dential refuge to many unfortunate persons who, saved themselves where such a multitude have perished, have been stripped in a moment of all they possessed, and left without even a shelter.

So wide spread is the desolation, that only about two hundred houses, with one fort, are left, in a shattered and dismantled condition, where in the morning of that day stood in its pride the wealthy, gay, and busy city. Together with its enormous piles of precious merchandise, ingots of gold, barrels of pistoles and doubloons, and tierces of silver,— common almost as the sand in the streets,—the city that trafficked in violence has sunk and disappeared in the depths of the sea; leaving the impoverished survivors to take up the lamentation for her that was uttered over ancient Tyre:"How art thou destroyed that wast inhabited of seafaring men, the renowned city, which wast strong in the sea, she and her inhabitants, which cause their terror to be on all that haunt it!" (Ezekiel xxvi. 17.) The ruins are still visible from the surface of the waters under which they lie; and buoys, placed above, still mark the spot, and admonish mariners that they may not drop their anchors there, lest they become inextricably entangled amid the stones, and brickwork, and massive timbers engulfed and swallowed up by the greedy sea.

Terrible has been the destruction of human life. Fifteen hundred persons of note, including the president administering the government, members of both branches of the legislature, officers of the government, judges, merchants,— nearly all the principal men of the island,—by one fell swoop have disappeared, with thousands upon thousands of sailors, soldiers, artisans, and slaves. All in the morning of that bright sunny day were full of lusty life, little thinking of death or danger. The setting sun shines upon the waves, where, far down below, they lie slumbering in a watery grave. Not a public building remains; and all the public records and official papers of the colony have perished, with those who had the care of them.

Nor is the devastation confined to the principal city of

the island. There, owing to the peculiar position and formation of the place, the ruin and destruction have been greatest; but all over the island the earthquake has left the sad traces of its terrible power. The rocks on the opposite shore, near to Port Henderson and the Apostles' Battery, have been rent into enormous caverns and fissures, from whence sulphurous steam is seen to gush for several days. The town of St. Jago de la Vega, founded, like Port Royal, by the Spaniards, is well nigh destroyed. The well compacted houses, built by Spanish skill, with a view to earthquake visitations, are split and rent in all directions; while those of more recent and less careful structure have crumbled into heaps, burying, in many instances, the unfortunate inhabitants beneath them. So it is all over the island. The buildings on the plantations are shaken down; and hundreds, crushed under the ruins of their habitations, have found their graves in their own dwellings. The whole face of the country is changed, stupendous mountains being upheaved from their foundations, and tossed about in wild confusion. There is scarcely a mountain in the island that has not been altered in its outline; while the rivers, too, have changed their courses. On the principal road through the island two mountains have been lifted up and thrown together, stopping up the bed of the river with huge masses of disjointed rock, until the waters, collected in great force, and raised to an overwhelming height, burst their adamantine barrier, and, bearing all before them, force open a new passage for themselves, increasing, in their destructive sweep, the horrors which already abound.

These are but the beginning of sorrows to the guilty land. One of the historians of the West Indies says, "The tremendous convulsions were repeated with little intermission, though with decreasing violence, for the space of three weeks; and every fissure in the rocks, every cleft in the cracked and parching earth, was steaming with sulphurous fumes. The air reeked with noxious miasmata, and the sea exhaled an offensive, putrid vapour, which destroyed a great proportion of those destitute and wretched beings.

whom the convulsion itself had spared. No fewer than three thousand were the victims of this dreadful endemic; and the few surviving inhabitants of Port Royal, who sought a refuge in temporary huts where Kingston now stands, were yet within reach of the contagious cause: for the dead bodies still floated in shoals about the harbour, and added horror to a scene which the pencil could not delineate, much less the pen describe. The insupportable heat of a tropical midsummer was not for many weeks refreshed even by a partial breath of air; the sky blazed with irresistible fierceness, swarms of mosquitoes clouded the atmosphere; while the lively beauty of the mountain forests suddenly vanished, and the fresh verdure of the lowland scenery was changed to the russet grey of a northern winter. The cane fields were disfigured by masses of fallen rock, and presented to the eye a barren wilderness, parched and furrowed. Thus vanished the glory of the most flourishing emporium of the New World, by a succession of tremendous judgments, resembling those visitations of an offended Deity on some cities in the Old World, where an iniquitous race was overwhelmed in sudden and unexpected ruin. Large sums of money, arising from the treasures of unknown or lost proprietors, fell into the hands of many individuals, and amongst others into those of Sir William Preston, who was charged by the assembly, ten years afterwards, with having appropriated a considerable share to his own use. One loss was irrecoverable, and is still severely felt: that of all the official papers and public records of the island, whose history is thereby rendered so obscure and incomplete."

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ALFWAY between Hayti and Jamaica, the voyager on the Carribbean Sea first catches a glimpse of the blue mountains of "the land of springs;" (for so Jamaica was called by its aboriginal inhabitants;) the towering hills of both islands being visible at the same time from the deck of the ship, when the weather is clear. But the first land which he approaches is Morant Point, forming the southeastern extremity of Jamaica, and stretching out a considerable distance into the sea, so low and flat as not to be seen from a vessel's deck until she is close upon it. Morant Point has been exceedingly fatal to ships; many a gallant bark having struck upon this treacherous tongue of land, before the slow progress of civilization, and the still slower growth of public spirit, in the British colonies of the West Indies, led to the erection of a light-house, whose beacon flame, gleaming over the dark waters, now admonishes the mariner of the danger upon which he might have rushed. This eastern extremity of the island is comprised in the parish of St. Thomas; Jamaica being divided into parishes, several of which are almost equal in geographical extent to some English counties. This part of the island offers to the admiring traveller many scenes of surpassing beauty. Looking southward from the low range of hills at the eastern

commencement of that vast chain of mountains running right through the centre of the island from east to west,— intersected by thousands of magnificent ravines and fruitful valleys, the eye is greeted by a landscape of Eden-like grandeur and loveliness. Enclosed between two ranges of rising lands, in a fork of the mountains open to the sea at one end, and terminating almost in a point at the other, lies what is called the Plantain-Garden-River District, nine or ten miles in length, and several in width. It is the most fertile spot in one of the most fertile countries in the world, and is divided into a number of sugar plantations, not surpassed in value by any in the colony; each of considerable extent, and possessing a soil of inexhaustible richness, which, with little or no aid of agricultural chemistry, produces crop after crop from the same roots through a long succession of years, without any diminution either in quality or quantity. The lovely valley is seen covered with luxuriant cane-fields, and studded, at distant intervals, with massive and costly sugar works, and the commodious mansions of the proprietors, surrounded by the dwellings of various grades of estate officials, and, farther off, with the numerous cottages of the peasantry; while groves and avenues of cocoa-nut and cabbage-palm stretch far away, and extensive walks of plantain and banana trees, with soft velvet leaves, five or six feet in length, and of proportionate width, that cover immense bunches of ripening fruit, each bunch a heavy burden for a strong man to carry; diversified, also, with the mango tree of symmetrical beauty, and the orange, whose dark foliage contrasts finely with the golden fruit, and the differing verdure of the star apple, the tamarind, and other fruit trees. To these objects an additional charm is given by the winding of the river which gives name to the valley,—its course clearly marked by immense clusters of the plume-like bamboo, waving on its banks as it flows onward to the sea; and that boundleas ocean, moreover, reflecting the azure of a cloudless sky, and extending in apparently illimitable majesty. Altogether, such a scene of tropical beauty may well awaken the thought," If this earth, defaced and