TOWN INSIDE CRATER.

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 69, 15 December 1931, Page 12 (Supplement)

TOWN INSIDE CRATER.

The Bottom, a town on the Island of Saba in the Dutch West Indies, is one of the strangest and most interesting communities in the world. It is built on the crater floor of an extinct volcano and can be approached from the shore 800 feet below only by hundreds of steps in solid rock known as The Ladder. The island, which is popularly known as Napoleon’s Cocked Hat because of its shape, is merely a rocky, circular volcanic peak or cone, about five square miles in area and rising abruptly from the sea to a height of 2800 feet. It lies about 18 miles northwest of St. Eustatius in the Leeward group, and like that island is a dependency of the Dutch colony of Curacao, although the inhabitants, who number about 2000, are practically independent, being exempt from taxation by the Dutch and having the privilege of electing their own governor. The Sabans speak English and are said to be the descendants of British, Dutch, and Scandinavian sailors and boat carpenters who settled there during the 17th century, when the island was used as a base by pirates. Many members of this Interesting community are seamen at the present time. The others subsist by cultivating fruits, vegetables. Boats made In The Bottom are said to be the best in the Caribbeans. The Island has no harbour where a vessel can anchor with safejy, and the boats, some of which attain almost the proportions of small ships, are made inside the crater of wood Imported from other Islands and carried laboriously up The Ladder. When they are completed they are hoisted over the rim of the crater and lowered over the sheer cliff into the tropical sea below. All Sabans are known by their first names because every person on the island has the same surname—Simonds.