Page:The British Empire in the nineteenth century Volume VI.djvu/17

 Rh House, behind which one green hill after another rises towards the peak of Mount Maitland, 1700 feet in height. The place was originally built by the French, with the name of Port Royal, changed to St. George on the cession of Grenada in 1763. The five stone-built forts on the surrounding hills have been dismantled since 1854, when the regular forces were removed from the island; the chief of these structures, Fort George, is now used as a barrack for the police force. The Grenadines are a line of islands, about 300 in number, and varying in size from 600 to nearly 8000 acres, running for sixty miles northward from Grenada to St. Vincent. Bare of wood, and edged with cliffs and streaks of red and gray rock, they rise a few hundred feet out of very deep sea. The inhabitants are chiefly a quiet and prosperous race of small proprietors or yeomen, raising and exporting live stock and vegetable products, conveyed to the larger islands in coasters of their own building. The southern islands of the group are attached politically to Grenada, and of these the chief is Carriacou, with an area of nearly 7000 acres and a population of about 6000. The chief island connected with St. Vincent is Becquia, in the north of the Grenadines; it is somewhat larger than Carriacou. The beautiful St. Vincent, an irregular oblong in shape, broader in the northern than in the southern half, lies about 70 miles north-north-east of Grenada, and 100 miles due west of Barbados. Eighteen miles long, and eleven in extreme breadth, it has an area of 132 sq. miles, with a population (1898) just exceeding 46,000, of whom about 2450 were whites, and 31,000 blacks, the residue being mainly coloured people and East Indian coolies. The history of the island in the nineteenth century involves nothing worthy of mention save the great eruption of 1812; the decline of sugar production due to the slave-emancipation of 1838, to the admission in British ports of slave-grown sugar, in 1846, at the same tariff as the West Indian article, and to a fall of prices in more recent years; and the establishment, in 1878, after previous changes in the constitutional system, of the island's rule as a "Crown colony" instead of by representative government. The mention of "eruption" has already stated the volcanic origin and character of St. Vincent. From north to south runs a chain of densely-wooded mountains with peaks from 3000 to 4000 feet in height. The chief crater,