These pirates are the frigate or man-of-war birds. They do not fish themselves, but attack the honest fishers in midair, and compel them to surrender what they have caught. The frigate-bird is of the orthodox piratical colour—black—but has a vermilion beak and a few white patches on its throat. It has a forked tail, and wings of extraordinary length in proportion to its body, their spread sometimes attaining, it is said, as much as fifteen feet.
There are other pirates here as well, of a meaner description, who, being able to fish for themselves, have no excuse for their crimes; whereas the frigate-bird is unable to skim the sea after fish. Should he touch the water he cannot make use of his unwieldy wings and flounders helplessly about until he becomes the prey of sharks.
But these other robbers have taken to dishonest ways from sheer laziness and lack of principle. Their favourite method is to seize a smaller fisher by the throat, and hold him under water until he is half drowned and has to disgorge his fish. Sometimes two or three plucky little birds will assist a neighbour in resisting the big bully, and often drive him off discomfited. We witnessed several most exciting combats of this description.
We skinned the birds we killed, and I have brought these specimens home with me. Of fish we now caught plenty. We salted and sun-dried some, but these were not a great success, and had a rank flavour in consequence of their oily nature.
XVI
Discoveries in Southwest Bay
At last, on December 7, communication between the yacht and the shore was resumed; for the wind and sea had greatly moderated, and the doctor was enabled to come off to us at midday, with four volunteers and paid hands. They had been labouring hard with pick and shovel, and looked like it too. Digging into the volcanic soil of Trinidad soon takes all superfluous flesh off. Indeed, led on by the energetic doctor, they had worked harder, perhaps, than white men should in such a climate, and had a stale overstrained appearance, while they admitted that they felt somewhat slack.
They brought us off a quantity of turtle-eggs. The female turtle frequent Southwest Bay in large numbers, for the purpose of depositing their eggs in the sand. But up till now, they had failed to catch any of the turtle. The eggs are excellent, and can be used for every purpose for which fowl’s eggs are employed. Here is a receipt for making eggnog which I have tried myself and can recommend:—Two turtle-eggs, a teaspoonful of tinned milk, some water, sugar, and a small glass of rum.
The shore-party had obtained an abundance of fish; they used to catch them not only with hook and line, but with an extemporized seine net, which they dragged with great success through the pools left by the receding tide. This seine was simply a long piece of the wire-netting which we had brought with us to serve as land-crab-proof fencing round the camp. It seems that this netting did not fulfil its original purpose very satisfactorily, as the crabs could burrow under it.
The land-crabs however, did not molest the shore-party to any extent, and it was only now and then that a man found one of these unpleasant creatures in his bed. It was the custom for the men to sally forth every evening, just before dark, and kill, with sticks, every land-crab they could find in the immediate neighbourhood of the camp, each man slaying his sixty or seventy. This afforded an abundance of food for the others during the night, so that they had no need to stray into the tents. The crabs, I was informed, were excellent scavengers, and consumed all the cook’s refuse.
The doctor and his companions had no lack of news to impart. I was anxious, of course, in the first place, to learn how the work had progressed. I was told that some hundreds of tons of earth had been already removed, and that a broad trench was being dug, along the face of the cliff, through the landslip in the first bend of the ravine, but that, so far, no indications of the treasure had been come across. The chief difficulty consisted in the presence of a great many stones of all sizes that were mixed up with the fallen soil, some of them being of several tons weight. In digging the trench an inclined plane was left at either end, up which the barrows of earth could be wheeled; and when one of the big stones was found, the earth was, in the first place, cleared from round it, and then it was dragged from the bottom of the trench up one of these inclined planes by means of powerful tackle, assisted by the hydraulic jack. When they had got it by these means to the top of the trench, they could easily roll it down the ravine.
The doctor explained to me all the routine that he had laid down for observance on shore, and the different details of the work. Sunday was always a holiday, and was occupied, as a rule, in wandering about and exploring; but it was sometimes too terribly hot for this.
I was informed that a crowbar and several other fresh relics of Mr. A⸺’s expedition had been discovered, and that a wooden box had been found, carefully hidden away at the farther end of the bay, which contained a chessboard, a quantity of shot cartridges, and several London and Newcastle newspapers, dated October 1875. Mr. A⸺’s expedition took place in 1885, Mr. P⸺’s—the first expedition—in 1880; so the papers gave us no clue as to who had brought them here. The shore-party had amused themselves by reading these ancient journals. In them they found accounts of the Wainwright trial and of the collision between the Mistletoe and the Alberta. It was strange to read, on Trinidad, the old theatrical
