Statia and St. Kitts, Nevis

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Statia and St. Kitts, Nevis

Ocho Rios, Jamaica, West Indies, Central America Photographic Print
Pitamitz, Sergio
12 in. x 9 in.
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Framed Mounted

The next example includes three composite islands that rise from a single bank, 47 miles in length. I landed on the middle member, St. Kitts, and drove around its younger cones; the southern member, Nevis, was well seen from passing steamers: The northwestern member, Statia, properly St. Eustatius, was seen only in the distance. The last-named island is a volcanic doublet consisting of two cones of unlike age. A rough outline of Statia, as seen through hazy air from the northwest end of St. Kitts: the huge inclined slabs of limestone, known as the "White Wall," on the shore of the cone, appear to have been lifted up from a preëxistent submarine bank when the volcano was formed.

The older cone of Statia is now a well dissected mass, a mile or more in diameter and 960 feet high, with a somewhat irregular and moderately cliffed shore line. It is overlapped on the southern side by the younger cone, two or three miles in diameter and 1950 feet high; the long concave slopes of this cone resemble those of Center Hill on Montserrat but are less dissected and less cut back along their shore. According to Molengraaff,15 the younger cone bears on its southern side some huge monoclinal slabs of limestone, known as the "White Wall," containing shallow-water fossils and rising with strong inclination to a height of 900 feet. From this as well as from the moderate inclination of its basal slopes, one may infer that the younger volcano was built up on a bank of calcareous deposits that had already been formed in association with the older volcano.

Similarly, St. Kitts, formally named St. Christopher and colloquially reduced to "Singkits," consists in its older southeastern part of six or eight small volcanic residuals, whose area is too small to show embayed valley heads but whose slopes pitch into the sea in a manner betokening advanced erosion while they stood higher than now and abrasion when the ocean was lower than now: they are attached to one another by sea-level beaches and occupy a stretch six miles in length over all. Adjoining them on the northwest is a group of lofty young volcanoes occupying an area of 12 by 5 miles, the highest rising to an altitude of 4314 feet. Here the steep upper slopes, verdant with well-watered vegetation, are sharply trenched by close-set valley heads, while their gentler lower slopes, which, like the similar slopes of Statia, suggest the preëxistence of a bank on which the lavas and agglomerates of the lofty young cones were spread out, are moderately incised by the lower courses of the same valleys, there shallower and wider-spaced. The shore is cut back in low, ragged cliffs but is without valley embayments.

According to Cleve, 16 large slabs of limestone bearing shallowwater marine fossils cloak the flanks of Mt. Brimstone, a small parasitic cone on the west side of one of the higher cones; hence here again, as in the case of Statia, it may be inferred that a bank had been formed in association with the older volcanic residuals before the younger cones were built. As the bank is continuous over the island-free stretch between the younger parts of Statia and St. Kitts, it is probable that it is there based on several completely submerged volcanic masses. Basseterre, the chief town of St. Kitts, lies on the southern slope of the young cones, its open roadstead being protected from the trade-wind swell by the beach-tied volcanic residuals on the east.

Finally, Nevis, the southeasternmost of the three composite islands here considered, consists of three mature residuals of earlier eruption and erosion, between and above which a younger cone of much later origin has been built up. It is of wonderfully graceful form, the finest island of its kind in the Lesser Antilles. The steep but slightly furrowed slopes of its verdant crater rim, which rises to a height of 3596 feet, descend toward the shore with ever decreasing declivity, little cut by radial consequent streams in spite of the frequent cloud-cap showers at the stream heads. The shore line is of simple oval contour, five by seven miles in diameter, very slightly cut back here and there in bluffs a few feet in height.

The maturely carved residual, Cone Peak, on the east of the crater summit is higher than the others; it is completely inwrapped in the flanks of the younger cone; the second, Saddle Hill, on the south, of medium height, is inwrapped on three sides but reaches the sea on the fourth, where it is cut back in cliffs a hundred feet or more in height; the third, the lowest of the three, forms a salient on the north coast where it advances toward the beach-tied residuals of St. Kitts, the nearest of which is only a few miles distant. Although Nevis has no uplifted bank limestones, the very gentle (declivity of its lower slopes suggests, as already intimated, that it was built up from a shallow sea bottom; its contrast in this respect with the steeper slopes of Saba and of the Montserrat Soufrières, which have no bank around them and which therefore must have been built up from deep water, is certainly significant.

The bank from which these three composite islands rise extends two miles northwest of Statia and ten miles south of Nevis, with a total length of 47 miles, a breadth of eight or ten miles, and a marginal depth of 30 or 40 fathoms. Its trend is sympathetic with that of the Lesser Antilles as a whole and with that of the axes of the elongated volcanic islands, like Guadeloupe, Dominica, and several others. Saba stands in line with it, not far to the northwest.

Hence, as already suggested, the bank is thought to have been built up as a reef-enclosed lagoon floor in association with a subsiding series of earlier volcanic islands, some of which appear to be wholly submerged in the island-free stretch between Statia and St. Kitts and in the southern end of the bank beyond Nevis; and, as in the case of the Saints, the bank here is believed to have recently lost its enclosing reef by low-level abrasion.

The younger volcanoes appear to have been piled up on the bank in Glacial or Postglacial time. Discontinuous reefs are charted on the bank near some of the islands; one fringes the northeast coast of St. Kitts for two miles; another resembles a submerged barrier reef, as it extends with a depth of six or eight fathoms for 15 miles along the northeast border of the bank from St. Kitts to Nevis and encloses depths of 10 or 12 fathoms.