Contrast of St. Lucia and St. Helena

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Contrast of St. Lucia and St. Helena

St. Helena offers guests a unique feeling of the Old Colonial Style of living. This beautiful beach house is nested within lush tropical gardens and the white sandy shores of our prestigious West Coast beaches, and has the unusual addition of an aviary housing 250 homing budgerigars. Designed by the late Oliver Messel with recent renovations by local renowned architect Larry Warren, St. Helena is tastefully and comfortably furnished with everything you should need to make you feel right at home.

Downstairs has two delightful sitting rooms that lead out onto a covered dining patio, which overlooks the garden on the sea side of the house. Also on this level are two air conditioned bedrooms with en suite bathrooms, an al fresco dining area with a pool deck and bar entertaining areas. The pool deck is partly covered and features fountains carved from the islands natural coral stone.

Upstairs has three bedrooms, including the spacious master bedroom with a luxurious canopied bed and private sitting room/study, named the "Napoleon Room". All upstairs rooms open to a spectacular semi-circular verandah equipped with a bar and relaxing lounge area, which overlooks our lush tropical gardens and the charming Caribbean Sea.

There is excellent swimming in front of St. Helena, and an alfresco dining gazebo located in the gardens between the house and the beach.

At St. Helena our Staff are dedicated to making your holiday an enjoyable one. Their aim is to make your visit to St. Helena and our beautiful island a relaxing island getaway.

In order to emphasize the inference stated at the end of the second preceding section, a direct comparison may be made between St. Lucia and St. Helena, to supplement the general comparison already drawn between marginal-belt and cool-seas islands. The comparison shows that these two islands are strongly contrasted as to the relations of stream erosion and wave abrasion exhibited by them. On the one hand, St. Helena is submaturely dissected by relatively narrow, steep-sided valleys of rapid fall and considerable depth in their lower courses; yet all of them but the largest have hanging mouths in the mature sea cliffs girting the island to heights of 1000 or 1500 feet.

St. Lucia on the other hand, is in a late mature stage of dissection but in an early stage of abrasion. Its valleys are broadly opened, and although their upper courses are rather steep, their fall next inland from the delta plains of their embayed lower courses is of moderate declivity. Its cliffs are of small dimensions; even if the ocean were lowered to the level at which it is supposed to have stood during the Glacial epochs, the spur-end cliffs, in spite of the increased height and length thus acquired, would still be relatively subordinate features and would demand a much shorter period for their rapid retrogressive abrasion than that demanded for the very leisurely widening of the valleys.

The two features are clearly not commensurate. The combination of late mature valleys and of immature cliffs which St. Lucia presents therefore calls for a special explanation, under which its coast shall have been protected from wave attack during the greater part of its history. Inasmuch as this island is situated near the warm seas, there is no way of providing former protection for its coast so reasonably as by the upgrowth of a great barrier-reef breakwater.

On the other hand, a comparison of St. Lucia with such islands as Matuku in Fiji and Borabora in the Society group--the first in about the same stage of late mature dissection as St. Lucia, the second in a more advanced stage--brings out another contrast; for those islands, like others in the coral seas, have no spur-end cliffs--a fact which implies that they have always, or at least since their early youth, been reefprotected. Let it be noted that identity of rock resistance on all these islands is not essential in the comparisons here instituted, for variations of resistance from island to island will not significantly affect the relation between stream work and wave work on any one island. If the rocks of an island are so weak that the valleys are rapidly excavated, the cliffs will be rapidly cut back; and if the rocks of another island are so resistant that the valleys are slowly excavated, the cliffs will be slowly cut back.

Hence these islands of the Pacific coral seas show that if St. Lucia had always been as well reef-protected as they have been, its headlands would not have even the moderate cliffs that they now show: conversely, St. Helena shows that if St. Lucia had always been without reef protection as it has been, the St. Lucia headlands would have been much more strongly cliffed than they now are. In a word, St. Lucia, like the other members of the Lesser Antilles, lies in the marginal belt of the Atlantic coral seas, where it has been much better protected by encircling reefs in Preglacial and Interglacial times than it is now and yet was wholly unprotected during the Glacial epochs.

Another lesson may be drawn from the comparison between St. Lucia and St. Helena. The latter island, which according to Daly is of Preglacial origin, must have experienced low-level erosion during all the Glacial epochs; and yet its valleys, excepting one or two or the largest, were not then deepened enough to be embayed by the Postglacial rise of the ocean to its normal level. Indeed, most of the valleys still have hanging mouths at a considerable altitude above present ocean level.

Hence the broad embayments of St. Lucia cannot possibly represent valleys that were excavated only by low-level erosion during the Glacial epochs. Their excavation must have been accomplished chiefly by prolonged erosion with respect to normal ocean level; and their embayment must be due not simply to Postglacial ocean rise but to island subsidence, as has already been announced. This comparison, however, unlike the two preceding comparisons, tacitly implies a similarity in the resistance of the lavas of St. Lucia and St. Helena, which is not proved to be the case.

On the other hand, it is altogether improbable that the resistance of their lavas is so unlike as to have permitted the deep excavation of the late mature valleys of St. Lucia during the same period of low-level erosion that left the submature valleys of St. Helena hanging even above normal ocean level. Thus, from various points of view, the conclusions above presented seem satisfactory.