The rich prospects of Britain's Caribbean colonies inspired Janet Schaw and her contemporaries to paint verbal pictures of West Indian landscapes. By the mid-1770s scenic tourism was gaining momentum among Britons with the means and leisure to travel in search of the perfect view. The scenic tour peaked in the 1790s and the first decade of the nineteenth century as a practice and a genre of writing. At this point it is worth examining in some detail the conventions of this peculiar practice — conventions that women writers would disrupt and creatively redefine. Good taste in landscape was a widely accepted means of displaying one's polite imagination (remember Austen's Henry Tilney strutting his cultural capital for Catherine Morland as he initiates her into the picturesque). Like the other pleasures valued by the man of taste, proper landscape appreciation took a good deal for granted: a high degree of literacy; an acquaintance with writings on aesthetics and works of literature; access to paintings, or at least engravings; and the mobility to examine and compare different views. Such stringent requirements obviously limited this species of taste to a relatively tiny elite. Women of the aristocracy and middle classes had the means, mobility, and to some degree the education needed to develop a taste in landscape.