The crater in Mont Pelee is silent now; the great vent which hurled white-hot rocks, incandescent dust and mephitic gases, is now covered with a thick green shrubbery, only here and there do small smoke-holes emit a light sulphurous vapor; but the great mountain, treeless, wrinkled, implacable, seemed to Stuart to throw a solemn shadow of threat upon the town. The secret of St. Pierre, as Stuart wrote to his paper, "lies in the hope of its inhabitants, but its real future lies in the parole of good conduct from the Great Eater of Human Lives, Mont Pelee." CHAPTER XII A CORSAIR'S DEATH There is not a corner of the world which is more full of historic memories than is the West Indies. Dominica, the next island which Stuart passed after he had left Martinique, besides being one of the scenic glories of the world, described as "a tabernacle for the sun, a shrine of a thousand spires, rising tier above tier, in one exquisite fabric of green, purple and grey," has many claims to fame. Here, the cannibal Caribs were so fierce that for 255 years they defied the successive fleets of Spaniards, French and English who tried to take possession of the island. Some three hundred Caribs still dwell upon the island upon a reservation provided by the government. The warriors no longer make war, and fish has taken the place of the flesh of their enemies as a staple diet. Under the cliffs of Dominica is a memory of the Civil War, for there the Confederate vessel _Alabama_ finally escaped the Federal man-of-war _Iroquois_. A few miles further north, between Dominica and Guadeloupe, in The Saints Passage, was fought, in 1782, the great sea-battle between Rodney and De Grasse, which ended in the decisive victory of the English over the French and gave Britain the mastery of the Caribbean Sea. It ranks as one of the great historic sea-fights of the world. The next island on the direct line to the north, St. Kitts, is not destitute of fame. As Cecil had told Stuart, St. Kitts or St. Christopher was first a home for buccaneers, and later one of the keys to the military occupation of the West Indies. Its neighbor, St. Nevis, together with other claims to romance, has a special interest to the United States in that Alexander Hamilton--perhaps one of the greatest of American statesmen--was born there.