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through a chasm of rock. A final twist brought us into the open, revealing the centre of Saba like the in-
side of a rotten tooth. It was the most unexpected sight.
The inside of the dead volcano's crater rolled down towards us in a hollow of green meadows and
great leafy trees. It was a gentle European landscape of spinneys and wild flowers and cattle grazing in a
mild, sunny atmosphere. In the centre of the plateau lay a woodland village of white-walled, red-roofed
houses, with long threads of smoke rising straight from their chimneys into the windless air. And, as we
penetrated this sylvan capital, the fair-haired, pale-skinned islanders lowered the hoes with which they
were working their potato-patches, and cried good-afternoon over their garden walls.
The origin of the Sabamen is a mystery. The majority of them are reputed to be of Scottish origin,
though how they came here none of the memoirs or travel diaries or histories state. There is certainly a
fair amount of Dutch blood, and one or two of the Sabamen I spoke to seemed to think there might be a
little Danish as well. Livingstone, Simmonds, Hassel and Laverack are the most widespread surnames.
They have always been a quiet, hard-working folk. When Father Labat came ashore, he found a pros-
perous, bourgeois community, every one of whom (including, he suspected, the Governor) passed his life
making boots and shoes for export to the other islands. Many of them had Negro slaves, whose descend-
ants still form a coloured minority. He lamented that the islanders were not Catholics, as they could have
put themselves under the protection of St. Crispin, the patron saint of cobblers. As a matter of fact, the
Sabamen, though Dutch subjects, are half of them Catholic and half of them Anglican, except for a few
dozen adherents to a sect known as the Pilgrim Holiness; and a point in the island known as Chrispeen
does exist. The Father bought a couple of pairs of shoes in Saba, which, he records, wore extremely well.
But the trade must have died out during the last two centuries. Most of the male inhabitants—about
1,600 souls inhabit the five square miles of the island—go to sea. They have a great name as sailors
throughout the islands, and many of them rise to be captains of Dutch steamers plying all over the world.
The oil-wells of Curaçao and Aruba have drawn many away from the rock; but they always return and
always send their savings home. The Sabamen are now, as in the past, accomplished boat-builders. They
fell the timbers for their crafts high in the mountains, and then carry them down, rigged and complete,
on their shoulders, to launch them in the stormy Sabian waters. Old writers perpetuate in their memoirs
a legend that they used to lower them hundreds of feet down the volcano side on ropes from the crater's
edge to the sea. Windwardside is perched like a guillemot's nest high on the rim of Saba; a cluster of
white houses lost among evergreen trees and giant ferns and the clouds that the Trades blow along the
deep gorge that it commands. It is inhabited by about 600 villagers, and is one of the only completely
white villages in the West Indies. When they retire from the sea, the older men spend the latter part of
their lives farming and gardening, and the women of the island are famous for drawn-thread work. They
are a hale, rosy-complexioned, quiet population, exactly what the descendants of Scotsmen and Dutch-
men might be expected to be. Many times in the past they have been attacked by pirates and filibusters
and predatory foreign powers, and their defensive stratagem was always the same, and always successful:
they raked the attacking craft and the landing skiffs with cannon and musket fire, and, once the invaders
were ashore, demolished them in the Thermopylean causeway up which we had come, by hurling down
on them cascades of boulders, hundreds of which were always in readiness.
The island is far from the tracks of steamers, and even the schooners and sloops are rare and haphazard
visitors; so travellers arriving there become the objects of a kind and generous hospitality. We were in-
vited to luncheon by the jovial Dr. Schokolaad, the town doctor of Bottom, the capital, who, during the
temporary absence of the deputy governor, was managing the affairs of the island in his stead. It was a
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