to swamp-land, the rivers are forced to bend out of their
direction and to desert places which depended upon them for irrigation.
These damages were seldom repaired, for the indolent planter would not
undertake the work of draining and of permanently securing the tillable
surface of his land. It is good luck, if a land-slide, instead of
creating a new morass, fills up an old one.

As if completely to unsettle any claim that this Creole climate might
make to character, the hurricane leaves its awful trace upon the island.
This rotating storm of wind has its origin to the east of the Caribbee
Islands; its long parabolic curve sweeps over them, and bends to the
northeast below Florida. In its centre, as it moves, it carries a lull
whose breadth varies from five to thirty miles. This dreadful calm comes
suddenly in the height of the storm, and is as suddenly interrupted,
after lasting sometimes for half an hour, by the revolving edge of the
wind. Torrents of rain go with it, and heavy thunder, and it brings from
the sea an enormous wave, which sweeps harbors clean of their ships, and
runs up, like an earthquake-wave, upon the shore. This vortex, moving
often a hundred miles an hour, takes hold of the _Bombax ceiba_ like an
enormous proboscis, pulls it from the thin soil of the tropics despite
the great lateral clutch of its knotty roots, and swallows it up.
Houses, cultivated fields, men and animals, are obliterated by its heavy
foot.

In some years no less than three hurricanes have occurred in the West
Indies. Father Du Tertre, a French missionary in St. Christophe,
describes one which he witnessed in 1642,--a year memorable for three.
During the second of these, more than twenty vessels, laden with
colonial produce and just ready to sail for Europe, were wrecked in the
harbor, including the ship of De Ruyter, the Dutch Admiral. The island
was swept of houses, trees, cattle, and birds; the manioc and tobacco
plants were destroyed, and only one cotton shrub survived. The shores
were covered with dead fishes blown out of the water, and the bodies of
ship-wrecked men. The salt-works were flooded and spoiled, and all the
provisions on the island were so damaged that the inhabitants were put
on rations of biscuit till the arrival of vessels from France.

Another storm like this desolated Martinique in 1657; and the annals of
most of the islands abound in similar narratives. They are less severe
in Hayti, and seldom sweep vio