vegetable for seafaring people, badly in need of such an addition to their diet. The sea round about Mas-a-tierra swarmed with fish, and was thronged by seals and sea-lions, which came ashore to breed or to bask in the sun. Dampier states that there were possibly "millions of seals", "either sitting on the shore of the bays or going and coming in the sea round the island". Both seals and sea-lions provided the ships with quantities of train-oil, but the flesh of these aquatic mammals was not liked. [Dampier notes with correctness the abundance of seals along the coasts of North and South America, but their relative absence from the seas washing the East Indies, where indeed they only reappear in the far south along the coasts of Australia and New Zealand.] [51] The largest of these islands was long associated in our minds with Alexander Selkirk and the story of _Robinson Crusoe_, though this wonderful piece of fiction was really concerned with the islands off the delta of the Orinoco River. [52] The group consisted of two islands and an islet. The largest of the three was called Mas-a-tierra ("more towards the mainland"), and was 425 miles from the coast of Chile; the next largest was 100 miles farther west and called Mas-a-fuera ("farther away"). The islet near Mas-a-tierra was named Santa Clara. Mas-a-tierra was garrisoned by Spain in 1750. From the Juan Fernandez Islands Dampier's ship made its way to the Galapagos archipelago, where Dampier duly noted the large, fat, and tame land-lizards--a species of iguana--and, above all, the enormous tortoises "extraordinarily large and fat; so sweet that no pullet eats more pleasantly". A very large tortoise might weigh as much as 200 pounds. He also observed the abundance of turtle of four kinds in the sea round the coasts of this archipelago.[53] [53] The three species of real turtle belonged two to the genus _Chelone_ and one to _Thallassochelys_, viz. the Hawksbill Turtle, the shell of which is the tortoiseshell of commerce; the Green Turtle, which makes turtle soup, and is delicious to eat; and the musky-smelling useless Loggerhead Turtle. The fourth kind was the quite unrelated Leathery Turtle (_Sphargis_), which grows to a great size, 7 to 8 feet long.