Six months in the West-Indies, in 1825

129 MARTINIQUE. This seemed, and I believed is, one of the safest and most spacious harbours in the West Indies or the world. I saw the famous Pigeon Rock, La Ramire, which cannot be taken except by Britons, and even John will have to sweat for it, I apprehend, in the next war. There was lying at anchor a line-of-battle ship carrying the admiral's flag, two frigates and five other smaller men-of-war, which with the Venus, a very fine fifty-gun frigate, and a brig in the Bay of St. Pierre, constitute a force that would give the French for a time the undoubted mastery of the Windward Sea, however inferior they might be after a month's notice at Jamaica.

We stole along the coast quietly during the night and anchored before St. Pierre at six in the morning. The face of the country round the town is beautiful, smoothly rising in a green upland of canes, intersected with winding roads and dotted with white bouses, whilst a deep ravine on one side, and precipitous mountains on the other, inclose the picture as in a frame.

We landed after breakfast, and went to Betsy Parker's, one of that numerous tribe of goodnatured, laughing, peculiar hostesses, whom West Indians rejoice in: women who are as cunning and as obsequious to whites as if they were negroes, and as proud and despotic to negroes as if they were whites. Not that I mean to abuse their mulatto or mestize ladyships; far be that from me!—Hannah Lewis K