These were spread out upon the sand, and an more brilliant piscatorial picture I never saw before, but such variety and beauty in a fish market I saw again and again in the markets of the Windward Islands. The fish were of all shapes and sizes, from a hideous shark to the graceful and beautiful bonita. There were the parrot-fish, a gray-blue and yellow fish that looked like a drowned “Polly,” with watery eye; the gar-fish, two feet long, as slender as a lance-blade, clothed in gleaming silver, and with a long black bill like a bird’s, which is set with rows of fine pointed teeth; there was the butter fish, and the redsnapper, and the gauze-winged flying fish, and the beautiful angel fish, with its delicate arrangements of scales of pearl and silver and bronze and gold. Curious eels of vast size lay coiled like serpents in boxes … and crabs of all sizes and colors, and forty other strange and wonderful dwellers in the sea. Dozens of men and women, squatting or kneeling in the sand, were chaffering and chattering, and handling and weighing, and selling and buying.
Excerpted from Cruising Among the Caribbees: Summer Days in Winter Months by Charles Augustus Stoddard. Published by Charles Scribner & Sons, New York, 1895.