Part 2

Some of the crew had seen goats at Seymour. They had been left there a hundred years ago by a sea captain who had had some on his boat for fresh milk; he took them ashore to give them a chance to eat grass. Each day he took fresh water to them. Then one day they did not come back for the water, and he guessed they had found some on the island and sailed off leaving them there.

But there are no goats here, nor the land lizards which we had seen at Seymour. The land is absolutely all lava rock and cactus and stiff prickly bushes which makes climbing around very difficult. I made a fine collection of shells that I found on the beach.

Several times I went ashore in the evening with the crew, and one night two of the men had an awful fight. Just the few of us were on this desert beach alone, and it reminded me of a story that Darwin told in his Cruise of the Beagle nearly a hundred years ago. He went to a little lake on one island and saw there the skull of a captain who had been murdered by his crew there many years before.

Darwin was a very famous scientist about 100 years ago. This book, The Cruise of the Beagle, describes a great voyage he took in the ship Beagle around South America and mostly around the world. He stopped at the Galápagos Islands. Mother read this book aloud to me. There were too many things to see and do on the Arcturus for me to have much time to read. Everything was too interesting and there was always something exciting happening. I think the only book I read through was Ivanhoe.

Early one morning Dwight went off walking across the island. He did not come back at four when the ship’s whistle blows to call us all to the landing beach, nor later at bedtime, and not until midnight. He had lost his way for a time and accidentally discovered a crater lake which no one had ever seen before. Although it is in the middle of the island it is salty and the water must come in with the tide. There are mangroves around its edge, and green scum on it, but small fish live in it.

THE VOLCANO

On April nineteenth Mother woke me up at one thirty in the morning saying there was a fire way off to the south and west of us and that the mate and the captain thought it must be a volcano in eruption. Far away in the sky there was a faint pink glow, and we were all very much excited.

The next morning we left Tower Island because the harbor would be dangerous in case of a tidal wave or any disturbance from an earthquake. Towards evening after trawling and fishing all day around Tower and Bindloe Islands, we started for the direction of North Albemarle. We could see the glow for seventy miles or more.

Later that night as we got nearer, the red glowed much more and the great bank of clouds over it was all pink like a very bright sunset. By three in the morning we were within ten miles of it and we could see flames and juts of smoke.

In the morning Uncle Will and John Tee Van went ashore. They had a hard time finding a landing place for the shore was all steep lava cliffs against which the surf broke. But finally they went into a little protected cove, and from there started off for the nearest smoking place they saw. For a time we could see them as they climbed over the terribly rough lava flows, older ones that had been coming down for centuries. But soon we lost sight of them.

There was a lot of pumice which is a very light stone, kind of pale gray or whitish in color. It comes from the volcanoes, like the lava. Sometimes when you step into it you sink right up to your knees. It is so light it floats on the water. It is fine for cleaning stains off your hands.

At about two thirty or so they came back to the shore again and Uncle Will had such terrible cramps in his legs he could hardly stand. They said that they only went to the nearest place from which the smoke was coming. It was so hot underfoot they had to keep going, it was impossible to sit down or rest because of the heat. So when they finally reached it after much climbing and walking, there was only time to take some samples, make a few notes, test the gas, and return.

Uncle Will named the two volcanoes Mt. Williams and Mt. Whiton, after Mr. Harrison Williams and Mr. Henry D. Whiton, two gentlemen who helped most in making the Arcturus trip possible.

The volcano was erupting on the slope of the mountain, not on the top, and there were many other little places from which smoke and cinders were coming through besides just the one big crater. At night when the fire showed more in the dark it looked like trains of brightly lighted cars running down the mountain side.

Next day I went ashore with Betty and Lin. I saw three sea lions, two huge crawfish, or speckled lobsters, many sharks, and lots of different kinds of small fish. I stayed right in the little bay because it was so hard walking around on the lava, which was just like clinkers.

This day the groupers, big heavy rock fish, were so hungry they even attacked the moving propeller of Bill’s evinrude engine and when he shook his sock at them they actually grabbed it. I would not want to jump over near that shore. I believe the big groupers would attack a man. We saw more big devil fish jumping near here than at any other place. And the crew hooked several sharks.

A DAY ASHORE

When I go ashore I usually take a net for fish or butterflies and bottles in which to put insects, a canteen of fresh water, a helmet to keep the heat of the sun from my head (and in the tropics this is very important, especially to protect the back of the neck from the sun). Also I like to have a gig or spear with which I can get some of the kinds of fish which do not bite at bait.

