on of slaves from Africa. It may be
said to have been governed by a military despotism from the outset to
the present time, and nothing short of such an arbitrary rule could have
maintained the connection between the island and so exacting a mother
country, situated more than three thousand miles across the ocean.

The form of the island is quite irregular, resembling the blade of a
Turkish cimeter slightly curved back, or that of a long, narrow
crescent. It stretches away in this shape from east to west, throwing
its western end into a curve, and thus forming a partial barrier to the
outlet of the Gulf of Mexico, as if at some ancient period it had been a
part of the American continent, severed on its north side from the
Florida Peninsula by the wearing of the Gulf Stream, and from Yucatan on
its southwestern point by a current setting into the Gulf. Two channels
are thus formed by which the Mexican Gulf is entered.

One neither departs from nor approaches the Cuban shore without crossing
that remarkable ocean-river to which we have so often referred in these
pages,--the Gulf Stream,--with banks and bottom of cold water, while its
body and surface are warm. Its color in the region of the Gulf is
indigo-blue, so distinct that the eye can follow its line of demarkation
where it joins the common water of the sea. Its surface temperature on
the coast of the United States is from 75 deg. to 80 deg.. Its current, of a
speed of four to five miles per hour, expends immense power in its
course, and forms a body of water in the latitude of the Carolina coast
fully two hundred miles wide. Its temperature diminishes very gradually,
while it moves thousands of leagues, until one branch loses itself in
Arctic regions, and the other breaks on the coast of Europe.

The sea-bottom, especially near the continents, resembles the
neighboring land, and consists of hills, mountains, and valleys, like
the earth upon which we live. A practical illustration of this fact is
found in the soundings taken by the officers of our Coast Survey in the
Caribbean Sea, where a valley was found giving a water-depth of three
thousand fathoms, twenty-five miles south of Cuba. The Cayman Islands,
in that neighborhood, are the summits of mountains bordering this deep
valley at the bottom of the sea, which has been found, by a series of
soundings, to extend over seven hundred miles from between Cuba and
Jamaica nearly to the Bay of Honduras, with an average b