"INAGUA IS A QUEER LITTLE ISLAND" 51 



been looking for turtle eggs when I had come upon them and 

 that they Uved on a "farm" some distance away. Here their 

 parents and a considerable assortment of uncles and aunts 

 dwelt in the summertime, but it was then winter and very cold 

 (about eighty in the shade) and that they had only come to the 

 fann to chase away the wild pigs that were rooting up the 

 vegetables. The island, of course, was Inagua, everyone knew 

 that. 



So it was Inagua after all. That accounted for the small 

 island directly north of the point of the shipwreck. How we 

 ever slipped between Caicos and Mariguana on a due south 

 course without sighting land I do not know to this day. The 

 scene of our disaster was the northernmost point of the island 

 and the lagoon where we had seen the flamingo was called 

 Christophe. I asked the boys why it was named Christophe but 

 they did not know. They said it had always been named Chris- 

 tophe. It occurred to me that possibly it was named after Henri 

 Christophe, the Black Emperor of Haiti which was only eighty 

 or ninety miles to the south. Later I found this to be the case, 

 for a legend persisted that it was at this point that the builder of 

 the famous Citadel near Cape Haitian was supposed to have 

 constructed a summer palace. Here also in his last days before 

 the coming of the revolution which caused him to end his life 

 with a golden bullet, and which plunged Haiti into the dark 

 period from which it is only now emerging, he was supposed to 

 have cached a considerable sum of coin and bullion against a 

 day of need. What truth there was in the legend I do not know, 

 except that months later I discovered a number of cut stone 

 blocks and a pile of debris half hidden by overgrowing pal- 

 metto and lignum vitae trees a short distance back of the lagoon. 



I fished the chart out of my pack and looked it over. The 

 map showed a very irregular island bearing the legend "flat 

 and wooded." There was little else to set it apart from the 



