THE STOEY OF THE CAHO^Y. 27 



must haw been near at hand and easily accessible, with available and 

 safe landings, even in winter, when the eggs were sought. Gurnet Rock 

 does not fulfill any of these conditions. It is several miles from St. 

 George's, then the chief settlement and cajDital; it stands isolated out- 

 side all the other islands, so that it is exposed to the full force of the sea 

 on all sides and in December and January the sea is always boisterous 

 in these waters ; it has no place where a boat can safely land, unless in 

 nearly calm weather and by daylight; its sides are nearly perpen- 

 dicular, exceeding rough, high cliffs, which can hardly be scaled with- 

 out risk of loss of life or limbs, unless by means of ropes and ladders. 

 Moreover the top is of very small area and almost destitute of soil. So 

 that there is no possible chance for a bird like the cahow to burrow 

 there. The writer, with two companions, visited this island about the 

 first of May of this year, on a day when the sea was not very rough, and 

 the tide was low. We found it impossible to land except by stepping 

 out upon a narrow, slippery and treacherous reef of rotten rock and 

 corallines, covered with sea-weeds, exposed only at low tide, and stand- 

 ing a little away from the shore, with deep water between. The sea was 

 breaking over this reef, and it was difficult to wade ashore except at one 

 place, on account of the depth of water. With the aid of a long pole I 

 climbed partly up the side of the rock, at the only available place, and 

 though I did not reach the summit, I could, from my highest position, 

 see that there is no soil on the top, but only a few seaside shrubs and 

 herbaceous plants, growing from crevices of the rock. This was suffi- 

 cient to convince me that the cahow never bred on this rock, and, if it 

 had, the early settlers would never have gone there in the winter and 

 at night to get the eggs or birds. 



It is far more probable that one of its breeding places was on Goat 

 Island, which is a larger, uninhabited island about half a mile inside 

 of Gurnet Eock, and with a beach of shell-sand on the inner side, where 

 boats can safelv land. Moreover on this island, in earlv times, there 

 was a deep deposit of sand and soil, which was subsequently used as a 

 burial place for soldiers who died in the old fortifications on this and 

 the adjacent Castle Island and Southampton Island. Indeed we found 

 two ancient human skeletons partly exposed in this bank of sand, 

 where it had been recently undermined by the sea. Evidently a large 

 amount of this sandy deposit, which contains fossil land snails, has 

 been washed away since the time when the old 'Charles Fort' was 

 built upon this island, about 1615. This old ruined fort was of small 

 size and apparently has been abandoned since about 1630. It has the 

 same size and form shown on Norwood's chart, published in 1626. 

 Norwood mentions, in 1663, that it had then 'fallen into decay.' Prob- 

 ably the cahow may have bred also on Castle Island, which is a larger 

 island a short distance inside Goat Island, and on Southampton Island, 



