(*) I am indebted to T. J. McLain, Esq., United States consul at Nassau, for the following information given to him by the captains of this port, who visit Samana or Atwood’s Key.  The sub-sketch on this chart is substantially correct:  Good water is only obtained by sinking wells.  The two keys to the east are covered with guano; white boobies hold the larger one, and black boobies the other; neither intermingles.

The island is now uninhabited, but arrow heads and stone hatchets are sometimes found; and in places there are piles of stones supposed to have been made by the aborigines.  Most of the growth is scrubby, with a few scattered trees.

The Nassau vessels enter an opening through the reef on the south side of the island and find a very comfortable little harbor with from two to two and a half fathoms of water.  From here they send their boats on shore to “strip” guano, and cut satin, dye woods and bark.

When Columbus discovered Guanahani, the journal called it a “little island.”  After landing he speaks of it as “bien grande,” “very large,” which some translate, tolerably, or pretty large.  November 20, 1492 (Navarette, first edition, p. 61), the journal refers to Isabella, a larger island than Guanahani, as “little island,” and the fifth of January following (p. 125) San Salvador is again called “little island.”

The Bahamas have an area of about 37,000 square miles, six per cent of which may be land, enumerated as 36 islands, 687 keys, and 2,414 rocks.  The submarine bank upon which these rest underlies Florida also.  But this peninsula is wave-formed upon living corals, whose growth and gradual stretch toward the south has been made known by Agassiz.

I had an unsuccessful search for a similar story of the Bahamas, to learn whether there were any probable changes within so recent a period as four hundred years.

The common mind can see that all the rock there is coral, none of which is in position.  The surface, the caves, the chinks, and the numerous pot-holes are compact limestone, often quite crystalline, while beneath it is oolitic, either friable or hard enough to be used for buildings.  The hills are sand-blown, not upheaved.  On a majority of the maps of the sixteenth century there were islands on Mouchoir, and on Silver Banks, where now are rocks “awash;” and the Dutch and the Severn Shoals, which lay to the east, have disappeared.

It is difficult to resist the impression that the shoal banks, and the reefs of the Bahamas, were formerly covered with land; and that for a geological age waste has been going on, and, perhaps, subsidence.  The coral polyp seems to be doing only desultory work, and that mostly on the northeast or Atlantic side of the islands; everywhere else it has abandoned the field to the erosive action of the waves.