54
THE
ENGLISH
IN
THE
WEST
INDIES
where luxuriant tropical forest trees overhanging the violetcoloured water. I could well understand the Frenchman's delight when he saw it, and also the satisfaction with which he would now acknowledge that he had been a shortsighted prophet. The English had obtained Grenada, and this is what they had made of it. The forts which had been erected by his countrymen had been deserted and dismantled; the castle on which we had seen our flag flying was a ruin ; the walls were crumbling and in many places had fallen down. One solitary gun was left, but that was honeycombed and could be fired only with half a charge to salute with. It was true that the forts had ceased to be of use, but that was because there was nothing left to defend. The harbour is, as I said, the best in the West Indies. There was not a vessel in it, nor so much as a boat-yard where a spar could be replaced or a broken rivet mended. Once there had been a line of wharves, but the piles had been eaten by worms and the platforms had fallen through. Round us when we landed were unroofed warehouses, weed-choked courtyards, doors gone, and window frames fallen in or out. Such a scene of desolation and desertion I never saw in my life save once, a few weeks later at Jamaica. An English lady with her children had come to the landing place to meet my friends. They, too, were more like wandering ghosts than human beings with warm blood in them. All their thoughts were on going home —home out of so miser able an exile. Nature had been simply allowed by us to resume posses sion of the island. Here, where the cannon had roared, and ships and armies had fought, and the enterprising English had entered into occupancy, under which, as we are proud to fancy, the waste places of the earth grow green, and industry and civilisation follow as its inevitable fruit, all was now silence. Not Babylon itself, with its bats and owls, was more dreary and desolate. And this