentlemen….
‘… We have just left St. Christopher’s; it is the most beautiful of any of the islands I have yet seen. Mount Miserere is quite fine; a precipitous granite crag, quite bare, and of a very great height, rising out of the rich woods with which the mountain is clothed up to the top, and stooping over a very deep hollow, which has once been the crater of a volcano. I should have liked much to get up there, but had not time, and besides, they say it is very difficult. The people here seem to have very little curiosity: in fact, few tastes except acquisitiveness…. I see the papers have begun to talk; addresses to the Archbishop are said to be pouring in. I wish I could get my lungs right again to make preachments, and give the Yanks a talking over. We shall be back at Barbados the second week in March, and about then the weather in New York brightens up. I think I have made up my mind not to be in England till the latter end of May, whatever news we have, so I shall certainly have time on my hands, and if I can’t preach I can prose; so I may as well go at any rate. Do ply the people with Tracts on the “safest course” principle: the more I think of it, the more important it seems as the intellectual basis of Church authority…. We have now got a north-west wind, which a few years since would have been almost a miracle in these latitudes. It is generally said that the trade-winds are becoming yearly more irregular, and have been for this last fifty years. It will make a curious change if they cease altogether; certainly nothing can be more irregular than we have had them, both in quantity and direction; it goes from a storm to a calm in no time, and the other night went all round the compass. This puts me in mind of an adventure we had the other evening at Nevis. There is no harbour there, but only a beach to land on, and sometimes a heavy surf. We landed in the morning, in still weather. In the course of the day it came to blow on shore, and we had to embark in the dark,
in a very heavy sea breaking on the sands most furiously. The Bishop slept on shore, but the Commodore, the Captain, the Chaplain, and myself were carried on men’s shoulders to the boat, which was lying as near the shore as it could, in the midst of the breakers. I was put in second, and was only wetted by the water in the bottom of the boat, but the two last were fairly soused…. I am sure this stuff is not worth sending across the Atlantic.’
To William Froude, Feb. 12, 1834.
‘… I will try to scrape together stuff for a letter to you. We are becalmed with Saba off our starboard quarter, in the Forte frigate, forty-six guns, Commodore P…. Somehow, this frigate is beyond my comprehension. I am not up to taking an interest in its movements; it is 1150 tons and the sails are so large, and the masts so high, and such an immense lot of ropes, that I see no hope of learning anything about it. When they get up the anchor they have 100 men at the capstan, and if they want to tack quickly they put 300 men to work at once. They do their work to the sound of two fiddles and a fife, instead of the gibber that one is accustomed to in the Ranger and elsewhere; so, as the [Provost?] would say, “I don’t comprehend the style of things.” The day before yesterday we had two adventures. (1) A man was to be flogged, and as I knew that he would be let off out of compliment to the Bishop, I went on deck to see the preliminary ceremony. The whole ship’s crew were mustered, while the fellow stood under guard; then a grating was lashed to the gangway, and his wrists and ankles made fast to it, his jacket having been stripped off in readiness; the officers stood in full dress on one side of him, and the boatswain’s mates on the other; and the Commodore read over the articles of war. I watched the fellow’s countenance closely. At first he seemed very unconcerned, but the ceremony seemed by degrees to work on his imagination, and just before his pardon was announced he seemed in considerable dismay. The thing has stuck in my mind deeper than I expected, and I feel rather sick at thinking of it. The officers say that letting him off did