Back to Homepage Caribbean History Caribbean until 1900 1900s Caribbean Caribbean Area Bahama Islands Jamaica, Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, Morant and Pedro Cays Leeward Islands Windward Islands Barbados Trinidad and Tobago Guiana Honduras Martinique   Guadeloupe and Dependencies French Guiana Clipperton Island The Territory of Curaçao Surinam Economy The International Importance of the Banana Trade United States Trade with the Caribbean Oil on the Caribbean

Saba, a Young Volcanic Island Three small members of the Lesser Antilles in different stages of a simple sequence of first-cycle development may be first presented. I saw them only from passing steamers. Saba, the simplest island in the whole chain, represents an early stage: it is a young volcanic cone, from two to two and a half nautical miles in diameter and 2820 feet high. As yet it is little dissected by streams but rather sharply cliffed by waves around the shore and bordered by a narrow submarine shelf, hardly wide enough to be called a bank. It naturally shows no signs of subsidence in the way of embayments even if its subsidence has begun, for its little valleys all have hanging mouths in the cliff face, well above the sea level. Naturally it has no coral reefs, because, as has just been explained, they cannot be established on a detritus-covered, cliff-base shelf. The inhabitants, of Dutch descent, have learned to speak English rather than their forefathers' tongue; they cultivate the uplands and also build small boats which are lowered down the cliffs to the harborless shore and sold for inter-island traffic. SABA BANK The ultimate stage of the first-cycle sequence of good-sized composite islands is represented by Saba bank, next southwest of Saba island but separated from it by a three-mile water passage, 300 fathoms or more in depth. The bank measures 33 by 20 miles and has a depth of 30 or 40 fathoms around most of its border; a submerged barrier reef, from 7 to 10 fathoms below sea level, extends around the southeastern border of the bank for 20 miles and constitutes one of the best approaches to a true barrier reef in this region. According to the scheme of development here adopted this bank is explained as an atoll-lagoon floor, deprived of its original reef and probably somewhat planed down by low-level abrasion in the last Glacial epoch. But, as in the case of many other banks, the depths now found probably do not represent the low-level platform to which the former atoll reef and its lagoon floor were abraded. They are much more suggestive of adjustment by Postglacial aggradation with respect to present sea level; for, if abrasion took place 30 fathoms below normal ocean level as Daly calculates and if no significant change had taken place since such abrasion, the bank border, where the products of abrasion must have been deposited in a detrital embankment, ought now to be from 60 to 80 fathoms deep at least; that is 40 or 50 fathoms deeper than the surface of the lowered Glacial ocean. As a matter of fact, the bank is of much more moderate depth and is in part reef-rimmed, as above noted. The main reason for assuming that a composite volcanic island is buried under this bank is that its size is much greater than it should be if it were based only on a single cone like that of Saba island. Home