Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the weather was blowing up again, and that we ought to weigh anchor at once. We waved back to the
Governor as our dinghy crossed the water towards the
Rose Millicent
past the wrecked stanchions of the
demolished jetty. Uncle Pete made us look overboard at the walls and timbers of a drowned village that
faintly loomed, yards below us, through the waves. He had no explanation for it, except 'It was dry once.'
The wind that carried us towards Saba blew the clouds off the blunted cone of the Venusberg. The
crater of this volcano is a deep pit, entirely surrounded by the jagged walls of the mountain. It is densely
forested, and as there is no side light, all the trees try to force their way up to the sun, and the cedars
and eucalyptus attain enormous heights. The trees are caught in a vast cobweb of creepers and lianas,
of which many, after having grown to a thickness of over four inches, have become semi-petrified. Mr.
Kruythoff states that some of this fossilized vegetation is over six thousand years old; thus, by Sephardic
reckoning, slightly earlier than the Creation. A hurricane in 1928 uprooted large numbers of the trees,
churning the imprisoned forest into a tangle of timber and torn lianas. A great ceiba tree growing in the
bottom of the crater is carved with the names of hundreds of sailors, some of them dating from as far back
as the middle of the eighteenth century. Brilliantly coloured birds fly between the branches in the half
darkness, and the damp air is heavy with a smell of decay that rises from the rotting trunks and the many
centuries' accumulation of fallen leaves. Night falls early and fast owing to the height of the crater-sides.
One of our fellow-passengers had once lost himself among the trees. He had been forced to spend the
night in the wilderness, and said that, by the time dawn broke, he was nearly out of his mind.
The shape of the island as we sailed to leeward of it lengthened into a high saddle stretched between
two dead cones. At Tumble-Down-Dick Bay, which is possibly the only existing memorial of Oliver
Cromwell's ineffective son, we turned westwards.
The sea grew rough, and great grey waves and then heavy rain reduced everybody except the crew to
a state of misery. We all crept back into our shelters. A few hours later, when we ventured out into the
sunlight, the sloop was sailing close under the side of Saba.
It is a round, absolutely symmetrical mountain ribbed by lava streams, rising sheer out of the sea, and
climbing in a perpendicular wall to a height that, from below, looks enormous. The summit disappeared
in the clouds and the sides were so steep and uncompromising that landing, or climbing to the top of
the island, appeared an impossible feat. But Captain Fleming pointed to a little gathering of houses, high
above the clouds and the circling gulls, perched, like a Thessalian monastery, on the very lip of the crater.
It was the village of Hells Gate, of which the houses, the Captain said, were secured to the rocks with
chains lest the wind should tear them loose and scatter them over the sea; and the overhanging rocks are
braced back to prevent them falling and destroying the houses. The island gives the effect of the cyl-
indrical keep of a fortress, several miles in circumference, rising from the sea, and tapering to a dome. We
sailed under the echoing flanks of this enormous thing, while hundreds of mewing sea birds fluttered and
wheeled round the sloop. The
Rose Millicent
was pitching and tossing in waves that broke all round the
island's base in a girdle of foam. We came level at length with a ledge of black volcanic sand about thirty
yards from end to end. Under a fluttering tricolor, a little cubic customs-house was perched. This is the
only place where an anchor can touch bottom on the submarine shelf of rock; everywhere else the sides
fall straight into the Caribbean to very great depths. As our boat carried us towards the beach, a jeep, the
island's one vehicle, appeared on the mountain-side, threading its way down a steep winding road from
the interior. It was driven by the brigadier of police, who told us, as we landed, that the Governor of Statia
had signalled our arrival. He drove us up the ladder of a road which curled into the side of the mountain
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