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CHAP. I. TURTLES AT ASCENSION. 11 station passed by, and on his stopping to observe my occupa tion, we entered into conversation respecting the state of the island. From him I learned that, many of the coloured men whom I saw around were liberated negroes, who had been educated by the missionaries at Sierra Leone, and had proved trustworthy and well-conducted men. The church and the school-house appeared to be neat and appropriate buildings. Before the former two brass guns, recently taken from the slave depot at Lagos, were fixed as trophies. The turtles, for which Ascension is so widely celebrated, are caught in large numbers along the shore, 300 being some times taken in one year. They are kept in two large ponds or inclosures, ten or a dozen yards square, on the beach; into these the sea water is admitted by openings in the walls of rudely piled lava by which they are surrounded. In these two ponds we were told there were at that time from 150 to 200 turtles, each weighing from 100 to 300 lbs. The turtles belong to the government, and a centinel is placed on the adjacent heach to protect them during the season in which they resort to the place to deposit their eggs. On the evening of this day, which was intensely hot, we returned to our ship, taking out with us in the same boat a turtle that weighed 300 lbs., which our purser had purchased at 2^d. per lb. We were indulged with portions of this luxury the next morning at our breakfast table, partly in the form of turtle steaks, which, to my fancy, very much resembled sinewy veal cutlets; and at dinner we had fricasseed turtle fins, which looked rather too green and rich for me to venture upon. We entered Table Bay on the 22 nd of May. The neat white-walled villas stretching along at the foot of the moun tains, and, towards Green Point, but a short distance from the sea, the batteries, the extensive African city with its flat- roofed and white or ruddy ochre-coloured houses, the spires of the different churches, the jetties, the numerous vessels in