| 184 buried in masses of cloud, and were now visible, now invisible, as the fickle air current disturbed the cumuli which yet in shifting forms continued to hang about the mountain tops. The little harbor . . . faces the east, and is in the form of a half-moon or horse shoe. In coming towards it, but still some miles away, a row of regular apertures became visible in the face of a cliff at right angles to the line of our approach. They looked so like a battery, that one had to pause for a moment and reflect how unsuitable their real if not apparent size must be as embrasures for guns. In point of fact, these holes were the entrances of caverns or chambers in the rocks, in which, as we were assured, the Chilian government formerly imprisoned convicts. The stone is soft and porous, and the felons, for whom the island was a sort of Botany Bay, were employed in gangs at enlarging the subterranean spaces which nature had originally formed.
"At Juan Fernandez we went ashore to bury Mrs. Goodwin. Although the occasion was so sorrowful, the presence of the six little children sobbing in their uncontrollable grief and the father in his loneliness trying to comfort them, still, such was our weariness of the voyage that the sight of and tread upon terra firma once more was such a relief from the ship life that we gratefully realized and enjoyed it. The passengers bathed and washed their clothing in the fresh water, gathered fruit and potatoes, caught fish, some eels, great spotted creatures that looked so much like snakes that some members of the company could not eat them when cooked. We rambled about the island, visited the caves, one of which was pointed out to us as the veritable 'Robinson Crusoe's' cave, and it was my good fortune to take a sound nap there one pleasant afternoon. . . .
"Many mementoes [mementos] and souvenirs were gathered, and after strewing our dead sister's grave anew with parting tokens of love, regret, and remembrance, we departed from the island, bearing away a serene though shaded picture of our brief sojourn. . . .
"The children! How they did gnaw away on poor bread and fat pieces of boiled salt pork! At first there was a sad waste of provisions and the sharks soon followed the ship
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