THE MAKING OF AN ISLAND 147 



of a permanent island. 



The cocoanut palms had arrived the same way, drifting on 

 the beach as ripe and fertiUzed nuts. They had come long after 

 the mangrove and by some trick of the beach had lined them- 

 selves in a straight rov^ just out of reach of the tide. In the 

 debris and jetsam of the tide Hnes were the decayed shells of 

 a number of other cocoanuts which just drifted in; these nuts 

 could not have belonged to the trees already on the island, for 

 the bar had enlarged since the trees had reached maturity and 

 the first comers were a number of yards inland. 



The cocoanut shells gave an indication of how the lizards 

 came to Sheep Cay. They could not have arrived on a man- 

 grove radicel; they would have been quickly chilled and 

 drowned. On a cocoanut shell, however, a lizard would have 

 had an excellent chance of survival; the casings are buoyant 

 and ride high out of the water. If the weather were calm and 

 the tides set right an agile lizard or even two would have had 

 no difficulty in navigating the half mile from the mainland. 

 There is even another possibility. An entire bush may have 

 been torn from its fastenings and been blown out to sea by 

 a storm with a whole family of arboreal Anolis ensconced in its 

 branches. This seemed more logical as none of the ground- 

 living species which abounded on the mainland had as yet made 

 their appearance on Sheep Cay. 



So far, the flying insects, the Anolis lizards, the few bushes 

 and the two species of trees were the only dry-land organisms 

 which had survived. The crabs and mollusks could hardly be 

 included, for although they were terrestrial in their habits they 

 were, strictly speaking, marine, being forced to return to the 

 ocean sooner or later to breed or wet their gills. How many 

 years had been needed to reach this stage of population I could 

 not guess. Sheep Cay, very likely, was not more than a century 

 or two old. The oldest map which I can find is dated i860 and 



