A. E. Verrill — The Bermuda Islands. (> 7 5 



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, 1901, on a day when the 

 sea was not very rough and the tide was low. We found it impos- 

 sible 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 standing a little way 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 

 the writer climbed partly up the side of the rock, at the only avail- 

 able place, on the inner side at least,* and though he did not reach 

 the summit, ascertained 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 sufficient to prove 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 smaller breeding places was 

 on Charles or Goat Island, which is a larger, barren, uninhabited 

 island about half a mile inside of Gurnet Head Rock. It has a 

 beach of shell-sand on the inner side where boats can safely land. 

 On this island, near the north side, there was a deep deposit of sand 

 and soil, which was early used as a burial place for the soldiers who 

 died in the old fortifications on this and the adjacent Castle Island 

 and Southampton Island. Indeed, we found two 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 numerous fossil land snails of a species not 

 now living on the smaller islands (Pmcilozonites Hermudensis), has 

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

 built here, about 1615. This sandy patch would have been a suit- 

 able place for the nests of the cahow. 



It may have bred to some small extent on Castle Island, but the 

 amount of sandy soil was small there. These and other adjacent 

 islands, including Cooper's Island, were fortified between 1012 and 

 1621, and it is probable that their occupation, at that time, was one 

 of the causes of the rapid extermination of the cahow and egg-birds. 



We endeavored to secure some bones of the cahow by digging in 



* It is quite possible that there may be a better place to ascend the rock on the 

 seaward side, where we could not land on account of the surf, bat the boatmen 

 denied this. 



