“The only things we met with remarkable here are the armadillos, or what the seamen call hogs in armour,” the Trial’s purser, Millechamp, wrote. “They are about the size of a large cat, their nose like a hog’s, with a thick shell…hard enough to resist a strong blow with a hammer.” St. Julian was not just a place of desolation; it also stood, in the eyes of Cheap and his men, as a grisly memorial to the toll that a long, claustrophobic voyage could wreak upon a ship’s company.
