M. Scott, Tom Cringle’s Log, 1917, p. 105 “The appearance of the town itself was novel and pleasing; the houses chiefly of two storeys, looked as if they had been built of cards, most of them surrounded by piazzas from ten to fourteen feet wide, gaily painted green and white and formed by the roofs projecting beyond the brick walls or shells of houses. On the ground-floor these piazzas are open, and in the lower part of the town, where the houses are built contiguous to each other, they form a covered way, affording the most graceful shelter from the sun, on each side of the streets, which last are unpaved, and more like dry-river courses, than thoroughfares in a Christian town. On the floor above, the balconies are shut in with a sort of moveable blinds called “jalousies,” with large-bladed Venetian blinds fixed in frames, with here and there a glazed sash to admit light in bad weather when the blinds are closed. In the upper part of the town the effect is very beautiful, every house standing detached from its neighbours in its little garden filled with vines, fruit-trees, stately palms and cocoa-nut trees, with a court of negro houses and offices behind, and a patriarchal draw-well in the centre, generally overshadowed by a magnificent tamarind. When I arrived at the great merchant’s place of business I was shown into a lofty, cool room, with a range of desks along the walls where a dozen clerks were quill-driving.”