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The Aberrant Island of Barbados Blue Seas of Barbados Art Print Buy at AllPosters.com Barbados, 19 by 10 miles across, and 1104 feet high, of which I had a good sight during a brief visit, will now be shown to exhibit even more peculiar features; indeed, in several respects it falls entirely outside of the scheme, just as its eastward position places it somewhat outside of the Lesser Antillean chain; it belongs in a class by itself. According to Harrison and Jukes-Brownell the island contains no volcanic rocks but is composed for the most part of strongly deformed and much eroded strata, mostly sandstones and mudstones, apparently an upheaved part of a continental shelf that was formed when northeastern South America extended farther into the Atlantic. As thus constituted, the island must have once been decidedly higher and larger than now, for its deformed strata show no signs of giving out as they approach the coast. Its decrease of altitude was in part due to erosion, but decrease of area as well as of altitude was also caused by subsidence, even to the point of disappearance; for the older rocks are unconformably covered by a thin cloak of calcareous beds containing pelagic fossils, thus indicating that the island was completely submerged for a time. This subsidence was followed by upheaval; and, during successive pauses in the resulting emergence, the expanding shores of the resurgent island were benched by a series of late Tertiary and Pleistocene fringing reefs, now seen in a series of terraces rising in low and broad steps to a height of 1040 feet and covering six-sevenths of the island surface. A fringing reef is formed along the present shore, and a bank surrounds the island with a breadth of one or two miles and with a marginal depth of about 50 fathoms; it bears a slightly submerged bank-barrier reef which extends for ten miles parallel to the southeast coast about halfway from the shore to the bank margin, with a depth of from 7 to 10 fathoms; the lagoon thus imperfectly enclosed has depths of from 20 to 27 fathoms. Geologically as well, Barbados appears to stand apart from the other islands of the West Indies. It contains no volcanic rock but has a core of strongly folded sandstones and dark sandy clays overlain by deep beds of calcareous and silicious marine deposits, which, in turn, over six-sevenths of the surface are covered with coral limestone. The highest point (1104 feet) is in a range of rounded hills near the center of the island. Coral reefs fringe the east, west, and south shores, in places extending three miles out to sea. The soil, though shallow, is of high fertility and has a considerable element of volcanic material, presumably from Soufrière on St. Vincent, from which during the eruption of 1902 -- which occurred synchronously with that of Mt. Pelèe on Guadeloupe -- ashes fell on all parts of the island. Originally Barbados was largely covered with forest, chiefly mahogany, locust, and fustic, but now is almost completely under cultivation. Owing to the porous character of the coralline surface, there are no surface streams of any account, and water is obtained from subterranean channels and wells. The absence of shore cliffs, even along the northeast coast where no reef terraces are present, is more difficult to understand here than in the case of St. Croix; for Barbados, lying to the east of the Lesser Antilles, should have had, as will later appear more clearly, less protection from coral growth during the Glacial epochs of lowered ocean level than the islands already described; and, as it is a rising island, the cliffs then cut should today be more exposed to view than on the members of the Lesser Antillean chain that are supposed to be subsiding islands. It does not seem possible that Barbados escaped being cliffed by being completely submerged in the Glacial period; for the terracing reefs by which it is now covered are of too great a total thickness to have been formed wholly in Postglacial time. It is perhaps possible that the cliffs that were cut by the lowered ocean around the rising island have been partly masked by the addition of later fringing reefs in front of them, the unconcealed top of the cliffs being mistaken for normal fringing-reef fronts. The failure to find these cliffs in the older rocks on the northeastern slope of the island, where the terracing reefs are absent over a stretch of several miles, may be due to their having been destroyed by later erosion, just as the cliffs that must have been cut on that unprotected side of the island while fringing reefs were forming around the other sides have been destroyed. But these suggestions have rather the nature of plausible excuses than of valid explanations; it must be recognized that Barbados does not fit into the scheme that accounts so well for the other islands. CLIMATE The climate is healthful. The temperature, tempered during eight months of the year by the northeast trades, is remarkably constant. The mean annual temperature at Bridgetown is 79.6° F., with the mean temperature for the hottest month (August) 81° F. and for the coolest month (February) 77.8° F. The average annual rainfall for the island is about 621/2, inches. June to November is the rainy season, with September the rainiest month. The driest months, which are also the cool months, are March, April, and the beginning of May. The island is in the path of the West Indian hurricanes and has suffered disastrously on a number of occasions. Home