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Updated: June 22, 2025
'Oh the beauty of the deep clefts in the coral reef, lined with coral, purple, blue, scarlet, green, and white! the little blue fishes, the bright blue starfish, the little land-crabs walking away with other people's shells.
That path was no road for a hard-drinking man to travel and, now and then, Grafton shrank back, with a startled laugh, from the hideous things crawling across the road and rustling into the cactus spiders with snail-houses over them; lizards with green bodies and yellow legs, and green legs and yellow bodies; hairy tarantulas, scorpions, and hideous mottled land-crabs, standing three inches from the sand, and watching him with hideous little eyes as they shuffled sidewise into the bushes.
Giant tortoises crawled lazily about, just visible in the half-light under the trees; innumerable land-crabs scurried to and fro, and unclean reptiles pattered over the fetid ooze, but we saw no more alligators than we should have seen in St. James's Park.
The Hermit-Crab seemed particularly proud of some of his relations who live on land, and told Sammy marvelous tales of their strange habits. Some of these land-crabs will suffocate if dipped in the water. They live in the shades of the deep forest, often a long way from the sea, but come to the seashore at certain seasons to lay their eggs in the sand.
For here were little bays of silvery sand, dotted with land-crabs; groves of palm-trees wherein monkeys frisked and pelted each other with cocoanuts; and caves, and sites for stockades, and hidden treasures significantly indicated by skulls, in riotous plenty; while birds and beasts of every colour and all latitudes made pleasing noises which excited the sporting instinct.
On these the goats subsist, and it is at this part of the isle where they are to be found, as also land-crabs, which are said to be very good. I was told, that about this part of the isle is some very good land on which might be raised many necessary articles; and some have been at the trouble of sowing turnips and other useful vegetables.
Before the evening after, they had all come. There were five of them three tars and two land-crabs, as they called each other when they got jolly, which, by-the-way, they would not have done long without me. "My uncle's anxiety visibly increased. Each guest, as he came down to breakfast, received each morning a more constrained greeting.
Land-crabs, terrapins, and iguanas move about in our vicinity. Malaria is in the air we breathe; the road is infested with "hotwater" ants, which bite our legs until we dance and squirm about like madmen. Yet, somehow, we are fortunate enough to escape annihilation, and many another traveller might also.
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."
How much they took will never now be known, but each man there had as much pure gold, in bars and quoits, as he could carry. They buried about fifteen tons of silver "partly in the burrows which the great land-crabs had made in the earth, and partly under old trees which were fallen thereabout, and partly in the sand and gravel of a river, "not very deep of water."
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