LECTURE GIVEN AT THE NEW YORK YACHT CLUB MAY 7, 19031 66 At the general meeting, May 15, 1902, I addressed the Club on the subject of Cruising in the West Indies," etc. That was after returning from a three months' cruise there in my schooner yacht Sea Fox. Needing to avoid cold weather last winter and remembering the unequaled advantages for winter and early spring cruising afforded by the eastern part of the Caribbean Sea, from Porto Rico to Trinidad, I determined to take the Sea Fox there again. I have now returned from a cruise of about three months. During this time I have visited most of the islands at which I landed last year, and also some others, including Hayti, Jamaica, and Cuba. 1 One hundred and forty-six stereopticon views were used in this lecture. A few of these views are here represented. Before I left New York, January 17th, the Chairman of our Lecture Committee called and asked that upon my return I would give to the Club a lecture on "Cruising in the Caribbean," to be illustrated by a stereoptican, and to be one of the course of seven lectures which the Committee planned for the present season. Now, the cruise I had planned for this season, if added to last year's cruise, would complete the tour of the islands on the north and east of the Caribbean Sea. Other reasons for consenting to address the Club again on the subject of the Caribbean I can most easily express by quoting a few lines from my last year's address, which was printed in my book on Cruising in the West Indies," etc.1 66 "The great variety found in the appearance and condition of the inhabitants, the various systems of land-ownership and labor. the general decay caused by want of commercial intercourse with the United States and with each other, the different colonial systems of the various nations owning the islands, the negro question, -all these present an important study for Americans, who are now called upon to face colonial problems." 1 Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1902. At that time I had seen sad results there of the mixture of the two races. Since then I have had an opportunity to compare white government in Jamaica with colored government in the neighboring island of Hayti,—a contrast as startling as that between St. Pierre as I saw it last year, and the dead St. Pierre that I have now visited. I think that few in our community know much of the interests and beauties surrounding the Caribbean Sea. Our war with Spain and the terrible disasters at Martinique and St. Vincent have called attention to a few islands, but how few of our citizens know anything of the charms of the Danish and British Virgin Islands, the grandeur and beauty of the Leeward and Windward Islands, or that there are a hundred islands in the Grenadine group alone. Or that on the north shore of South America, and beginning near Trinidad, and attaining its greatest height near Caracas, is what Kingsley, in "Westward Ho!" has called "the mighty northern wall, the highest cliff on earth, some nine thousand feet of rock parted from the sea by a narrow strip of bright green lowland." How few know that, three hundred miles farther west, Santa Marta, covered with perpetual snow, and in plain view from the decks of passing vessels, rises 17,500 feet, while, farther west and south, Aconcagua is 23,910 feet high. Mt. Blanc is only 15,800 feet above sea level, and is far from the sea. The Caribbean is about the same size as the Mediterranean, which is a little longer and narrower. But the Caribbean Sea, on account of its location twenty degrees farther south, its reliable trade-winds, freedom from storms during February, March, April, etc., is much better suited for late winter and early spring yachting. |