I Myself Do Not Believe That This Island Was Ever
Connected With The Continent, But Arose From The Ocean As The Result
Of A Terrific Upheaval In The Chain Of Volcanic Activity Which Runs
Across The Atlantic From The Cameroon Mountains In A SSW.
Direction
to Anno Bom island, and possibly even to the Tristan da Cunha group
midway between the Cape and South America.
These volcanic islands are all of extreme beauty and fertility.
They consist of Fernando Po (10,190 ft.); Principe (3000 ft.); San
Thome (6,913 ft.); and Anno Bom (1,350 ft.). San Thome and Principe
are Portuguese possessions, Fernando Po and Anno Bom Spanish, and
they are all exceedingly unhealthy. San Thome is still called "The
Dutchman's Church-yard," on account of the devastation its climate
wrought among the Hollanders when they once occupied it; as they
seem, at one time or another, to have occupied all Portuguese
possessions out here, during the long war these two powers waged
with each other for supremacy in the Bights, a supremacy that
neither of them attained to. Principe is said to be the most
unhealthy, and the reason of the difference in this particular
between Principe and Anno Bom is said to arise from the fact that
the former is on the Guinea Current - a hot current - and Anno Bom on
the Equatorial, which averages 10 degree cooler than its neighbour.
The shores of San Thome are washed by both currents, and the
currents round Fernando Po are in a mixed and uncertain state. It
is difficult, unless you have haunted these seas, to realise the
interest we take down there in currents; particularly when you are
navigating small sailing boats, a pursuit I indulge in necessarily
from my fishing practices. Their effect on the climate too is very
marked. If we could only arrange for some terrific affair to take
place in the bed of the Atlantic, that would send that precious
Guinea current to the place it evidently comes from, and get the
cool Equatorial alongside the mainland shore, West Africa would be
quite another place.
Fernando Po is the most important island as regards size on the West
African coast, and at the same time one of the most beautiful in the
world. It is a great volcanic mass with many craters, and
culminates in the magnificent cone, Clarence Peak, called by the
Spaniards, Pico de Santa Isabel, by the natives of the island O
Wassa. Seen from the sea or from the continent it looks like an
immense single mountain that has floated out to sea. It is visible
during clear weather (and particularly sharply visible in the
strange clearness you get after a tornado) from a hundred miles to
seawards, and anything more perfect than Fernando Po when you sight
it, as you occasionally do from far-away Bonny Bar, in the sunset,
floating like a fairy island made of gold or of amethyst, I cannot
conceive. It is almost equally lovely at close quarters, namely
from the mainland at Victoria, nineteen miles distant.
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