St. Bartholomew or Turtle Bay is a small, almost circular, sheet of water and surrounded by some of the dreariest territory in the world. The mountains which stand about it seem the cooled and hardened deposit of a volcano. Vegetation there is none, save cactus and other spined, horned, and stinging growths. Of fresh water, whether in springs, rivulets, or brooks, there is none. Close by our boat-landing was the grave of a mother and child, landed a few years previous from a wreck, who had perished of thirst. Coyotes, hares, and birds must have relieved thirst somewhere, possibly from the dews, which are very copious. Our decks and rigging in the morning looked as though soaked by a heavy shower. Regularly at night the coyotes came down and howled over that lone grave, and the bass to their fiend-like yelping were furnished by the boom of the Pacific surges on the reef outside. To these gloomy sounds in the night stillness and blackness, there used for a time to be added the incessant groaning of a wretched Sandwich Islander, who, dying of consumption, would drag himself at night on deck to avoid disturbing the sleep of the crowded forecastle. Small hope for help is there for any thus afflicted on a whaler. There is no physician but the Captain, and his practice dares not go much beyond a dose of salts or castor-oil. The poor fellow was at last found dead, early one evening, in his bunk, while his countrymen were singing, talking, laughing, and smoking about him. It was a relief to all, for his case was hopeless, and such misery, so impossible to relieve, is terrible to witness on a mere fishing-schooner so crowded as ours. The dead man was buried at sea without any service, much to the disgust of one of our coopers, who, although not a “professor,” believed that such affairs should be conducted in an orthodox, ship-shape fashion. Some one, after the corpse had slid overboard, remarked, “Well, he’s dead and buried,” whereat the cooper muttered, “He’s dead, but he ain’t what I call buried.” I don’t think the Captain omitted the burial service through any indifference, but rather from a sensitiveness to officiate in any such semi-clerical fashion. Some rocks not far from our anchorage were seen covered at early dawn every morning with thousands of large black sea-birds. They were thickly crowded together and all silent and immovable, until apparently they had finished some Quaker form of morning devotion, when they commenced flying off, not all at once, but in series of long straggling flocks. In similar silence and order they would return at night from some far-off locality. Never during all the months of our stay did we hear a sound from them. Morning after morning with the earliest light this raven-colored host were ever on their chosen rocks, brooding as it were ere their flight over some solemnity peculiar to their existence.