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half-circle back to Hadrah bridge. Hounds got very close to him here, as he dwelt for a few seconds in some beans. He then broke out on the east side but swung round left-handed and pointed his mask for Muennis Woods.

Hounds were pressing him very hard and evidently his heart failed him, so he swung right-handed and made for the crops where we first found him. Hounds were now running by view

and coursed their now dead-beat jack, gaining on him yard by yard. They were within a few yards of him when he dropped into a trench and went to ground.

Bint was put down and we found our jack only to be about 4 feet down. Ten minutes digging with sticks and old Wisdom drew him in fine style. He was an exceptionally fine big dog jackal.

ENVOI.

The original "field" is scattered far and wide. The Master will re-read these snatches from his hunting diary in a camp on the North-West Frontier. Our ruddy-faced whip, scion of a line famous alike in the battleand the hunting-field, is joint master of a pack in the south of India. The General, our genial field - master, holds an important command at home, but sighs, I fancy, for those runs in the grass country of the Holy Land.

D another whip, gets his sport (for wherever he goes, you may be sure there is hunting of some kind) across the sandy stretches of Upper Egypt.

Many are back again at peace-time jobs: lawyering one; another tutoring infant rajahs; a third patching up invalids, in his best bedside manner, at a spa; Bravida, your "easy-writin' cove," blow

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ing up dud ammunition in a slummy little station with no foxhounds for miles, and no horse to ride (in these economyaxe days) if there were.

But they are linked for ever to Sharon's plain by a mask or a brush proudly displayed over the study-door, and by mighty hunting talks at the annual dinner, when those who followed the Armageddon Hunt get together again.

And the hunt goes on. Such a seed, once planted, grows steady and strong. As long

as there are soldiers or exsoldiers serving in Palestine, horses to ride, and fox and jackal sunning themselves on the hillsides of Sharon, there will be hunting in the Holy Land, and the plains where Joshua and his men smote the Amorites will ring with the crash of music as the successors of the Armageddon Hunt "roll him over."

SIR THOMAS WARNER AND ST CHRISTOPHER.

BY JAMES A. WILLIAMSON.

ON 28th January 1624 Thomas Warner and seventeen Englishmen landed on St Christopher and founded the first permanent English colony in the Caribbean Sea-the pioneer of those fair plantations which played so great a part in the national economy for two hundred years, and helped so largely to build up the mercantile wealth and maritime power of Great Britain. Many of the circumstances attending the origin of this enterprise have remained obscure, and even its date has been mistaken. In January 1923 the people of St Christopher carried out a public celebration of their tercentenary; but, as will be shown, they did so not three hundred years but two hundred and ninety-nine years after the event.

The islands of the Lesser Antilles were discovered by Columbus in the course of his second and third voyages to the West. But the Spaniards never attempted occupation. They were by instinct goldhunters rather than planters, and also the warlike Caribs of the island chain were much too formidable for their liking. So the Spaniards passed on treasure-seeking to the West, and left the smaller islands to their successors. These latter, the English and the French, were

by no means quick to seize the advantage. The Huguenot rovers and the followers of Drake were well acquainted with the Windward and Leeward groups. Yet during the whole sixteenth century they made no attempt at settlement. The French made their first experiments on the mainland of America; and Englishmen also, when they turned their thoughts to colonisation, followed the counsels of Ralegh, attempting Virginia and Guiana, but neglecting the beautiful Caribbees. The first generation of English colonists indeed followed two will-o'-the-wisps, the westward passage to Asia and the golden empire of Manoa. The first they hoped to attain through Chesapeake Bay, and the second by way of the Orinoco and the Guiana rivers. Only when these hopes had died did the true basis of English colonisation reveal itself— the pursuit of solid gain by the plantation of tobacco and other products. Virginia, after years of profitless misery, began to ship tobacco in 1613, and Bermuda shortly followed her example. It was, however, from another tobacco enterprise that the colonisation of the Caribbees took its origin.

In 1619-the year following that of Ralegh's executionthere was a change in the

balance of parties at the English Court, and the pro-Spanish faction, which had hunted Ralegh to his death, was temporarily driven from power. Taking advantage of this, a body of peers and courtiers obtained from James I. permission to found a colony in the delta of the river Amazon, a region claimed by Portugal, whose throne was then in the possession of the King of Spain. The leading spirit of the enterprise was Captain Roger North, one of the officers of Ralegh's last expedition, and he became the governor of the new corporation, which styled itself the Amazon Company, and obtained its letters patent from the Crown in September 1619.

North intended to go in person to the Amazon, and spent the winter in making preparations for a departure early in the following year. By April 1620 he was ready, with his ships lying at Plymouth and his crews engaged. Meanwhile the aspect of politics had changed once more. Spanish agents and pensioners were busy at Court, and the Spanish ambassador, Count Gondomar, absent when the Company had been chartered, had returned to reassert his ascendancy over the vacillating mind of James. The result was that the king refused North permission to sail, an evident preliminary to the cancellation of the whole enterprise. North, however, was a resolute man. Seeing the trend of affairs, he acted in the tradition of Drake. On

30th April 1620 he sailed from Plymouth without permission. With him as a gentlemanadventurer went Thomas Warner, a Suffolk man of good family and a friend of John Winthrop, who nine years later was to found the colony of Massachusetts.

