rd situation and
its good harbours; for from St. Lucia every other British island
might receive speedy succour. He advised that the Little Carenage
should be made a permanent naval station, with dockyard and
fortifications, and a town built there by Government, which would,
in his opinion, have become a metropolis for the other islands. And
indeed, Nature had done her part to make such a project easy of
accomplishment. But Rodney's advice was not taken--any more than
his advice to people the island, by having a considerable quantity
of land in each parish allotted to ten-acre men (i.e. white yeomen),
under penalty of forfeiting it to the Crown should it be ever
converted to any other use than provision ground (i.e. thrown into
sugar estates). This advice shows that Rodney's genius, though,
with the prejudices of his time, he supported not only slavery, but
the slave-trade itself, had perceived one of the most fatal
weaknesses of the slave-holding and sugar-growing system. And well
it would have been for St. Lucia if his advice had been taken. But
neither ten-acre men nor dockyards were ever established in St.
Lucia. The mail-steamers, if they need to go into dock, have, I am
ashamed to say, to go to Martinique, where the French manage matters
better. The admirable Carenage harbour is empty; Castries remains a
little town, small, dirty, dilapidated, and unwholesome; and St.
Lucia itself 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 very
mountain-tops.

We went up 800 feet of steep hill, to pay a visit on that Morne
Fortunee which Moore and Abercrombie took, with terrible loss of
life, in May 1796; and wondered at the courage and the tenacity of
purpose which could have contrived to invest, and much more to
assault, such a stronghold, 'dragging the guns across ravines and up
the acclivities of the mountains and rocks,' and then attacking the
works only along one narrow neck of down, which must be fat, to this
day, with English blood.

All was peaceful enough now. The forts were crumbling, the barracks
empty, and the 'neat cottages, smiling flower gardens, smooth grass-
plats and gravel-walks,' which were once the pride of the citadel,
replaced for the most part with Guava-scrub and sensitive plants.
But nothing can destroy the beauty of the panorama.