Vol 'i9i* Xn ] Murphy, Birds of Trinidad Islet. 335 



ward beach of Trinidad is perpetually strewn with wreckage, for 

 many a fine square-rigger, since the days of treasure-ships and 

 slave-traders, has been lost among the outlying reefs. During 

 favorable weather vessels may obtain drinking water at two places, 

 on opposite sides of the island — the Cascade, and the river by the 

 old Portuguese settlement. Explicit directions for watering are 

 given by Captain Amasa Delano. 



Probably the first naturalist to set foot upon Trinidad was the 

 veteran botanist, Sir Joseph Hooker, in 1S39, during the voyage 

 of the Erebus and Terror. The vegetation, like most insular floras, 

 comprises rather few species. Moreover, according to Hemsley, 

 the flora is of recent origin as compared with that of St. Helena. 

 Less than twenty species of vascular plants are known, of which 

 several are ferns. The tree-fern, so conspicuous on the plateaus 

 and higher slopes, is an endemic species, Cyathea Copelandi. The 

 lower limit of its zone of growth was determined by the naturalists 

 of the Discovery to be at an altitude of about eleven hundred feet. 

 There are a few sparse grasses and sedges, a widespread, tropical, 

 tangling bean (Canavalia), a sage, and several mosses and lichens 

 including a tree-infesting Usnca. But the most striking element 

 in the vegetation of Trinidad is its great groves of dead trees of the 

 genus Caesalpinia. Records of the old mariners say that the island 

 was once heavily forested, even to the pinnacles of the Sugarloaf 

 Mountain and the Ninepin. All its trees, however, have long since 

 been dead, the last mention of living forests harking back to the 

 eighteenth century. Captain Marryat, whose picturesque and 

 truthful account of Trinidad appeared in his first work of fiction 

 in 1829, relates the following observations regarding a valley among 

 the island's hills: 



"Here a wonderful and most melancholy phenomenon arrested 

 our attention. Thousands and thousands of trees covered the 

 valley, each of them about thirty feet high; but every tree was 

 dead, and extended its leafless boughs to another — a forest of 

 desolation, as if nature had at some particular moment ceased to 

 vegetate! There was no xinderwood or grass. On the lowest of 

 the dead boughs, the gannets, and other sea-birds, had built their 

 nests in numbers uncountable. Their tameness, as Cowper says, 

 'was shocking to me.' So unaccustomed did they seem to man 