My main idea is to get birds’ eggs. Gulls’ nests are mostly on the rocks of the cliffs, doves build on the lava rock on the ground or in little crevasses, mocking birds in low bushes or the cactus trees or shrubs, and the big boobies and frigate birds make ugly twig nests about two or three feet from the ground, the greater number of them nearer the shore, although I did see some on my way up to the crater lake that Dwight had discovered in the center of the island, and these were in higher trees. There was one big nest right on the lava rock under a tree. It was a green heron’s nest and the three half grown birds walked out of the nest when I came near.

One day I speared two crawfish in a pool right near shore, but the prongs of the gig were too short to hold them and they got free and darted away. I lost a moray, or poisonous eel the same way.

When we swim at the beaches or in the ocean pools near the shore we have to watch out for sharks, sting rays and morays.

One day at Tower Island, I went to climb the cliff for birds’ eggs. I took two boxes of soft cotton for packing any eggs I might find. And as I went along I tapped the ground to make the small birds fly up from their nests. This way I could locate them.

I found a mocking bird’s nest, took one egg, got some frigate eggs and a gull’s egg. Then I turned to come back and I could not remember the way. So I made for the cliff and the sea and came along till I found a place to climb down again over the huge boulders of loose lava rock.

The frigate nests were near the shore. Their eggs are about the size of a hen’s egg, quite white. The Galápagos gulls’ eggs are smaller. And the boobies’ eggs are like the frigates’ only a little smaller.

After hunting for birds’ eggs I thought I would go over to see what Lin was doing in the big shallow pools across the beach. She was fishing with a tiny hook and line. So I tried, too, and I caught a lovely little blue and silvery fish about four inches long. It had small white speckles and was a new species. There are many different kinds of fish in these little pools, whole schools of them, varying from one to eighteen inches long and some with very lovely colors, many having stripes of gold and silver.

Later I speared a whole collecting bag full of crabs for Mother to use as bait for her fishing out in the inlet. The black lava rocks are just full of bright colored crabs crawling around ... thousands of small black ones, speckled, and lighter color sandy ones, and great big bright red ones. Evidently they are all chasing each other all the time, and acting like cannibals. And then the rest of the time the birds are swooping down and snatching one. They certainly scurry the minute a shadow appears, and dart up and down the rocks so quickly it is hard to catch them.

The ship’s whistle blows at eleven in the morning and at four at night to warn us to return to the beach to be ferried out again.

THE DIVING HELMET

In addition to the nets and trawls and dredges, the ship is equipped with a diving apparatus. It is a helmet or head piece, but not the rest of a suit.

This tall helmet is made of thick brass with a triangle shaped glass window in the front. It fits on the shoulders and there is an air space inside so one can breathe. Then fresh air is pumped in by a hand pump, and whole flocks of bubbles keep rising to the surface coming out from under your arm pits.

Uncle Will is the best one at it for he has used it most and goes down oftenest. It can be used at any depth a man can stand pressure, and of course the deeper down, the stronger the pressure, and one feels this especially in the ears. They buzz and hurt as though someone was pushing on them. You have to swallow hard to keep back this feeling and equalize the pressure, the same as going down in a high elevator.

There is air in front of your eyes so you can see just as perfectly as when you are on the surface. Whole crowds of tiny fishes swim by, many of them different colors and very bright. Pink, or green, or blue, or silvery or striped ones.

One day as Uncle Will entered the water, and was just going down, a huge shark swam by. He waited a few minutes and then went down, and the shark had apparently gone along on his business. Later he had a cage built, so he could stay in that and look around if there were too many sharks.

That afternoon when he went down he saw many very strange fish, some bright orange and black with a white cross like a belt, others dark gray with yellow tails.

Of course there is always a chance in these waters to see octopus, big sting rays or devil fish and sharks. So the cage with three heavy wire sides one can stand in, is pretty nice.

One day I went down. I was a little scared because the helmet weighs forty pounds or more and the stuffy feeling of having something over one’s head is unpleasant. I went over the stern of a rowboat in about fifteen feet of water near shore, and climbed down a heavy iron ladder, holding onto the rounds. There is a kind of roar from the air coming in, and a curious feeling against the ears, but otherwise it is grand fun to be down underneath the sea and see all the rocks and ledges and fish swimming past.

Your feet seem to float out around you and the distances under the water all look different. You think you can reach out and take hold of something, not believing it is far away.

It must be fun to go down often enough to get used to the feeling and then walk all around on the bottom like the pearl divers do, or the men who go way down below to salvage wrecks.

THE SHIPWRECKED MAN

Today Christianson is a taxi driver in New York City, but in November, 1906, he was a sailor on the ship Alexander, bound from South Wales to Panama with a cargo of coal. Fred Jeff was his pal, and they had made other voyages together.

The story of the wrecked taxi cab driver is told in a chapter in Uncle Will’s book Galápagos, World’s End. I read it long before I ever thought there would be a chance of my really seeing the Islands myself. It is about the most interesting adventure story you could imagine.

