Читать книгу The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism (Vol. 1-4). The History of Sea Voyages, Discovery, Piracy and Maritime Warfare онлайн

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Kingsley, speaking of the islands in general, says that he “was altogether unprepared for their beauty and grandeur.” Day after day, the steamer took him past a shifting diorama of scenery, which he likened to Vesuvius and Naples, repeated again and again, with every possible variation of the same type of delicate loveliness. Under a cloudless sky, and over the blue waters, banks of light cloud turned to violet and then to green, and then disclosed grand mountains, with the surf beating white around the base of tall cliffs and isolated rocks, and the pretty country houses of settlers embowered in foliage, and gay little villages, and busy towns. “It was easy,” says that charming writer, “in presence of such scenery, to conceive the exultation which possessed the souls of the first discoverers of the West Indies. What wonder if they seemed to themselves to have burst into fairy-land—to be at the gates of the earthly Paradise? With such a climate, such a soil, such vegetation, such fruits, what luxury must not have seemed possible to the dwellers along those shores? What riches, too, of gold and jewels, might not be hidden among those forest-shrouded glens and peaks? And beyond, and beyond again, ever new islands, new continents, perhaps, and inexhaustible wealth of yet undiscovered worlds.”112