PREFACE vii 



about one hour, by ordering a sleigh by telephone, I 

 can indulge in this Eastern pastime on the slopes of 

 the snow-capped Sierra Madre, four or five miles away, 

 and a mile above the sea. 



While the islands afford various sports — golf, coach- 

 ing, hunting, mountain climbing, and diversion for the 

 botanist and archaeologist, their fame has been made by 

 the extraordinary sea-angling with rod and reel, the 

 region being, apparently, the meeting-ground of many 

 great game fishes caught nowhere else, and many 

 indigenous to the locality. Here is the leaping tuna, 

 the long-finned tuna, the yellow-fin, the white sea 

 bass, the leaping swordfish that jumps and outfights 

 the tarpon, the yellowtail and many more, any one of 

 which would make any place famous, and to catch 

 some of which, scores of anglers cross the Atlantic and 

 continent yearly. 



In the present volume I have made no attempt to 

 exhaust the subject. Technical papers relating to the 

 antiquities, the flora, and fauna can be found in the 

 pubhcations of the National Museum and various 

 scientific societies, as the Channel Islands have been 

 visited and examined by eminent specialists in various 

 branches of science, the botanical, biological, and eth- 

 nological conditions being more than remarkable. 

 Here are plants and land animals of species found 

 nowhere else. Here are the remains of a great and 

 powerful barbaric civilization, a people with arts and 

 intellectual graces, which have been swept away like 

 the fog flecks before a gale. Here are islands in their 

 full glory — some being blowoi into the sea, others, 

 again, beaten down and just below the surface, deep 

 in the embrace of ocean forests. 



