We caught glimpses of the wild ponies…brown, black, bay, and piebald, trotting barefoot over the sandy dunes, sometimes singly, more often in little herds marshaled and guarded by small shaggy stallions. Rabbits, too, swarmed across our track. And there were birds without number, seabirds and land birds, as though the island were a convention-center for the feathered tribes. As we drove along gaunt bleaching ribs protruded from the sand, like tombstones in a cemetery. Some, the driver told us, were the bones of stranded whales. Others were the timbers of dead ships. Some were weedy with submersion by every tide, others were white with sand and salt and took on rose tints in the rays of the setting sun. Wrecks, wrecks, wrecks; here a solitary spar, there a while ship. It truly seemed an ocean graveyard – a place where ships came to die and be buried; yet not a mournful place. We children were too young to feel that way about it, when there was so much life among the ponies and the bunnies and the birds.

James Farquhar, Farquhar's Luck