675 A. FE. Verrill—The Bermuda Islands. 263 
destitute of soil. So that there is no possible chance for a bird like 
the cahow to burrow there. The writer, with two companions, 
visited this island about the first of May, 1901, on a day when the 
sea was not very rough and the tide was low. We found it impos- 
sible to land except by stepping out upon a narrow, slippery, and 
treacherous reef of rotten rock and corallines, covered with sea- 
weeds, exposed only at low tide, and standing a little way from the 
shore, with deep water between. The sea was breaking over this 
reef, and it was difficult to wade ashore except at one place, on 
account of the depth of water. With the aid of a long pole 
the writer climbed partly up the side of the rock, at the only avail- 
able place, on the inner side at least,* and though he did not reach 
the summit, ascertained that there is no soil on the top, but only 
a few seaside shrubs and herbaceous plants, growing from crevices 
of the rock. This was sufficient to prove that the cahow never bred 
on this rock, and if it had, the early settlers would never have gone 
there in the winter and at night to get the eggs or birds. 
It is far more probable that one of its smaller breeding places was 
on Charles or Goat Island, which is a larger, barren, uninhabited 
island about half a mile inside of Gurnet Head Rock. It has a 
beach of shell-sand on the inner side where boats can safely land. 
On this island, near the north side, there was a deep deposit of sand 
and soil, which was early used as a burial place for the soldiers who 
‘died in the old fortifications on this and the adjacent Castle Island 
and Southampton Island. Indeed, we found two human skeletons 
partly exposed in this bank of sand, where it had been recently 
undermined by the sea. Evidently a large amount of this sandy 
deposit, which contains numerous fossil land snails of a species not 
now living on the smaller islands (Pcecilozonites Bermudensis), has 
been washed away since the time when the old “ Charles Fort” was 
built here, about 1615. This sandy patch would have been a suit- 
able place for the nests of the cahow. 
It may have bred to some small extent on Castle Island, but the 
amount of sandy soil was small there. These and other adjacent 
islands, including Cooper’s Island, were fortified between 1612 and 
1621, and it is probable that their occupation, at that time, was one 
of the causes of the rapid extermination of the cahow and ege-birds. 
We endeavored to secure some bones of the cahow by digging in 
* It is quite possible that there may be a better place to ascend the rock on the 
seaward side, where we could not land on account of the surf, but the boatmen 
denied this. 
