66 S T. J A G O.
the commanding officer of the troops, a raw-boned Scotch
^serjeant, six feet high, who had served in the American army,
and his wife, a slender diminutive Irish woman. All these
wore an aspect so sickly and so wan, so full of misery and
woe, that, with all the rank and importance which they
held on the island, we could not help considering them as the
most deplorable objects of compassion; as creatures that, as
the poet observes,
“ Meagre and lank with fasting grown,
“ And nothing left but skin and bone,
“ They just keep life and soul together.”
The clergy were people of colour, and some of them perfectly
black. The officers of justice, of the customs, and
other departments in the civil and military services, the troops,
the peasantry, and the traders, were all blacks, or at least so
very dark that they would scarcely be supposed to. have any
mixture of European blood in their veins. Yet most of them
aspire to the honour of Portugueze extraction, and are proud
of tracing their origin to a race of heroes who, disdaining the
restraint of laws at home, contrived to get themselves transported
abroad, where their free and ungovernable spirits
could exert themselves without controul. The Cape de Verd
islands were to Portugal what Botany Bay is to England, an
asylum for convicted criminals.
Whether this cluster of eighteen or twenty islands, of which
St. Jago is the principal, be the Gorgades, the Gorgones, or
the Hesperides, of the ancients, or none of them (which is
S T. J A G O . 67
perhaps the most probable), is a point which I most willingly
resign for the learned to settle. I t is very certain, however,
that they produced no golden apples until the trees had been
transplanted thither by the Portugueze, unless, indeed, the
mala at/rea of the ancients were quinces instead of oranges,
as some philosophers, and among others Linnaeus, have endeavoured
to prove; in which case they may have been the
gardens of the Hesperides, as the quince, I imagine, is here
a plant of native growth. They are supposed, by some
writers, to have been totally uninhabited when they were first
discovered; though others maintain that a race of negroes,
similar to those on the continent^ was thinly scattered over
one or two of the largest. The names of Ilhas Verdas the
Green Islands, and Cabo Verde the Green Cape, which is opposite
to them, were not assigned on account of any peculiar
verdure of lrxuriant vegetation that enlivened their surface,
but'because the sea, near the coast of the latter, after a series
of calm weather, 'was generally covered over with a vegetable
substance like the Confervee which float on stagnant pools of
fresh water. \ Every part of St. Jago, which we had an opportunity
of visiting, wore so parched and sterile an appearance,
that Churchill might have observed of this place with
more truth than of Scotland,
“ Earth clad in russet scorns the lively green.”
In fact, a drought of three years continuance, and consequent
famine- for almost the same period, had nearly desolated the
island. While we remained here, daily accounts were received
k 2