Caribbean History
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Cultural Futures of St. Lucia
St. Lucia would be an excellent subject for a detailed study of island anthropogeography. Its chief towns are all on bay-head delta fronts. The largest is Castries, on the half-mile delta of a bay of the northwest coast. The streets are laid out in small squares; many of the business houses are well built and of two stories, but the greater number of dwelling houses are small and of one story. The delta front has a series of wharves available for large steamers; much coal is stored near by. A beautiful botanical garden adjoins the northern side of the delta plain. The northern side of the harbor is formed by two low hills, tied together and to the main island by the first of the mount-tying beaches above described. The outer and higher hill bears a lighthouse and a signal station; the inner hill is crowned by a large hospital. Many villas occupy the hill slopes above the town. Government House stands high above the harbor where Morne Fortuné, the rounded ridge on the south, falls off rapidly to the sea on the west; it enjoys a fine view of the northwestern part of the island, with Martinique clearly outlined in the distance.
Most of the other towns are hardly more than villages of a single water-front street. Such are Anse la Raye and Canaries, on the beached front of deltas which fill narrow valleys incised in the volcanic slopes of later eruption on the mid-west coast. Soufrière, is of larger size and has a few cross streets; it stands on a reëntrant delta front at the mouth of a wide valley in the maturely dissected volcanic area of earlier eruption, between the littledissected slopes of later eruption on the north and the Petit Piton on the south; the gentle seaward slope of successive agglomerate beds is well shown by their benched outcrops on the northern side of this valley; a mile or more inland, a small group of hot springs, from which the name of the shore town is taken, has an unwarranted reputation as a volcano. The inland view here includes some of the high mountains of the south-central district. Dennery is a linear delta-front village on the mid-east coast, but its delta plain is much smaller than that of the Fond d'Or valley, two miles to the north, which has no village. Micoud, the only other village on the cast coast, is farther south in an apparently similar situation, but it lay beyond the limit of my island excursions. The open-spaced village of Gros Islet stands on a broad, west-facing, hill-tying strand plain, two miles from the north end of the island. Choiseul is a linear village crowded along a narrow strand at the base of 70-foot cliffs on the western margin of the sloping agglomerate plain, two and a half miles southeast of Gros Piton. An experimental botanical garden is maintained near by on the plain a quarter mile back from the cliff top, adjoining a narrow valley. Laborie, another linear shore village, is less crowded on a prograded strand ensconced in the open reëntrant of a group of isolated volcanic hills, above mentioned as interrupting the cliffs of the agglomerate plain of the southwest coast near their mid-length. Vieux Fort lies on the low northern slope of the peninsular hills at the southern end of the island and therefore enjoys a view of the long slope of the agglomerate plain as it gradually declines between groups of subdued hills of earlier date to its isthmian end; the exposed southern slope of the peninsular hills is strongly cliffed; a lighthouse stands on their summit. The chief building in all these villages is the Catholic church.
The larger delta plains are occupied by plantations of sugar cane, five of which have steam sugar mills near the shore. Three of these are on the abovementioned valleys of Cul de Sac and of Roseau on the west coast and of Fond d'Or on the east coast; the fourth is on a lagoon plain behind a beach about a mile from the northern end of the island; and the fifth is on the southern isthmian plain near Vieux Fort. Coconut palms are productive on some of the delta fronts; groves of lime and of cacao trees occupy some of the more open valleys and the gentler slopes adjoining or inland from the delta plains. By far the greater part of the mountainous island is forested.
Besides many rough wagon roads and bridle paths, automobile roads of fair or good quality run north from Castries on low ground near the coast to Gros Islet and south over the rounded ridges and across the delta plains to the sugar factories of Cul de Sac and Roseau. A good cross-island road turns up the aggraded portion of the Cul de Sac valley into its upper north-south part; then crosses over the forested axial ridge in a well laid but very winding course, near the highest points on which fine views are disclosed down the Roseau plain on the west and the Fond d'Or plain on the east. The road next follows down the last-named valley nearly to the shore, where it turns southward over many ridges and valleys a short distance inland from the cliffed headlands of the ridge ends, passing Dennery and Micoud on the way to Vieux Fort on the southernmost peninsular hill slope. Thence it runs northwest near the cliffed margin of the sloping agglomerate plain, thus reaching Laborie and Choiseul, where a turn inland is made to cross over a rather high col back of the Pitons before descending to Soufrière. No wagon road has yet been made along the mid-west coast between Soufrière and Roseau, over the sharply dissected lava slopes of later eruption. Telephone wires are stretched all over the island. At the time of my visit a launch was running along the west coast three days a week between Castries and Soufrière and two days a week between Castries and Vieux Fort, touching at various intermediate points. The absence of similar means of transportation along the east or windward coast, as well as the smaller number of villages established on east-coast delta plains, appears to be due to the rougher water there prevailing.

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