Canoe Adventure

Our knowledge of the early days of the Lesser Antilles is meagre, hurricanes and the depredations of the little wood ant (which literally eats away the wooden houses from about their owners) being the two chief destroyers of manuscripts and their containers. What of the life of St. Eustatius — scarcely eight miles in area — which had its beginnings before our Plymouth colony and in 1781 when at the height of its prosperity it was destroyed by Rodney it had a population of nearly 40,000 — more than either Boston or New York at that time? Its printed history does not cover much more than 20,000 words. But with history we have little to do in this account. I have limited myself to those incidents which might have a direct interest for the reader and some of them, in whole or in part, as far as I can ascertain, now appear in print for the first time. Those who are familiar with the literature of the Lesser Antilles will, I hope, be agreeably disappointed in not finding in these pages those hardy perennials of the guide books — the building of schooners at Bottom Town on Saba, eight hundred feet above the sea, and the deadly snakes of the Petit Piton that killed the members of a climbing party one by one till the last man fell only a few feet from his goal. So I have attempted neither a history nor a guide book but have spun out the yarn of a lone cruise in a sailing canoe. I went to study the islands at first hand and in the craft which I believed would be most suitable for the purpose — a deep-sea sailing canoe. The main portion of the cruise has appeared serially in abbreviated form in some magazines. I have made no attempt to discuss the problem of the native — the more one studies it the less one has to say — and my few explosions of choler will, I hope, be forgiven. Throughout the islands from Grenada to St. Thomas, I have made friends whom I count among my best and it is their unexampled courtesy and generosity that go to make up some of the most pleasant memories of the cruise.