The late Lieut. Ruxton, R.N., speaking of the Island of Ichaboe, on the Western Coast of Africa, says, ‘Notwithstanding that the island had been occupied for nearly two years, during which time thousands upon thousands of penguins had been wantonly destroyed, on the cessation of work these birds again flocked to their old haunts, where they had again commenced laying their eggs. The rocks round the island are literally covered with penguins, cormorants, and albatrosses. The former, wedged together in a dense phalanx, have no more dread of man than ducks in a poultry-yard, although they have met with such persecution on the island; and any number might be taken by the hand without any difficulty. The sailors eat the livers and hearts, which are exceedingly palatable, but the flesh of the body is rank and oily.’[16]
Captain Morrell, also writing of Ichaboe (Nautical Magazine, vol. 13, p. 374), tells us, ‘Eggs may be obtained here in great quantities. In the months of October and November this island is literally covered with jackass-penguins and gannets, which convene here for the purpose of laying and incubation. The nests of the gannets are formed like those of the albatross, but are not so much elevated; while the jackass-penguins lay their eggs in holes in the ground from twelve to thirty inches in depth, which they guard with the strictest vigilance. They frequently lay three or four eggs, but the gannet seldom lays more than two.’
A correspondent, writing from Tristan d’Acunha, in September, gives an account of his adventures in taking penguins’ eggs. ‘This is now the time for penguins’ eggs. They get great numbers of them. There are two rookeries, as they call them; one on the east, and one on the west, of us. To the one on the west, they go over land, beyond Elephant Bay. I went there last year, when I saw the great sea elephant and the penguins for the first time. But this year I have been disappointed, the weather has been so unsettled. But yesterday was a fine day, and they were going in the boat to the other, to which they can go only by water; so I went with them. It was a good day, and we landed easily, though it is a very bad beach. Fancy the scene—a long, very narrow strip of land, at the foot of a great rock, covered with the thick tussac grass, far higher than my head; the whole place swarming with these penguins—pretty to look at, but the most ungainly creatures in their movements that I ever saw? They stand almost upright. The breast is glossy white, the rest is gray. A couple of tufts of those pretty yellow feathers, of which I sent home a few, adorn each side of the head and give them a very lively appearance. They have no wings, but instead, a couple of flippers, as they call them, like arms, which they use about as gracefully as Punch does his. And then the way in which they hop along! Talk of the motion of a frog! it is elegance itself compared with them. Altogether, they are the most interesting, curious things in Tristan. They are about as big, and twice as noisy, as a duck. Fancy going into the midst of thick grass higher than your head, with thousands of them round you, all croaking out in a harsh, loud, quick note, ‘Cover up! cover up!’ and then kicking them right and left, quickly, taking care they do not get hold of you,—seizing their great eggs, till you have got some hundreds of them in your bosom. The men wear a large shirt, tied round their waist, so as to form a large loose bag in front, and so pop them in as fast as they can pick them up. The men will gather two or three hundred in this way, and the boys from one to two; and from the other rookery carry them the whole way home—no little load. The eggs vary much in size, from a large hen’s egg to a goose’s. They mostly lay two at once. Their nests are sometimes close together, so you can soon pick up a lot. They stand in pairs, each couple at their nest to defend it, and some will not give up till they have been kicked away two or three times. They can give a good sharp bite, if they get hold of you. The men found me a spot where the eggs were very thick, and very little tussac, and though I was a new hand at the work, and therefore obliged to look sharp to escape a bite, I managed to collect more than a hundred of them in a short time. Fancy what work, to stand amid hundreds of the birds, all screaming round you, so as almost to deafen you, tumbling them here and there, and picking up their eggs as fast as you can gather them! It is really amusing sport. I must remind you the kicking them over with our soft moccasins (shoes) does not hurt them in the least, and the next day they will have just as many eggs.
‘Six of the men went round in the boat. We were there about four hours, and gathered about four thousand—pretty near a boat’s load; and could have got more if we had chosen. It was a pleasant day, and we had a good row back.’
An interesting account which recently appeared in a Jamaica paper, respecting egg gathering, is also worth quoting.
The annual egg gathering visit, which the boatmen of Port Royal make to the Pedro Keys, we may set down as a remnant of Indian life. In the work entitled The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, compiled from his papers by his son Don Ferdinand, we are informed, that on the 13th of November, 1492, the discovery squadron weighing from the Rio de Mares, Cuba, stood to the eastward, to search for the island called Bohio by the Indians, and coming to an anchor among some high raised islets on the coast, found them to be places visited by the Indians at certain seasons of the year, for supplies of fish and birds. ‘The islands,’ Columbus says, ‘were not inhabited, but there were seen the remains of many fires which had been made by the fishermen; for it afterwards appeared that the people were in use to go over in great numbers in their canoes to these islands, and to a great number of other uninhabited islets in these seas, to live upon fish, which they catch in great abundance, and upon birds and crabs, and other things which they find on the land. The Indians follow this employment of fishing and bird-catching according to the seasons, sometimes in one island sometimes in another, as a person changes his diet, when weary of living on one kind of food.’[17]
‘From the lighthouse on the Port Royal palisades to Portland in Vere, a line encloses a system of coast islands, reefs, banks, and shoals colonized by numerous birds and fishes. Each kind has its own locality. Pelican Key and Pigeon Island never interchange inhabitants, and the bank that gives the king-fish furnishes neither the snapper nor the grouper. Southward from Portland, at a distance of some few leagues, the great Pedro bank is reached, stretching near 100 miles. There are islets at each extremity, but the group that attracts the egg gatherers every year, are the Keys, distinguished as the Pedros, at its eastern end. We shall loiter a little to describe a living world there that must have been a great attraction to the aboriginal Indians, in those periodical junketings that came under the notice of Columbus.
‘The Port Royal boats bound for the egg harvest, bring to, at the outermost of the Portland Keys, and start at midnight from there, to gain with a favourable breeze in 14 or 15 hours the shelter of the Pedros, and to be snug at anchor long before sundown. The vessels in their voyage steer for a single rock in fathomless water, the Isla Sola of the Spanish maps. It rises about 30 or 40 feet out of the sea like a castle in ruins, over which the surf breaks fiercely; and in about five or six hours after making it, they anchor within what are properly called the Keys.
‘There are numerous outlying rocks just above and beneath the water, between the Pedro shoal and the open sea, on which the winds and the currents roll a heavy surf. The spots properly called the islands are seven in number, and vary from forty to some three or four acres in size. They are upthrown masses of broken coral and shell cemented by calcareous sand, washed upon rocky ledges above the sea. The breakers shift with the shifting winds, rolling these fragmentary deposits on before them. By the regularity of their change of action, they have done the work of accumulation pretty equally on all sides: they have raised a wall all round the islands, and left the centres hollow.
‘From time to time storms of unusual violence have carried the heaped-up coral and sand suddenly, and in thick layers, over portions of the islands where the dung of the sea birds had accumulated for years, and these irruptions have made intermediate deposits of animal matter and cemented rock. It is evident from the prevalence of this succession of deposits within the hollow centres of the islets, that the sea has washed in the fragmentary materials of the outer margins, by a more than ordinary rise of the waters, and laid them in pretty equal strata at distant intervals of time, so that the centres have risen in height as the sea walls have been built and cemented up. The animal deposits, which may be characterized as loosely cohering urate of lime, are sometimes found two feet beneath the strata of cemented coral and shells, and run about an inch or an inch and a half thick.