On May 8th, the captain said they were seven hundred miles off South America, and the weather was still bad because they had no wind, and the Alexander was a sailing ship. For three weeks they had just drifted. He thought they had better put to sea in the small boats because water was scarce, and their supplies had given out. Galápagos Islands were the nearest land, so they started for them.

They had sixteen-foot oars and rowed for twelve days, four men on and four off, taking turns. One day the old cook cried out “Land.” Nobody believed him at first but soon they could make out a dim cloud-like object on the far horizon. They realized it was really land and pulled hard on the oars till they came to a small beach to land on. They fairly ran up the beach to try to find water for they were all suffering from thirst. After a short time they were attracted by the old cook crying out and waving his hands.

But they ran about licking up the brackish water from puddles in the rocks. The rain had left some, but the surf had thrown spray up into the pools. However, they drank up the surface, for the salt was at the bottom.

When they looked back for the cook, they saw him alone on the beach. It was too late to help him; their boat had smashed to pieces on the rocks. They were on a small island ten miles from another big one.

The captain said, “Now we are all just men together, not captain and crew. And we will try to reach the other side of the island.” They started out to cross over, but the way was terribly rough, they were exhausted and weakened by long suffering, and after a short distance they had to come back.

They walked around the island later and in one cove they discovered some sea lions, and two of the men who were good swimmers went out and chased them to shore. Once ashore, the rest of the men stoned them to death, skinned them for shoe leather, ate the meat, and drank the blood. All were sick as a result, but later they found turtles and after killing them, sucked the blood and ate the meat.

After two months of living like this, with very hard going, they found a small beach with fresh water. Here they buried a lot of gold in a crack in the rocks. And one day after living on that one beach for three or more months, they were rescued by a chance ship sailing by.

When Christianson heard that Uncle Will was coming on this trip again, he wanted to come back here, mostly to find the gold. But he could not afford to leave his job, and he would not tell just where it was buried.

HOOD ISLAND

After cruising around to the south of the Galápagos Islands for two days, doing deep dredging and hauling, we turned back to Hood, the most southerly of all the islands. It is low-lying with two or three rather higher hills and at the south end an albatross rookery which shows way out at sea, a high rocky headland, with the birds showing white against the black rocks.

Compared to the other islands there is little known about Hood. There are lots of sea lions on the beaches and in the coves around the rocks. You may get almost close enough to touch them. Isabel Cooper, who is not afraid of anything, crept near enough to pat one old bull on the flipper. When she laughed aloud he gave a curious grunt and slid into the water.

We noticed that several of the sea lions had eye disease, many of the little pups being entirely blind, and the older ones having perhaps one eye dimmed with a white film. So Bill Merriam shot one of them, brought it to the boat, and the doctor took the eyes out to study the sickness.

I went ashore with the crew one day, and we got a huge log which was covered with barnacles. We pushed it back into the water again and played with it, diving and climbing over it and fooling with it as we would a raft at home. The water is beautifully clear, the white sand and the black rocks showing up perfectly clearly for many feet deep. Of course we were all terribly scratched with rough housing, but it was good fun and fine exercise.

I lifted up some of the black rocks along the beach at low tide and found a small octopus. Someone took him out of the jar I had put him into to look at him and left him in the sun, so he died. But he was valuable as a specimen on the ship and has been put with the other jars aboard.

The beaches here at Hood have very soft white sand, unlike that at Tower which is crumbled up coral and sharp and cuts the feet.

Also there are many bays or coves like fiords along the shore. Don Dickerman, one of the best collectors in the outfit, was getting beautiful starfish, some like worms, some brittle and a lovely pinkish coral color, and some small red and green fish while I rowed the boat around so it wouldn’t smash on the rocks. When he was doing this I saw seven sharks, one huge turtle and one small one.

Another day John Tee Van took me with him when he went ashore to trap birds. He uses a long pole with a small twig on the end. This is covered with very sticky paste. He whistles the song of the bird, and when it comes to see who it is, John hits him on the back a light tap which makes him stick to the twig. Then John takes him off, wipes off the paste, puts him in a box, and takes him to the ship.

Dwight Franklin harpooned a big ray along the shore of the beach, and lost the harpoon. Afterwards we saw the handle going along the surface. He got four other rays, but never caught the one that had gone off with the harpoon handle. We saw spotted rays, brown ones, red ones and black ones.

At night when we are at anchor, there are two great arc lights lowered over the ship’s side, one over the boom and one above the gangway. This bright light attracts the fish in great numbers. At Hood the flying fish were very plentiful, and a large size—ten or twelve inches long, with lovely pinkish purple wings or fins. One night I harpooned enough for breakfast for the crowd.

The fish seem to get quite crazy with the light and they dart around cracking themselves against the boats and the shipside. To add to the excitement, sea lions come skimming by and snatch at the wounded ones gulping them down and stuffing themselves on more. One big sea lion came close enough to the gangway for me to reach over and touch him.

