Ebook The West Indies

Lesser Antilles without having scenes from Charles Kingsley's At Last come vividly to his mind, but Kingsley only caught glimpses of the charm from St. Thomas to Grenada, and spent his real Christmas vacation in Trinidad, which he makes others see even as he saw it. Froude's observations were confined mainly to Barbados, Trinidad, and Jamaica; and though in his English in the West Indies he was chie?y concerned with the problem of government in the British colonies, he gives some lively views of places and people. Of those whose chief purpose has been to describe what they saw on vacation trips are W. A. Paton in his Down the Islands and C. A. Stoddard in Cruising among the Caribbees. Lafcadio Hearn's Two Years in the French lvest Indies, as the title implies, is more than the narrative of a hasty trip, and has graphic delinea tions of life and character, mostly in Martinique. F. A. Ober's Camps in the Caribbees has the attrae tion of scientific observation and study combined with that of narratives of adventure and descriptions of novel scenes. Regarding the historical aspects of the subject, the same writer's In the Wahe of Colum bus is not to be forgotten, for it presents many de tails of the era of discovery in a new and interesting light, as the result of personally tracing the course of the discoverer in his voyaging and his landings.