Feb. 13th.—At .6.30 AM., sighted the island of St. Lucia right ahead. After divisions dropped a target overboard, and fired away half of our quarterly allowance of shot and shell at it. At 5.15 P.M. came to in eleven fathoms outside, but not in, Castries Bay. It is one of the finest harbours in the West Indies, but as we hope to get away under sail, when we leave, we remain meanwhile pitching in the swell outside. From the sea St. Lucia appears a longer island than St. Vincent, but the hills are not so high; there is one large fiat-headed table-land conspicuous in the centre; the two tall sugarloaves (each 3,000 feet high) of the Pitons were to-day distinguishable at its southern end, and Pigeon Island, at its northern end, is just such another cone. The view from our anchorage is desolate, but it is a fine starlight night, though squally. We hear the admiral is at Grenada following us up.
.jpg/300px-HMS_Bacchante_(1876).jpg "HMS Bacchante")
HMS Bacchante
The little town of Castries lies dirty, dilapidated, unwholesome, a long way up the bay on the port hand. This is the bay that Rodney, as early as 1778, advised should be made a permanent naval station with dockyard and fortifications, and a town which would become a metropolis for the other islands. This and St. George’s at Grenada are the only two ports we have yet seen in the West Indies where steamers can load and unload alongside the wharves, elsewhere lighters are employed. St. Lucia, he held in those days when ships only went by wind, would, from its position to windward, and its good harbours, render Martinique (the great French stronghold) and all the other French islands of little use in war; while from it every other British island might receive speedy succour. But nothing was done, neither was his plan for colonising the island with ten-acre men (white yeomen) listened to, and so ” St. Lucia is hardly to be called a colony, but rather the nucleus of a colony, which may become hereafter, by energy and good government, a rich and thickly-peopled garden up to the mountain tops.” There are not wanting signs of prosperity and improvement: cacao and coolies have been introduced. A great central sugar usine, like that we saw in Trinidad, insuring the most economical methods of making sugar, has been established by the local government. It pays six per cent, on its capital, and has given a great stimulus to the principal industry of the island. When the Panama Canal is made St. Lucia will increase in importance as a coaling station, for it lies directly in the line of commerce between England and the isthmus, along which much of our Pacific and Australasian trade will pass. There is a good deal of swell here in the roadstead, and it has been squally and rainy all day.
