‘… [Rose?] seems to think anything better than an open rupture with the State, as sure to entail loss of caste on the clergy. Few men can receive the saying that the clergy have no need to be gentlemen…. ‘… We have just left St. Christopher’s; it is the most beautiful of any of the islands I have yet seen. Mount Miserere is quite fine; a precipitous granite crag, quite bare, and of a very great height, rising out of the rich woods with which the mountain is clothed up to the top, and stooping over a very deep hollow, which has once been the crater of a volcano. I should have liked much to get up there, but had not time, and besides, they say it is very difficult. The people here seem to have very little curiosity: in fact, few tastes except acquisitiveness…. I see the papers have begun to talk; addresses to the Archbishop are said to be pouring in. I wish I could get my lungs right again to make preachments, and give the Yanks a talking over. We shall be back at Barbados the second week in March, and about then the weather in New York brightens up. I think I have made up my mind not to be in England till the latter end of May, whatever news we have, so I shall certainly have time on my hands, and if I can’t preach I can prose; so I may as well go at any rate. Do ply the people with Tracts on the “safest course” principle: the more I think of it, the more important it seems as the intellectual basis of Church authority…. We have now got a north-west wind, which a few years since would have been almost a miracle in these latitudes. It is generally said that the trade-winds are becoming yearly more irregular, and have been for this last fifty years. It will make a curious change if they cease altogether; certainly nothing can be more irregular than we have had them, both in quantity and direction; it goes from a storm to a calm in no time, and the other night went all round the compass. This puts me in mind of an adventure we had the other evening at Nevis. There is no harbour there, but only a beach to land on, and sometimes a heavy surf. We landed in the morning, in still weather. In the course of the day it came to blow on shore, and we had to embark in the dark, in a very heavy sea breaking on the sands most furiously. The Bishop slept on shore, but the Commodore, the Captain, the Chaplain, and myself were carried on men’s shoulders to the boat, which was lying as near the shore as it could, in the midst of the breakers. I was put in second, and was only wetted by the water in the bottom of the boat, but the two last were fairly soused…. I am sure this stuff is not worth sending across the Atlantic.’ To WILLIAM FROUDE, Feb. 12, 1834.