guano, with hands and feet gashed and cut by the birds that sit with "sword" ever drawn and ready to slash at the intruder. They were taken off, these marooned mariners of ours, while planning a raft— not of wood, for there was none on the island, but of birds-in case they were not rescued before the last drop of carefully hoarded water was consumed.

JOHN BULL'S YOUNGEST ISLAND Ascension, near whose iron-bound coast Bosunbird Islet stands, is the volcanic island of a geologist's nightmare - an island terrible, bleak, awesome.

As we

sailed slowly toward it, the tall central peak gave promise of beauty equaling that of Treasure Island; but, nearer at hand, as we skirted the northeastern shore and came to anchor in Clarence Bay, the island was seen to be the more or less flattened disk of a bare volcanic plain, from which rose the large mountain first sighted, surrounded by a multitude of smaller cones and peaks.

"An island you will never forget," Admiral Newton A. McCully had said to us in Rio many months before we sighted the terrible clinker of the sea. "It seemed as if a mother volcano had squatted on

that little-known island and a group of chick volcanoes had settled around her. You will find it the strangest of all the islands you visit."

And the strangest it was. So recent are the formations of this ash-heap of volcanoes that, according to many geologists, it is the youngest of all Great Britain's possessions, if not the youngest island in the world.

There is no good anchorage. Clarence Bay, where we furled sail, is an open-sea roadstead facing Long Beach and the little settlement of Georgetown. Here, on a low, rocky shore backed by clinker plains, the first settlers landed in 1815-a detachment of British who anticipated attempts to use it as a base from which to rescue Napoleon from St. Helena.

Soon the island became known as the only immovable battleship in the world, for she was manned by a ship's crew and officers and was carried on the books of the British Admiralty as H. M. S. Ascension, a ship's tender.

Diamond Rock, strategically located on the coast of Martinique in the West Indies, was fortified for nine months in 1803

by British sailors of Admiral Sir Thomas Hood's fleet; from it the Britons harried French ships entering harbors of Martinique.

The rock might thus be referred to as an unofficial "immovable battleship."

SOLAR PLEXUS OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE

Warfare with mid-Atlantic pirates and slave traders compelled Great Britain to develop the hospital service of the island, and it soon became the rest station of the British West African squadron, which three-quarters of a century ago was extremely active and powerful. The Boer War in South Africa added an important chapter. Britain's submarine cable system was spread southward to the southern tip of Africa and Ascension became a relay station to speed up and strengthen signals.

With the death of slave trading and piracy, and with subsequent changes of world interest from warfare and colonization to commerce and necessity for naval retrenchment, the Admiralty in 1922 withdrew its small personnel and turned the island and settlement over to the cable

company, which represents the British Colonial Office in the administration of the island's affairs.

We landed and met the fifty-odd Englishmen who live in the settlement and who keep the great cable station running. They are odd in numbers only, for the majority have lived in the great cities of the Old World, are well educated, and take pride in making possible political and commercial contact between Europe, Africa, and South America.

Ascension is an exceedingly healthful place for children. We saw about the settlement the bright and happy youngsters of more than a dozen members of the cable staff, who had brought wives and families to live with them during their self-chosen exile of three years.

Unless spare time is regularly employed in some form of recreation, and especially the time of the young bachelors, men on the island fall victims to the malady of "Ascensionitis." Symptoms are a lack of

interest in work, general irritability, and a longing for the fleshpots of London.

THE BEACHES OF ASCENSION

A famous stretch of white beach lies in a gleaming scimitar along a bight just northeast of the settlement and its landing. But "sand" is a misnomer for the fine white particles here found; close examination shows that each and every grain is a tiny, sea-rounded fragment of seashell, perhaps of triton, nautilus, limpet, or whelk.

During the breeding season, from November to April, the waters about the island are alive with giant green sea turtles, which lay their big, white eggs on this strand. We captured a number of them for our collections and put others in the government turtle pens ashore-apparently the first males ever taken at the island, since only females go on to the beaches.

Vanzetti and I became beach combers

THE ANCIENT MARINER'S BIRD ON THE WING

Photograph by Geo. Finlay Simmons

Coleridge's pig-tailed, tarry seaman wore a forty-pound wandering albatross around his neck in penance for killing with his crossbow the bird that made

the winds blow fair.