The expedition reached the Amazon without mishap, ascended the main channel past the Cabo do Norte, and anchored at the head of the delta. There the adventurers built a fort and established a tobacco plantation, whilst their pinnace pushed up the great river far into the interior. At the end of the year North returned to England with a first cargo of tobacco. Disaster awaited him. He found the Company dissolved, its charter confiscated, James in a wrathful mood, and Gondomar demanding the head of the chief delinquent. He expiated his offence by passing the greater part of 1621 in the Tower, and was only released on promising to attempt no more voyages to South America.

The settlers on the Amazon were thus cut off from communication with England, and the corporation which was to have supported them had ceased to exist. Nevertheless they persevered in their plantation, selling their tobacco to casual Dutch traders who sometimes visited the colony. This could not have been very satisfactory, for we may infer that the Dutchmen, having the whiphand, must have traded on such terms as secured most of

the profit to themselves. Gon- island where a handful of colondomar also pursued the colony relentlessly. The Portuguese were already established at Pará, on the eastern side of the delta; and in 1622-3 he sent out orders for the English settlement to be attacked and destroyed. The Captain of Pará accordingly gathered a force of white men and Indians in canoes, and at some time in 1623 raided North's plantation, together with some Dutch posts in other parts of the delta. The English fort was taken, and, although most of its occupants escaped into the interior, they returned to find their buildings and crops ruined. Tobacco-planting on the Amazon was evidently destined to be an uncertain business.

Thomas Warner took this view, decided that the game was not worth the candle, and determined to try his fortune elsewhere. He had heard a good account of the smaller Antilles from a comrade who had been there, and in 1622 or 1623 he quitted the Amazon with a few associates and made a tour through the Windward and Leeward Islands, seeking for a favourable spot. What What ship they sailed in and how they obtained her we do not know. The exact dates of these events are also not recoverable, and it is not absolutely certain whether the departure took place before or after the Portuguese raid, although the former is more likely to be the truth.

Warner was looking for an

ists could plant tobacco in reasonable security. It needed to be remote from the Spaniards and Portuguese, its natives few and inoffensive, its soil and water-supply good, and its anchorage safe. Grenada and the large Windward Islands would not serve, for they contained multitudes of Caribs, and were, moreover, right in the track of the Spanish fleets outward bound to the Main and the Gulf of Mexico. Barbados was uninhabited, and would have suited the adventurers' purpose very well, but they seem not to have known of its advantages. It lay well to windward of the main chain of islands, and, although occasionally visited, its position was not accurately laid down upon the maps of the period. When John Powell landed there in 1625 it was to the English virtually a new discovery, but to that we shall refer later. Warner therefore pushed on to the northward, and entered the Leeward group. How many

of its units he examined does not appear, but he found what he sought in the island of St Christopher, so named by the Spanish explorers more than a century before.

The main portion of St Christopher is an oval with its longer axis running from west-northwest to east-south-east. То the latter end an irregular outlier is connected by a long and narrow isthmus, the whole roughly suggesting a tadpole with a knot tied in the end of

its tail. The prevailing wind is the north-east Trade, so that the south-west or leeward coast, although lacking enclosed harbours, provided shelter for small ships except during the hurricane season of the year. A ridge of mountains formed the backbone of the island, and between them and the leeward shore was a fertile tract watered by several streams. The appendage to the island's tail was low-lying and contained salt-ponds, then a valuable mercantile commodity. Spanish navigators commonly avoided the Leeward group, the passage through the Windwards being less intricate. The only disadvantage of St Christopher was the presence of a small tribe of Caribs ruled by a chief named Togreman.

Warner struck up a friendship with the chieftain, and remained as his guest for some time, his purpose being to explore the island and test the quality of its soil for tobaccoplanting. Then, in the latter part of 1623, he and his party sailed for England to enlist recruits and financial support for the founding of a settlement.

Tobacco was a very favourable commodity upon which to start a plantation. It was still something of a novelty in Europe, where the demand exceeded the supply, so that prices continued for some years to be high enough to yield a handsome profit. Also, its cultivation required no expensive equipment, in which respect it

differed from sugar. A seventeenth-century writer calculated that one man working on favourable soil could grow, cure, and roll about a ton of leaf in a year, besides producing the foodstuffs necessary for his own support. The market price in England in 1623 was 5s. or more per lb., of which the duties accounted for less than a shilling. A good business, therefore, awaited the enterprising planter. The method of establishing a colony in the islands was for the principals to enlist a few agricultural labourers apiece, engaging them as servants indentured to work for a term of years (usually five) in consideration of the payment of their passage to the colony and their maintenance whilst in service. At the end of his time the indentured servant became a free labourer, or might secure some vacant land and set up as a planter in his turn. In this manner St Christopher and Barbados and other islands speedily became populated when once the initial steps had been taken. The recruitment of negro slaves required more capital, and was uncommon during the first twenty years. Their introduction on a large scale into the islands coincided with the adoption of sugar as a staple crop after 1640, when large estates and gang labour superseded the small holdings and petty capitalism of the tobacco period.

Warner was evidently in England-precise dates are lacking

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