THE OPEN SEAs 



5 



joyous nature of it both upon and around our two little 

 islands, that we shall endeavour in another chapter to 

 picture for the reader some of its awesome realities. 



Such then, in brief, were the islands which on one 

 Sunday in the early part of 1908, we were rapidly nearing 

 in the steam yacht " Zenaida," a boat of some 850 tons 

 belonging to Sir Frederic Johnstone. For all we knew 

 about them then, they might or might not be worth a 

 visit. We knew they contained a few birds — one or two 

 of them supposed to be peculiar to the island and found 

 nowhere else — ^we knew also that they must be nearly, 

 if not quite, uninhabited, and that they consisted of a 

 mere " scrap of dirt," as a sailor would have it, a hundred 

 miles from any land. But what more could an amateur 

 ornithologist want, a " bird-nesting " expedition to a 

 tropical, and possibly uninhabited island, miles from 

 anywhere ? Think of it ! you who, perhaps, deem yourself 

 lucky to get a day's leave to explore some well-preserved 

 wood, marsh, or moor at home ! 



We had left the island of Cura9ao (Dutch West Indies, 

 off the coast of Venezuela) at three o'clock on the 

 afternoon of the 15th of January, 1908 ; and for four 

 days, with the exception of an eight hours' stay over the 

 Rosalind banks, where we had stopped to drift and fish, 

 we had been steaming through the Caribbean Sea in a 

 dead straight line, nine hundred and forty-two miles in 

 length, bound for these two little isolated specks of 

 coral. 



Above this vast fluid surface we had seen not a speck 

 of land, and, if we except the flying-fish, barely a sign of 

 life. Sometimes we passed a patch of guK-weed; some- 

 times a patch of swarming globigerince, looking like reddish 

 scum upon the surface of the water ; sometimes a tropic- 

 bird would glitter for a minute or two against the blue 

 sky, like a white butterfly, and then would disappear. 

 Otherwise there was nothing very obvious but a lonely, 

 sunlit waste of waters, bounded on the far horizon by 

 fleecy banks of Trade-wind clouds. 



