e formed by the most prominent of the ridges, the others
by the sand thrown up at the foot of their valleys. Behind the beaches
are ponds of brackish water.

The abruptness and sudden rise of the hills for the most part permit the
vegetable earth to be washed down into the vallies as fast as it is
formed. Some of the more gradual slopes retain a sufficiency of it to
produce a thick coat of tolerably succulent grass; but the soil partakes
too much of the stony quality of the higher parts to be capable of
cultivation.

The dark luxuriant foliage of the valleys points out the advantages which
they had received from the impoverished hills. Their soil is rich and
deep, but their extent is narrow and limited. Some three or four hundred
acres of excellent soil might be found upon the edges of the ponds, and
by the sides of the occasional drains that supply them with the fresh
part of their water.

Both hill and valley produce large timber and brush-wood of various
heights; upon the hills, the brush grows in small clumps; while in the
valleys it not only covers the whole surface, but is also bound together
by creeping vines, of every size between small twine and a seven inch
hawser.

In the SW corner of the bay, is a lagoon, or small inlet, that
communicates with the sea, through the beach at the back of which it
lies. The chain of hills here runs back to some little distance from the
water, and leaves a few square miles of rather good ground, through which
the inlet was found to take its course in a winding direction to the SW
for six or eight miles, where it ends in small swamps and marshes. Large
boats might enter this place at a third flood, and proceed to the farther
part of it. Upon its banks from five to seven hundred acres of a light
sandy soil might be picked out, in patches of from fifty to a hundred
acres each; but on the side next the mountain it soon became stony, and
on that next the lagoon it was wet and salt.

The country along the back of the bay lies in rounded stony hills
scarcely fit for pasturage, but covered with timber, and patches of short
brush.

On the south side was another shallow inlet, larger than that on the SW
running in by the end of a beach, and winding along to the SSW with
little or no cultivable or low ground upon its borders. The returning
tide did not allow time enough to proceed to the head of it.

On the eastern side, the hills being neither steep nor prominent, some
extensive s