oo2 Murphy, Buds of Trinidad Islet Ljuly 



THE BIRD LIFE OF TRINIDAD ISLET. 



BY ROBERT CUSHMAN MURPHY. 

 \ 



Plates XXIII-XXV. 



East of the coast of Espirito Santo some seven hundred miles 

 lies a fairy island. Alone in the tropical ocean, piled up in peaks 

 as fantastic as tossing waves, and overhung with pennons of torn 

 clouds which seem to flutter from the summits, Trinidad has 

 exercised a strange charm upon the imaginations of all who have 

 but seen its silhouette on the borderline of sky and sea. During 

 four centuries it has been a landmark in the trade routes of the 

 South Atlantic, often sought by sailing vessels as a check upon 

 their nautical reckonings. Before the days of steamers it was a 

 veritable signpost at a crossroads of the sea, yet few indeed are the 

 travelers who have set foot upon its crumbling shore. Pirates in 

 the old times, whalers, treasure-seeking adventurers, ill-fated 

 colonists, in their turn have come to Trinidad and gone; the island 

 seems unfalteringly to forbid the encroachment of permanent 

 habitation. None who riave felt its presence can speak or think of 

 it unstirred; even the prosaic pages of the 'South Atlantic Pilot' 

 become alluring at the account of Trinidad, and the Director of 

 the British Antarctic Expedition of 1901, though he surveyed the 

 islet with the critical eye of science, was deeply impressed by " the 

 dream-like appearance of this remarkable cluster of volcanic peaks 

 in the early tropical dawn." 



Trinidad was discovered early in the sixteenth century by the 

 Portuguese admiral, Tristan da Cunha; consequently it appears on 

 most old maps of the western hemisphere. Captain Edmund 

 Halley, afterwards Astronomer Royal to George the First of 

 England, and of popular fame through his cornet, visited the island 

 in April, 1700, while conducting a voyage for the study of magnetic 

 variation. Halley landed on April 15 in search of water, which he 

 soon found. On the seventeenth he moored his vessel, the Para- 

 more Pink, off the western end, with "the high steep Rock like a 

 Ninepin E. S. E. Whilst the Longboat brought more water on 