Another night I caught a Portuguese man-o’-war in a scoop net and was stung by him on both hands. This is a jelly fish kind of thing with long trailers or tentacles. And these tentacles are poisonous and sting their prey so they can eat the little fish or plankton. I also caught a little transparent fish, pale colors with dabs of bright red on the lower fin. Miss Cooper painted him. And I got a bright red squid and many small crabs one of which was scarlet.

Altogether I think I had the most fun at Hood Island, because the beach was so long and the shore line was so easy to explore. Mother went to the tops of three of the highest peaks in the island and saw way over the first ridge a long low lagoon of fresh water, probably rain water with great reddish muddy pools.

There are many goats here, quite wild and unused to man. Some are bright faun color, others have black stripes or spots and one old buck which the crew shot and brought in had entire white hind quarters, brownish head, black beard and large horns. They eat the cactus leaves and the small trees and the wisps of grass.

There is a good deal of soil here, reddish and evidently very heavy rains at this season. The lagoons are fresh rain water and in places climbing up the mountains it seems like half dried stream beds or water courses—rocks and muddy places between, and then great terraces of tuffa rock, a very sharp lava rock which is hard to climb over.

A DAY ON SHIPBOARD

Soon after dawn each day one of the crew washes the decks. And it seems only a short time later that Willie, the German mess boy calls “Hallf pass seex.” I jump out of my cot on the upper deck, put on shorts, shirt and sneakers and beat it for breakfast at seven o’clock.

Just after breakfast or just before, the temperatures are taken and samples of water brought up from the different depths of the ocean. When that is finished, the depth of the ocean is measured. This is called “sounding.” A heavy lead weighing seventy-five pounds is let over on a piano wire till bottom is reached. Of course the ship’s engines have to be stopped while this is going on. The sounding machine has a contraption for bringing up samples of the sea bottom, so that one knows if there is sand or mud or rock below. Our soundings have varied from 746 fathoms to 2070 fathoms. A fathom is six feet.

It is fun to feel the icy cold water brought up, sometimes just above freezing although we at the surface are broiling with heat if we get out of the breeze.

The nets are put down 600 fathoms or more. There are three or four nets let out on the same cable, 150 to 200 fathoms apart. The net goes out for two hours, then begins hauling in. And of course there is excitement when it comes up for everybody wants to see, first if the nets are still on, and then what has been brought up in them. In it are tiny fish, pieces of strange unknown fish, once a black octopus with a queer umbrella-like arrangement over his mouth and head. Early in the voyage several nets were lost because they twisted off from the cable. And one was cut off by the propellers.

Next we feed the animals. The mocking birds have crumbs, the lizards are forcibly fed with bits of bread and water, the two very lovely albatrosses eat fish which is kept on the ice for them. These are now at the New York Zoological Park in the Bronx. I hope they like it there. And the little fish in the aquarium are given the “crumbs” from the nightly plankton nets. The nice little penguin died although for days he came out and had a swim, then gobbled up fish.

Then we have lunch. One day, the ship was stopped for half an hour, the gangway let down and we went swimming right in the ocean. It was over a mile and a half deep too. And beautifully clear water. If you even let yourself sink a few feet below the surface you could see right under our ship with the sunlight showing on the opposite side.

For an hour or two in the afternoon we seemed to be in a lot of drifting stuff. We saw two turtles, some big logs with birds resting on them and hundreds of tiny fish swimming round in the shadow underneath, and two poisonous sea snakes all brown and bright yellow. We caught a small dolphin fish on a line and while pulling it in three sharks followed.

All the nets were in before five o’clock for we have supper at that time. It is nice to sit up on the roof of the laboratory to watch the sunset and the moonlight later. And at eight o’clock the plankton net goes out for a short while. Plankton is very small sea life like bugs, queer fish that can’t move themselves. And then to bed for another day just like it tomorrow.

DREDGING

The Blake dredge has a ten-foot iron bar across the top, a handle arrangement and a long twenty-foot net at the bottom, in which things are thrown after being loosened by the top bar. The bottom of the net is fastened so that specimens cannot be dropped out.

This is put way down till it is on the ocean bottom, and then trawled along slowly for an hour or more. Sometimes the whole dredge is lost when it hits an unexpected mountain peak or rock or ledge at the bottom, as it was at Abingdon Island, and once the whole thing was terribly twisted and bent out of shape because of hitting something way down in the depths.

It is dragged along, the top iron bar loosening things from the floor of the sea, dumping them into the net, and then brought to the surface.

The things brought up are always very cold, often just above freezing because it is so cold down there. One day a whole bucket load of sea cucumbers came up in the net and they were icy cold as if they had been in an icebox.