Mous hurricane, the funnels and masts of the hapless Columbia, which
lies still on the top of the sunken floating clock, immovable, as
yet, by the art of man. But some hundred yards on our right was a low
cliff, which was even more interesting to some of us than either the
town or the wreck; for it was
covered with the first tropic vegetation which we had ever seen.
Already on a sandy beach outside, we had caught sight of unmistakable
coconut trees;
some of them, however, dying, dead, even snapped short off, either
by the force of the hurricane, or by the ravages of the beetle, which
seems minded of late years to
exterminate the coconut throughout the West Indies; belonging, we are
told, to the Elaters--fire-fly,
or skipjack beetles. His grub, like
that of his cousin, our English wire-worm, and his nearer cousin, the
great wire-worm of the sugar-cane, eats into the pith and marrow of
growing shoots; and as the palm, being an endogen, increases
from within by one bud, and therefore by one shoot only, when that is
eaten out nothing remains for the tree but to die. And so it happens
that almost every coconut grove which we have
seen has a sad and shabby look as if it existed (which it really
does) merely on sufferance. But
on this cliff we could see, even with the naked eye, tall Al
