PORT
ROYAL
223
had met ten years before at the Cape. He was a brisk, smart officer, quiet and sailor-like in his manners, but with plenty of talent and cultivation. He showed us his stores and his machinery, large engines, and engineers to work them, ready for any work which might be wanted, but ap足 parently with none to do. We went over the hospital, airy and clean, with scarcely a single occupant, so healthy has now been made a spot which was once a nest of yellow fever. Naval stores soon become antiquated; and parts of the great square were paved with the old cannon balls which had become useless on the introduction of rifled guns. The fortifications were antiquated also, but new works were be足 ing thrown up armed with the modern monster cannon. One difficulty struck m e ; Port Royal stood upon a sand足 bank. In such a place no spring of fresh water could be looked for. On the large acreage of roofs there were no shoots to catch the rain and carry it into cisterns. Whence did the water come for the people in the town ? How were the fleets supplied which used to ride there ? How was it in the old times when Port Royal was crowded with revelling crews of buccaneers ? I found that every drop which is consumed in the place, or which is taken on board either of merchant ship or man-of-war, is brought in a steam tug from a spring eight miles off upon the coast. Before steam came in, it was fetched in barges rowed by hand. Nothing could be easier than to save the rain which falls in abun足 dance. Nothing could be easier than to lay pipes along the sand-spit to the spring. But the tug plies daily to and fro, and no one thinks more about the matter. A West Indian regiment is stationed at Port Royal. After the dockyard we went through the soldiers' quarters and then walked through the streets of the once famous station. It is now a mere hamlet of boatmen and fishermen, squalid and wretched, without and within. Half-naked children stared at us from the doors with their dark, round