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Updated: June 22, 2025
In those days the rotation system had not been yet adopted, and the young gentlemen in "crack regiments," only knew of yellow fevers and land-crabs, through reading of them in books; and even through that channel, it would, perhaps, be unsafe to assert that they were much informed on these subjects, or indeed on any other.
Cuban land-crabs, like Cuban vultures, are haunters of battle-fields; but they seek the dead at night, while the vultures drink the eyes and tear off the lips of an unburied corpse in the broad light of day.
We proceed with a copy of the forenoon till the sun declines, when it is time to escape the flies, to repair to the terrace for fresh air, or to dress for a walk. Generally our direction is through the town eastwards, to a plain of dilapidated graves and salt sand, peopled only by land-crabs.
But any one who had paid so much attention as Thompson to the development of these animals, must have been well able to decide with certainty upon eggs, if not too far from maturity or badly preserved, whether a Zoea would be produced from them. Moreover, the mode of life of the Land-Crabs is in favour of Thompson.
I crossed a salt marsh upon a raised causeway that was perfectly alive with land-crabs, whose desperately active endeavours to avoid my horse's hoofs were so ludicrous that I literally laughed alone and aloud at them.
For instance, there are the Crustacea. As a group the crabs and lobsters are confined below the high-water mark. But experiments in air-breathing are no doubt in progress in this group we already have tropical land-crabs and as far as we know there is no reason why in the future these creatures should not increase in size and terrestrial capacity.
Our beaches of the temperate zones are wastes compared with these, for not only were the sands strewn with a vast débris of forest and jungle, but animal life abounded. The hermits toddled about, carrying their stolen shells, some as small as watch charms, and the land-crabs fed on the purauand hibiscus-leaves.
There were some twenty men in the party, and most of them followed their distinguished elders through brush and rocky passes. Occasionally, a sudden yell of pain mingled with the shouts of mirth, for land-crabs have their methods of revenge.
The man fled in fear. When his comrades returned with him to find this white company, not a human being appeared to them, and, except for the chatter of birds and the clicking of land-crabs as they scuttled over the stones, the place was still.
At the most distant view of his person or sound of his voice, every midshipman, not obliged to remain, fled, like the land-crabs on a West India beach. He was incessantly taunting me, was sure to find some fault or other with me, and sneeringly called me "one of your frigate midshipmen."
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