Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 3.djvu/145

FERNANDO-PO. 113 smaller than Sam-Thome, having an area of only 60 square miles. The surface, somewhat uniform in the north, rises rapidly southwards, attaining in the chief peak a height of 2,700 feet. The copious rains falling on this " garden of Africa " have clothed the slopes with dense forests, and fuj-rowed them with " as many streamlets as there are days in the year" (F. Travassos Valdez). The atmosphere, however, is less healthy than in the southern islands, and especially in Annobon, Principe lying altogether beyond the influence of the relatively cool equatorial current. Cultivated by slave labour from the first period of the Portuguese occupation, it soon developed extensive sugar plantations, but derived its chief importance from its depot of Negroes, whence the American slavers drew their supplies. At present there is scarcely any traffic, except in the little cofi:ee and cacao raised on the northern slope. The natives, almost exclusively blacks, who call themselves Portuguese and Catholics, have decreased from nearly five thousand in the middle of the century, to little over half that number. Nearly all reside on the north-east coast, in the little pori of Santo Antonio, near a well-sheltered bay. Fernando- Po. The island, which has preserved under the Spanish form of Fernando-Po the name of its Portuguese discoverer, Fernao do Poo, is at once the largest and finest of the volcanic chain intersecting the Gulf of Guinea. The surface, about 830 square miles in extent, is mostly mountainous, rising gradually from the periphery to the cloud-capped central cone (10,000 feet), which is known to the English as Clarence Peak, and to the Spaniards as the Pico Santa Isabel. The island presents the form of an elongated parallelogram disposed in the direction from north-east to south-west, and terminating on all four sides in steep cliffs and escarpments broken here and there onl}^ by a few gently sloping circular inlets. Seafarers navigating the strait, some 18 miles wide, flowing between Fernjindo- Po and the African mainland, contemplate in fine weather one of the grandest, spectacles on the surface of the globe. They pass through a superb gateway, formed on one side by the Kameroons with its wooded hills, rugged peaks, and snow-flecked cone, on the other by the island of Fernando-Po, with its lofty bluffs, its slopes clothed in verdure from base to summit, its perfectly regular volcano overtopping all. This noble approach to the inner Gulf of Guinea would be as famous as the Strait of Gibraltar or the Bosphorus, if like them it led to a busy inland sea or to a great capital, instead of to desert coastlands fringed only with wretched hamlets. Unlike the other Austral Atlantic lands, Fernando-Po is not an oceanic island, for its northern section rests on the pedestal which forms the circuit of the continent. The intervening strait has an extreme depth of only 290 feet, and on both sides the marine bed rises rapidly towards the strand. The submerged plateau extends for some distance to the east and west of the island ; then the sounding-line suddenly plunges into deep abysses, revealing depths of over 550 fathoms a little to the south of Fernando-Po. The quadrangular mass is thus